by OL » Tue Sep 25, 2012 3:08 am
That's a good point actually. I think in the case of Symphonia, I just never actually realized that those parts were required, because I was also in the process of working on side-quest, level-grinding, and exploration at the same time anyway, so they either just came off as more side-stuff for me to do, or didn't seem quite as long because I was doing other things along the way.
Still, it's always seemed to me that if you sit down and dedicate yourself to playing through an RPG, you have to know that you're going to be there for a very long time. It's always felt to me that frequent lulls in the progress of the story are just a given. With the exception of shorter ones like Parasite Eve, I could swear I've run into sequences like that with almost every RPG I've ever played. Out of everything that could go wrong with an RPG, pacing problems feel, to me, like one of the absolute lesser complaints one could have about them. I go into an RPG expecting that kind of thing to begin with. By their very nature, long-form RPGs tend to be slower than most games anyway.
Which kind of goes back to what I was saying about the player creating their own pace; while someone simply going from point A to B in Symphonia might get irritated with how slow those parts in the story are going, I never really noticed it because I was filling that time with side-questing and level-grinding, making it so the pace didn't really feel like it slowed down much.
One of the risks with an interactive medium, I suppose. Not everyone comes out with the same experience.