a lack of purpose

[Zool]

I just finished Dragon Quest IX (I was new to rpg's last year and this is the first one I completed). I am now a few hours into Puzzle Quest 2 ds.

In Dragon Quest it was a case of 'level up' fight 'monsters' go to next town 'get clues'....'level up' fight 'monsters' go to next town etc. etc. and by default I collected monsters. Puzzle Quest seems much the same concept.

There seems to be a lack of purpose. I'm thinking 'why am I doing this'?  At least with Mario or Zelda I have to rescue a Princess.

Or have I missed somethong?

[Sagacious-T]

To save the world, duh.

[Aeolus]

Got to catch them all.

[Kup]

I got into RPGs in my younger years because of a lack of funds to buy numerous games each month.  So RPGs were the perfect remedy...  most were long games which lasted long enough for me to save up pocket money for a new one.  Sucked if I bought one I didn't like though.

I guess it kind of stuck with me - I have more money as an adult, but still buy them.  Some have good memories.

[Dice]

That's one reason I love Tri-Ace games; the secret bonus dungeons are usually a test of everything available to you.  My purpose is to beat the supers in the game.  How I feel after that though....

[Kup]

That's one reason I love Tri-Ace games; the secret bonus dungeons are usually a test of everything available to you.  My purpose is to beat the supers in the game.  How I feel after that though....

The last time I did something like that was with the Lost Odyssey DLC dungeon... afterwards, I didn't really feel anything.  But before doing it, all I felt was hard rage at trying to beat that place.

Never again, I learnt my lesson there.  I know when to quit now...  when my console goes sailing out the window.

[Sagacious-T]

I hate most JRPG bonus "hard" dungeons. They're usually just a game of grinding and breaking the battle system. Waste of time.

[Dice]

That's one reason I love Tri-Ace games; the secret bonus dungeons are usually a test of everything available to you.  My purpose is to beat the supers in the game.  How I feel after that though....

The last time I did something like that was with the Lost Odyssey DLC dungeon... afterwards, I didn't really feel anything.  But before doing it, all I felt was hard rage at trying to beat that place.

Never again, I learnt my lesson there.  I know when to quit now...  when my console goes sailing out the window.

I dunno - I guess so long as it's fun in the meanwhile - why complain?  Yeah you feel that emptiness after; but what good is a game if not to be beaten (excluding party/sport genres).
WHat are you asking for then?

In the case of DQIX, I think it's mainly because the gameplay is pretty flat to begin with.  Hell, Pokemon has the same problem but they know how to fill those titles with so many fucking stupid extras they make ya wanna spit (or enjoy 'em anyways).  ...IMO.

[MeshGearFox]

A few years ago I was playing Legend of Mana on hard mode and thought it was really fun because that made all these little intricacies in the combat system come out, in terms of combos.

Except it didn't, and it wasn't fun at all, and I'm pretty sure I was aware of that at the time and just convincing myself otherwise.

I have this huge problem, I think, where I can't tell if I'm actually having fun with a game or not.

Here's another example that's actually better because I really don't know. I've been thinking about Disciples 2 for the past hour or so, remembering how fun I thought it was. Then I read some forum posts by people that didn't like it. So there are elements about it that I personally dislike, and I'm aware of those, but like... it's not a feature by feature thing. It's like... well, are those long, hard, back-and-forth fights over a resource point challenging and interesting, or are they just tedious slogs?

Similar it's really easy to have games that are more addicting than fun.

So, yeah. I can't honestly tell if I'm finding a game fun or not and that worries me because I'm not sure how much that pervades into my other interests.

[Prime Mover]

Enjoyment is a very complicated thing, contrary to popular belief, and I think you've hit on some very insightful psychological phenomenons. Many times, enjoyment is a process in which one actively seeks to enjoy something and eventually does. I remember back to listening to some of my very favorite albums for the first time. Many times, my favorite albums are ones that didn't quite sit right with me at first, or didn't grab me. I had to put effort into enjoying them. And I think it was that effort... understanding, extending boundaries, accepting... that I found pride and growth when I would finally come to really enjoy something through and through.

Maybe that's why so many of my favorite things have identifiable flaws. It was the processes of accepting a work beyond its inherent flaws where I really found enjoyment. Final Fantasy VIII, Pain of Salvation (band), Cryptonomicon (novel)... all examples of some of my favorite works, and all of them have very apparent flaws that took time for me to overcome.

[Starmongoose]

Many times, enjoyment is a process in which one actively seeks to enjoy something and eventually does.

Made me think of this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism

And I agree more with the wiki page. Enjoyment almost never comes from actively seeking it

[MeshGearFox]

Maybe that's why so many of my favorite things have identifiable flaws. It was the processes of accepting a work beyond its inherent flaws where I really found enjoyment. Final Fantasy VIII, Pain of Salvation (band), Cryptonomicon (novel)... all examples of some of my favorite works, and all of them have very apparent flaws that took time for me to overcome.

Sometimes it takes awhile for a game/album/movie/book/whatever to click with me. But generally, for me, that's not a case of looking past its inherent flaws, but just... Well, okay, sometimes things are just really detailed and it's hard to get the underlying gestalt unless you spend some time with it. That's not looking past flaws, though -- just spending some time wrapping your head around it.

On some cases I HAVE had to look past flaws to enjoy something, but usually that's a matter of finding out that something I perceived as a big problem really wasn't that big of a deal after all. For instance, the features they cut from X-Com: Apocalypse used to bug me, but looking back I don't think they would've added much anyway. Although more often in cases like this I look back and realize the perceived flaws weren't really harming the product anyway.

However, every time I've actually had to *work* past flaws, especially ones that are pretty non-trivial -- in cases like Legend of Mana, FFVIII, Wizardry 8, or a lot of other JRPGs and WRPGs that have gameplay mechanics that are essentially broken and badly designed to their cores -- I end up realizing that there was just something about the game's aesthetics, story, charminess, modus operandi (In cases like Daggerfall or Space Empires 4 where I was, once, more in love with the idea of the game than the game itself), or whatever that I liked, and so I was willingly ignoring the fact that I wasn't having fun at all just so that I could latch onto these periphery things.

I could sustain that when I was younger, which is why I used to care about things like story and art design and companies experimenting. Now that my attention span isn't as bulletproof as it used to be, I sort of can't keep that up*.

* in this sense, I think I WAS having fun with Disciples 2, or what I played of it, but I also had a niggling feeling that it'd get, eventually, grindy and sloggy. Similarly, with Suikoden recently, I wasn't actually disliking what I'd seen, but it really felt like the game wouldn't ever go anywhere. At least in the latter case, I'm probably right. In the former case, most of the stuff I know about Disciples 2's later stages in the campaign are coming from the sort of dumbasses that liked HoMM2 *a lot* more than HoMM3 even though they're the same damn game, so who the hell do I even trust there!

** You can make any videogame look terrible by recording yourself playing it on easy without understanding the mechanics, making fun of everything in it, and then uploading this video to youtube. *EVERY* game.

*** I'm also not really sure the "Paradox of Hedonism" work here since that looks like it's referring more to personal happiness then fun. Playing other peoples' games is never going to make me happy. You can't really seek personal fulfillment from gaming, and if you do, you'll just end up pissed off (and that bit there DOES work with the Paradox of Hedonism, I'd think -- trying to use games as a means to achieve happiness. It just doesn't work on an individual is-this-game-fun-or-not level).