Gender: Male
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Fri Jan 31, 2014 8:13 pm
Posts: 1546
Pierre wrote:
Overall I didn't like the game.
I could tell :p. Thanks for participating until the end though!
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When we started you asked us to also acknowledge that at times you would take control of our characters for little things. I agreed and was like fine assuming it was just like something to move the plot along if we were struggling or whatnot. I suppose I underestimated this at the start but it matched the tone for a lot of the game, where player agency and decisions did not really matter. At least that was how I felt.
As a start I'll say there were much more decisions in this game than most people probably think. A lot of htem were just in the background.
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At the start I did not have much to offer. Bradley was seeing real people for the first time and was eager to be with them and to make them like him...well except for a Ghost. Excepting that JM told me I would have to lie and keep my backstory secret. This felt weird because...Bradley is innocent...he hadn't done anything wrong...lying about nothing because it would look suspicious later on. JM had to manufacture the lie that Einstein was Nulls dog because that would Bradley a reason not to just reveal that he knew Einstein out the bat. In short, I had nothing I could really contribute to anyone at the start.
It's fair to feel it was contrived, but the idea was that Bradley wouldn't trust anybody right off the bat. If Bradley was just open about everything from the beginning that kills the fun of the game, and makes exploring his route pointless. People care about doing those routes because they reveal more about the characters.
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Things took a worrying turn for me about the time of Teddy's trial. A miscommunication between me and JM led to Bradley attacking Teddy (Bradley was legit not kidding when he said he didn't mean it). My choice had actually been to warn Teddy and so I felt a little scunnered at this. Then I asked JM if it would have made a difference if I had warned him. JM told me no. That set off massive alarm bells...my choice didn't matter...the story would proceed regardless...I couldn't really do anything and...would probably be ultimately doomed as things went on and Bradley as Zero was revealed.
You know it's not until right now I actually see what you mean. You posted 3 times in a row for that decision (201/202/203) and I only saw 203. Even when you complained about it when I did the wrong thing back then, I hadn't seen 201/202 when I went to double-check and only noticed now.
So for 203, I see that Bradley will distract Teddy for Helios' plan. And that's what I went with (and he couldn't escape up the chimney because it was locked). I told you it wouldn't have made a difference not because your choices didn't matter, but because the trial itself was pretty much doomed to end in failure. If Bradley warned Teddy about Helios, Teddy would shoot Helios. Then more people would die. And eventually Bradley would die too. That's all I meant.
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I wanted to reveal Bradley's name to Ghost earlier on. There was a nice moment in their private conversation where Bradley got to talk about how Ghost and Bradley had named each other but JM said no.
I said this because it wasn't important for that ending and I figured Panda wouldn't want to know. But maybe I'm wrong for that last part.
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I wanted to try various ways to smash Ghosts visor or open Ghosts suit (after they were dead) but these wouldn't work simply because it wasn't the narrative point in time.
It was because it couldn't be smashed or ripped. It's not like it was plot-contrived. Ghost's suit was never opened throughout the entire game besides the Albert End. Ghost's Schrödinger trick wouldn't have worked if she just made it so the suit could be opened easily.
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I never wanted the Ghost/Bradley showdown to be public because...well it was a private matter. They were both clear on their relationship to each other but Bradley still didn't want others to know plus having spectators there might hurt his resolve knowing that others would see him killing someone. However, all information has to be revealed and it wouldn't have been good "entertainment" and so it turned into a public spectacle.
So much stuff in the Bradley end was already happening in the background with the qt that happened between Bradley and Ghost. All the other players were kind of just sitting on their thumbs. I didn't want to have an ending that just resolved itself in the background, especially since all the stuff that was meant to be private was going to be revealed in that exact same ending. Considering you didn't like having to hide information from the beginning of the game, I thought you'd appreciate being given the go-ahead here too.
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All the times I felt that there could be a rational outside-the-box solution to something when really it was pointless and there were only ever the two answers. That's something I really hate. It's the thing I hate when I watch stuff "why would you do this stupid thing? There's easily other ways out of this" and then being actually forced to play into those tropes was frustrating.
You can cite specific examples if you want but almost every time it was because you were misunderstanding what was going on. Which could totally be my fault for not making it clear.
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It was especially prevalent at the end. Everyone knew there were child hasmat suits, they could all have died, went back one more time encased Bradley in a suit and went out with Ghost still alive and just decided not to even start the trial.
Like this. This is not a solution. They would not have gone 'back in time', they would've just died. And then maybe in an alternate history they'd remember what'd happen if they started the trial. But that was not a rational solution.
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Bradley even knew it wouldn't work, there was no reason to believe he would time skip away and sure enough there was a "true" ending where Ghost is sacrificed. The entire final scenario felt really contrived and Ghost suddenly remembering she was Violet without any kind of real explanation felt like a bit of a deus ex machina.
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It felt like I could only really do what JM wanted and everything in between was just wasted space. No one could die until exactly their time, player actions were just the fluff between whatever JM decided would happen. I feel this was distinctly bad towards the end when questions were being asked of Null but really I think only JM had the power to move things forward. I remember thinking I'd hate to be Cesar towards the end because most of my posts would just be JM moving the plot along.
Not knocking Cesar (and I think he played well) but he's not the most active, especially during certain parts of the day. So yeah there were times where I posted as Emma to move along the plot at the end.
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Puzzle Rooms-
The puzzles in my experience were boring and dissatisfying. Most of them were just search places and then do an anagram...and I hate anagrams they are hard, time consuming and I don't find them much fun. Even at the end there were still some unsolved ones I think which is another problem where they were actually pointless. Felt weird to just solve an anagram, have a plot conversation and then just have someone declare "That's all we'll find here"
The puzzle rooms SUCKED and were really just there to give some freetime between characters/break up the pace. They would've been better if I was good at them.
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Case in point: We solved the Garden anagram and correctly followed the clue of the anagram to dig around the garden and then spent most of the phase digging but (related to the earlier problems of "you can't do that it's not time yet) we were never able to randomly dig up Adriana's body. Despite the fact that random digging on a shorter time limit was what discovered this later on in the plot.
The garden is big, that's why randomly digging six foot holes didn't work. Helios only found it at the end because he remembered through the field.
And the very last thing I'll mention here. Zero's goal was originally just that he hated humanity (with a little more flavor). Ghost was also present in all 98 attempts. First half Bradley was lining up just fine with this, but then when the Zero twist happened it was clear you didn't like it and Bradley changed a lot because of it too.
I didn't want you to change Bradley because you should have freedom to play the character how you see (and pretty much every character was different from how I imagined them pre-game). So I actually changed the story itself to make Zero's goal more focused on protecting himself from being erased, and I also made it so Ghost was only a presence in the last two attempts (so Bradley was definitely more fucked up in the other histories without her).
I didn't think these changes were bad since I felt enough of the setup to the twist was still there (Zero was a super-esper and Bradley had been infected with Blight for so long, Bradley was messed up from living in the shelter so long, etc). My main point here is that I wasn't just locking in on a story. I did recognize that you didn't like the Zero twist and adjusted the story as much as I could accordingly.
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-why was Ghost missing/declared dead in Helios's end?
-why was Helios declared alive and well in Midge's end?