My point is "Focus on what I care about. It's not those 100 soldiers (or at least, not entirely), this is why".
And my point is I don't care about the character's feelings and don't want to control them if they seemingly have no understanding of what they're doing (and neither does the story).
Why is it that being void of emotion is not considered bad character writing?
Regardless, I think this "Kill 100 soldiers" thing is a lot less common in JRPG's then you are making it out to be, to the point where it can hardly define the genre.
It ain't being void of emotion. It's being a lot more grim when doing grim things like murder. Acting like an uppity child despite engaging in extreme violence is pretty terrible writing in my opinion (unless there's some justification for this, like the character being mentally unhinged).
Most of the game goes through someone's head, yes. It still functions as a counterpoint to this idea that JRPG's consist of smiling children murdering soldiers.
Ok. I phrased it badly and could probably find jRPGs where the characters aren't horrible people who'll engage in a game of tag over someone's corpse.
The innocently cheerful murderer that somehow isn't considered crazy or evil is an archetype I remember encountering a lot in jRPGs, tho.
No. I gave a description to demonstrate that its not right to reduce bandits to generic-RPG-monsters while raising soldiers to innocent honest people, without any more information about these people.
At this point, I think your just projecting your own ethics onto these games. Which I suppose is fine when it comes to how you relate to characters. My own sense of ethics differs, and I will try to explain why.
Don't get me wrong. Normally I'm not for wanton murder (and would honestly really want to see a game with non-lethal solutions to such issues), but between soldiers and bandits, the profession of soldier is the far less morally reprehensible one.
Also, the ethics projection part is funny coming from someone talking about harmless bandits in video games. When has that ever happened? I can name a few examples where the soldiers were just some hapless, clueless people doing their job, only to get cut down by the protagonist who looks a lot like a murderer at that point. Just think of all the jail escape scenes where you murder some jobbers who's task is to isolate thieves and murderers from the rest of society.
And I'm hardly projecting my own ethics. It's more a matter of ethics as suggested by the society presented in the game world. If I'm not seeing the protagonist as part of some viking or fascist culture, then I cannot buy that they would just brush off committing murder on a non-outlaw, even on an enemy soldier (and even then their innocently cheerful mentality would not remain intact).
I don't find that realistic. What I can find realistic is a society that'd consider it fine to kill or maim outlaws as punishment, especially ones who took someone's life. That's a thing that's been common in history since forever.
It does not imply "without exception" doing harm, nor does it define any inherent motivation for any crimes committed. Your defining a specific definition of banditry that you are using to justify your actions, without any knowledge about these people. Feeding your family is not selfishness. That's like, the polar opposite of selfishness. Starving to death will force people to do all sorts of desperate things for obvious reasons that can hardly be considered voluntary. Maybe if you offered some sort of charitable feeding program or something?. This does not excuse their actions, but the reasons must be considered when judging the morality of their character, and when looking for a solution to the bandit problem. You don't know that they have not tried "plain theft" first (They can't be both a bandit and a thief?). Banditry does not necessarily involve the murder of people. Hell, maybe they feel its wrong to murder and the threats are only bluffs. Why can't they have some character depth too? They are still human.
Sure, if any game world featured a law system more complex than "do not hurt others or their livelihood", and they called people who broke such irregular laws bandits. They only ever seem to do that to mobs of murderous looters, though.
And no, a mugger cannot get by on threats alone, because eventually they will get called out on their threats, and then either resort to violence or gain the reputation of one who throws empty threats you can just safely ignore.
I could consider your character the good guy if they went around and made an effort to help those desperate bandits that wanted help, and help dish out punishment that has been decided by a legal body after a fair legal trial. Or if you attempted to capture one alive that was wanted for trial.
I do not understand how I am supposed to see a character who goes around being the own self-declared judge, jury, and executioner as the good guy. Last time I checked, if someone who was robbed at gun point, and then gave money to someone to kill the person at gun point, they would both be off to jail, because they both did bad things.
If the person paying for the killing has legal authority, then nope. It's called a bounty. Also, you're applying modern laws and ethics to video game realms where those usually don't apply.
Not sure how assaulting, murdering, or looting is now OK because its for some hand-wavey "higher purpose". At best it can be deemed an unfortunate necessity, but I'm going to demand a very good reason as to why its a necessity (which most games rarely provide, since bad guys are bad guys and are little more than fleshy bits of XP).
(...)
Soldiers are trained to kill. Killing is bad. Of course its inherent to being a soldier! Not only that, but soldiers are trained to kill other soldiers. You should try being part of the other nation one day. Again, as above, this killing can be an unfortunate necessity at best.
But I can't make the judgement call if it is actually an unfortunate necessity, because most games just want me to accept that enemies are nothing more than evildoers doing evil to be evil and bad (and drop treasure on death).
Yeah, here's the thing. Fighting and killing other people who's purpose it is to fight and kill you is far less reprehensible in any society than preying on the weak like bandits do is.
Also, looting is not something inherent to being a soldier. The assault and murder is meant to be directed at other combatants, rather than anyone who's weaker like in the case of bandits.
Why? Focus more on the parts I actually care about seems like good writing to me. Again though, this doesn't really seem to be inherent to JRPG's.
A well written character is one that's believable, one that takes all the things that make up a person's personality into account. Ommitting parts is lazy and creates blatantly unrealistic archetypes like the cheery cutesy high schooler war criminals.
See above. Your greatly simplifying the situation, where murdering bandits by the hundreds (they are human!) doesn't mentally affect you for some reason, only killing certain humans (like soldiers) do.
Well, just about any society in the world will consider outlaws a less valuable form of life, to different extremes, as unfair as that may be. Dehumanizing others makes it easier to justify killing them to one's self. And being branded a violent criminal is extremely dehumanizing.
* GUNINANRUNIN has never played VC2.
I can say for sure nothing like that happens in VC1.
Ok. So, ignoring what VC2 implies, you assume that when their bodies disappear (much like your own soldiers after getting coup de grace'd) after getting shot with bullets, they're just knocked out despite being nobodies to the story (which, unlike Advance Wars, is trying to be serious in its tone). That's pretty wishful thinking, I'd say.
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Topic: Gaming Pet Peeves (Read 523400 times)