Question Planescape: Torment

I have been playing through this and just have to say, I have never in my life read anything that conveys utter anguish better than when The Nameless One goes through Deionarra's experience of "Longing". Granted, one has to go through so much of the game first to lay the context, but what phenomenal writing.

I agree with your perspectives. Baldurs Gate 2 and The Longest Journey are still in my future, but with happy anticipation

Strangely enough, now that you mentioned Final Fantasy, I found very few "modern" RPGs whose writing could even hold a candle to the old SNES ones like Terranigma, etc. Somehow, people did far better with the greater restrictions than they seem to be doing with greater freedom. I noticed this also in American comics; there were so many absolutely fantastic stories written while writers were under the supervision of the Comics Code Authority, yet such a huge percentage of what came out after dropping that was absolute trash. The creative part of the human mind seems to thrive when given constraints.

PS: Another great one was the first Knights of the Old Republic (much better than II). The story of Revan and the validation of the Jedi philosophy was a masterpiece.

Ahimsa wrote: I noticed this also in American comics; there were so many absolutely fantastic stories written while writers were under the supervision of the Comics Code Authority, yet such a huge percentage of what came out after dropping that was absolute trash. The creative part of the human mind seems to thrive when given constraints.

While not arguing with your main thesis- sometime enormous creativity can come while under constraints- I think there's a lot of selection bias in both cases. The good stuff gets remembered, reprinted, and talked about. The garbage... mostly doesn't. The CCA is a major point with that... It took several years for comics to really start putting out classic material again; with a few stray exceptions; and the EC line was pretty much destroyed by it. The one extended run (as opposed to certain issues) of late 50's material that seems to regularly come up in discussions of classic comics is Barks work on Donald and Scrooge... and that was from Dell/ Western, which didn't follow the code.

OtherEric wrote: While not arguing with your main thesis- sometime enormous creativity can come while under constraints- I think there's a lot of selection bias in both cases. The good stuff gets remembered, reprinted, and talked about. The garbage... mostly doesn't. The CCA is a major point with that... It took several years for comics to really start putting out classic material again; with a few stray exceptions; and the EC line was pretty much destroyed by it. The one extended run (as opposed to certain issues) of late 50's material that seems to regularly come up in discussions of classic comics is Barks work on Donald and Scrooge... and that was from Dell/ Western, which didn't follow the code.

Point taken.

Also, remember that among the truckloads of dreck (Rob Liefeld, anyone?) that came after the end of the CCA, we also had... well, practically everything Vertigo put out under Karen Berger, and, to a lesser degree, Marvel's Epic imprint. Also lots of good stuff from Dark Horse and other second- and third-tier publishers. For a while, around 1990, we thought we were seeing a comics renaissance... then the speculators started hoarding anything with a "First issue" on the cover, and everybody went for the quick buck.

Sir Lee wrote: Also, remember that among the truckloads of dreck (Rob Liefeld, anyone?) that came after the end of the CCA, we also had... well, practically everything Vertigo put out under Karen Berger, and, to a lesser degree, Marvel's Epic imprint. Also lots of good stuff from Dark Horse and other second- and third-tier publishers. For a while, around 1990, we thought we were seeing a comics renaissance... then the speculators started hoarding anything with a "First issue" on the cover, and everybody went for the quick buck.

Quite true, but Vertigo and Epic ran concurrently with the mainstream lines that were under the CCA. DC, especially, continued to put out Superman, Batman, etc with the CCA stamp. Some of my most treasured Batman stories came out under it as well, e.g. Legends of the Dark Knight, Rucka/Brubaker, etc. Not to mention Morrison JLA, Messner-Loebs Flash and Wonder Woman, Giffen/DeMatteis JLA... the list goes on and on (well, until that Infinite Crisis dreck that made me give up reading comics forever).

As for Liefeld and company... let us not walk in the valley of the shadow of death.