RPGCast - Episode 209: "Radioactive Pidgeons"

[sabin1001]

RPGCast - Episode 209: "Radioactive Pidgeons"

RPG Cast takes you to the remains of Trafalgar Square as we try to save Sega's JRPG line up. Mass Effect 3 peppers the media with small updates including big PSP licking voice talent. But if you'll excuse me, I need to go download Lightning into my FFXIII-2.

You can find the links to all our stories on delicious: http://delicious.com/rpgamer/209

RPGCast streams live, sometimes on Friday at 10 PM Eastern / 7 PM Pacific, usually on Saturday at Noon Eastern / 9 AM Pacific.

Leave your feedback in the following ways!
Post in this thread.
Email us at podcast@rpgamer.com
Leave us a voicemail at (608) 729-4098
Email us an mp3 or m4a voicemail at podcast@rpgamer.com

Download the show: "Radioactive Pidgeons"
Subscribe to the feed: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Rpgcast
Subscribe in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/M...t?id=264306390
Subscribe your Zune: Zune Player Link

[Shaymin]

- There is a wrong way to play Skyrim. It's called the PS3 version.

- I'd want to work for Pokemon Company International since I'd pretty much have a job for life - god knows the mainline RPGs could use some refreshments, and maybe Farfetch'd would get the Flying/Fighting evolution he's needed for about a decade and a half now.

- Blizzard pays well because they make $n (where n is at least $75 million) a month off WoW money.

- Sega could be fixed by firing whatever dumb *AMPERSAND* does their game scheduling. Three RPGs in a seven day span, the same weeks as an overrated Pokemon remake and a mainline Final Fantasy? WHAT THE HELL? (That's Infinite Space, Resonance of Fate and the cripped Yakuza 3.)

- This is Anna's reminder to play After Years. The end sequence is incredible, and the PSP version is a lot easier to get the important post-chapter treasures from. If she promises to get on my rear to play FFII, we can get through this together.

- When the pay MMO system is nuked, the cockroaches will be SWTOR, WoW and FFXI.

- What the hell is a Wildstar?

- At some point, Manny needs to record a clip of him doing the RE4 shopkeeper, so I can mod Diablo 3 to actually put him in it. (Will Blizzard even allow that?)

- Was there any confirmation that 3rd parties are making their games 10% cheaper on the Vita? Seems like the only ones in the leaked screenshot were 1st party things.

- If I ever see someone playing Mass Effect 3 with Kinect, I'm going to yell "DELETE FILE" as loud as I can, then run. It will be totally worth it.

- Screw all PC games; All games in general should be $50.

- Let it be resolved that JRPGs in a post Chrono Trigger/Radiant Historia world should just not do time travel. Seriously, just hearing about 13-2 makes my brain hurt, and it's not just from Crazy Chocobo.

[Ocelot]

This is Wildstar.



And no, mods will not be allowed in Diablo III.

[MasterChief]

- Let it be resolved that JRPGs in a post Chrono Trigger/Radiant Historia world should just not do time travel. Seriously, just hearing about 13-2 makes my brain hurt, and it's not just from Crazy Chocobo.

Replace "JRPGs" with "games" and I agree with you. There's really precious little that can be done with time travel without it ending up like a tangled mess that belongs at the bottom of the fanfiction.net barrel. There's just no way to get around paradoxes.

- Sega could be fixed by firing whatever dumb *AMPERSAND* does their game scheduling. Three RPGs in a seven day span, the same weeks as an overrated Pokemon remake and a mainline Final Fantasy? WHAT THE HELL? (That's Infinite Space, Resonance of Fate and the cripped Yakuza 3.)

Agreed on all counts. It's especially true with Yakuza 3, which was cut in order to rush the game out on the day FFXIII came out IIRC. Also, I'd fire their entire marketing department and replace them with competent marketers - as well as giving said marketers enough money to actually do the job - and force Sonic Team to sit down and play the Sonic games from 1 to 2006 and make them write reports on what went right and wrong with each game. I imagine the 2006 report would be amusing.

[HyphyKezzy]

No need to go to McDonald's, here's Nintendo Zone in your home.

[Rosestorm]

Radiant Historia definitely had the best time travel story ever in an rpg

[Just Doug]

First off, a disclaimer that I roll my eyes at quite a bit of the dialogue I've seen in FFXIII-2 so far... it has the same sort of disease that Kingdom Hearts games started where you have no idea what the characters are talking about because they use such figurative, flowery language (especially in narrations or villain-speeches) without any anchor in concrete events. It's easy to spout something like "the flower of death brushes against the cheek of despair," but does it actually mean anything? No, because I just made it up out of nowhere and it doesn't correlate to anything. That's what some of the dialogue feels like. The action scenes of the opening cutscene were a lot more enjoyable in the pre-title-screen movie because there was NO TALKING in the pre-title-screen movie. Once I saw the same scenes with the dialogue in it, it really came across as so silly...especially since I'd seen those same scenes not five, ten minutes before and thus couldn't help but compare. If it had just been Lightning and Caius battling in relative silence... it might have served the same purpose with less eye-rolling on my part.

Believe it or not, my main point is going to be defending the use of time travel as a plot device, which is an issue separate from the silly dialogue. I believe the dialogue is the real reason one might think of FFXIII-2 as being "fanfiction" level material. My suspicion is that calling it "fanfiction" level material while citing the use of time travel is affected by the writing--if FFXIII-2's story were better (and better written), people probably wouldn't condemn its use of time travel as much.

Anyway...as difficult as it is to do time-travel well in any medium, partly it comes down to how much you care. Paradoxes and such are inevitable: questions about if you can change the past or not, what happens if you kill your own grandfather, and general tangled-messes...but it doesn't have to be a giant headache. You could just shrug them off as part of a suspension of disbelief or acceptance of the contrivances used to tell a story (in which time travel in and of itself is not necessarily the point--e.g. Chrono was still basically just trying to save the world, whatever his timeline shenanigans). Many (J)RPGs have different, say, continents you travel to as the plot unfolds. A few have different time periods. It's just another way of delineating chapters of a game, and it doesn't have to be a logic bomb unless you really are looking for an intelligent approach to, say, time travel in a game, which I wouldn't advise doing.

I guess you could say it's the same reason I don't look for realistic space travel in games--it's a lot easier to just take it as part of the glitter and sparkle of entertainment than bemoan things like "noise in space" or a spacecraft behaving more like an airplane, like in Macross. Of course, I'd appreciate anyone who takes the trouble to "get it right," but I understand why many works don't (especially videogames, where "rule of cool" often reigns supreme).

Also, one of the things FFXIII-2 focuses on is paradoxes. That time travel is causing so much weird crap to happen is in some way commendable--at least they're acknowledging that you can't mess with a timeline and not expect a bunch of issues.


P.S. I'm quite enjoying FFXIII-2 so far, despite the Nomura-esque dialogue.

[blitzer98]

Hey RPGCast thanks for those RPG recommends but you guys didn’t answer the second half of my post. I asked what you guys thought about Final Fantasy XIII because I was thinking of purchasing it in anticipation for XIII-2.