Can someone explain to me why western point'n clicks suck so much ass in comparison to eastern one? I'm not even talking about the stories, because many western point'n clicks have really good fucking stories, I'm talking about the gameplay.
In western point'n clicks you're so often lost wandering looking for one item that you've missed or trying to trigger one very specific event that will push the story forwards. I know that puzzles ought to be challenging for a player, but there is little actual challenge in frantically looking for shit that you've missed, pixel hunting or checking the same location a thousand times in a row until you give up and look up a walktrough.
Now take for example something like Ace Attorney, how many times were you left wondering about what you had to do in those games? The inability to complete puzzles in those games is rarely down to missing something but rather down to the fact that you don't have the right analytic capability to find the right answer. So is for example Ghost Trick (although not necessarily a point and click, it is a game of the same category nonetheless).
It's really irritating to see because although I really like Eastern stuff, I would love to see some good Western point and clicks that do not fuck up in the gameplay department.
Is there an adventure game from western developers that is challenging, interesting, has good story but at the same time isn't infuriating to play?
Bentley White
Only if you can explain to me why you insist on being such a faggot.
Tyler Bell
Phoenix Wright is more of a VN with gameplay elements including point and click than a point and click game itself. I don't think there are actual eastern point and click games. As for western point and clicks, they relly completely on the point and click element to tell an story, which is why they are extremely limited in both story and gameplay and they usually go around it shoehorning some elements. Not like I don't mind, but point and click and both games you mentioned are completely different games. Try Daedelic games to see if they change your mind.
Hudson Morgan
The AA games are closer to being Visual novels with heavy puzzle elements. Not a point and click adventure game like Monkey Island. You're getting your genres mixed up. This user explains it better >>13336605
Brandon Perry
Maybe I worded myself wrong, I meant more of adventure games in general but fine, although I disagree with Phoenix Wright being a VN with gameplay elements.
Grayson Miller
There's no reason to deny Phoenix Wright being a VN. I guess western devs jut suck at either passing or puzzles, or both.
Benjamin Walker
point and click games are largely just an excuse to work with voice actors and animation companies that the developers jack off over. They're never about making a fun game.
Grayson Stewart
Fuck no. The investigation sections of the earlier games were a great example of precisely how not to do adventure gameplay.
The more recent games definitely made the investigation sections far less tedious, because really they always were the dull parts of the games.
Adrian Rogers
But it's not the puzzles that are problems in western adventure games. Take Scratches for example, it's a game that I really fucking love but you won't get too far without a walkthrough there. That game doesn't have that many puzzles but it forces you to trigger certain events by exploring places and clicking on stuff as well as getting items. The problem is that the way to progress in those games is often so fucking arbitrary and so fucking specific that it gets unbearable without a walkthrough. The same can be said about checking the same locations twice to see if anything changed without any indication of what might have changed, it becomes tedious after a while. It doesn't resemble puzzle solving, it might test your attention to detail for some time but you're bound to forget some minuscule thing in the end and be forced to look it up. It's the gaming equivalent of stumbling in an empty dark room in the search of a flashlight. What those games lack is some direction behind their design that clues the player on what they should do next.
Jack Adams
It's probably because unlike in the west the genre didn't commit suicide through convoluted puzzles with sideways logic.
It's not like western point-and-clicks haven't done the same shit.
Brandon Butler
Which isn't a problem because the game often gives you hints on what to do next when you finish a given task or will outright tell you at what you should be aiming at.
Also not a problem, because the game actually rewards you for presenting evidence to characters anyways if just by additional funny dialogue.
The traveling between the locations is quick, the locations are a list of places you can go. You don't have to traverse several locations before actually getting somewhere, you can just click a place from a list and bam, you're here. That makes it far less tedious than any of the point'n click games and while I agree it's a flaw, it isn't such a big flaw because of that.
David Ramirez
Well. During the time point and click was popular during the DOS days of PC, japanese point and click games on PC-88 and PC-98 computers were all lewd. And actually featured interactions unlike modern garbage VNs like select, talk, look, apply chainsaw to a loli and so on.
Josiah Thompson
Are adventure game creators fucking insane? I get that a writer can create a slightly weird explanation to a puzzle based on a lousy comparison I did that once but faking a man who doesn't have a mustache with making a mustache?
Jose Stewart
Any good japanese PC-88 and PC-98 adventure games worth checking out?
John Hughes
To be fair, you do have to draw a moustache on the passport, and you can handwave the issue away by saying the clerk would recognize your face, but the fucking maple syrup to stick it on is straight-up retarded, especially since you have fucking tape.
Adrian Jones
You could use that to try justifying bullshit in western adventures as well, you shouldn't work on the assumption that the player is already going to be trying every possible combination to find dialogue.
Not the case in the earlier games, you actually had to pick from drop down lists that only included adjacent locations, I remember the first steel samurai case being really tedious for this.
Brody Nguyen
But Western adventure games don't really have that. If you use an item on something it's mostly "That won't work, are you stupid?" without any explanation. In AA majority of the evidence presented to different characters gives you small scenes with funny dialogue or some additional information.
Fair enough, I might have been remembering it wrong.
John Robinson
The lady behind the Gabriel Knight series legitimately hates the people who play the games and goes out of her way to torture them. I'd imagine it's a common sentiment among developers nowadays.
Lincoln Perry
So what makes fun puzzles then?
James Russell
Phoenix Wright and Ghost Trick have very focused gameplay. They have far less downtime between the logic puzzle parts. You're doing the same thing over and over (cross-examination/possession) so you have a more grounded place to think from. The context of the puzzles is immediately understandable and compelling. It's not 3 steps removed of 'I need to chase a cat to make a disguise.' It's 'I need to catch this murder in a lie' or 'My waifu is about to die in 30 seconds unless I intervene.' The writing is great, but it's still in service of the gameplay. Phoenix Wright actually began as a more conventional investigation game until Takumi realized catching someone in a lie was the best part- so they paired the game down to the essential. I forget who said it, maybe Paul Klee, something like "Refining a good idea is like starting with a broomstick and whittling down to a toothpick."
The best example of the Western-style lackadaisical, wander around a world to find bizarre puzzles is Riven. The pace matched the narrative, and both the lore and art direction had a depth and inspiration that merited exploration. But that is a really fucking tall order.
Caleb Anderson
probably because the western ones copy a formula that they remember fondly from their childhood but no one on samurai island grew up on kings quest
Jose Perry
Space Quest, Kings Quest, and the first few Police Quest games. Captain Bravve was also entertaining.
Zachary Allen
Western point and clicks evolved into today's Telltale Movies, which are blatantly not games, because the creators don't want to make games, they want to make movies, but their skills are shit, so they throw in half assed "gameplay" so they can pass off their "art" in a different medium that has lower standards.
The truth is that this trend began decades ago, and all that's changed is that now they pretend even less to actually be games. But the genre has always had a huge number of creators who simply weren't interested in the gameplay, and who only used it as an excuse to publish their stories that weren't good enough to be published as a book or movie.