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I had a good feeling! Celebrating 40 Years and 108 JRPGs of Destiny

aturtledoesbite said:
You're right, we should stick to normal English words for video game titles.
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Yeah, I'm not happy about that one either lmao

WisteriaHysteria said:
"Metaphor: ReFantazio" strikes me as something pretty short and benign, when it very easily could be called something like, "That That I Overthrew a Cursed Kingdom's Broken and Corrupt Political System While Romancing a Harem"
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The length is not the problem, it's the second half of the title. What is a Fantazio?

Also isn't there literally a game called like "Is it Cool to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon" or something? lmao

Torzelbaum said:
Like Phantasy. Or Ultima.
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At least "Phantasy", dumb as it is, is just a goofy mispelling. I can't defend Ultima, though (and don't want to).
 
WisteriaHysteria said:
What's a Front Mission? Or a Final Fantasy? Why is Legend of Zelda not ever about Zelda? What's a Suikoden? Or a Chrono Trigger? What's a Nier?
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Those are all, at least, words (Nier aside. I cannot answer that one for you). Suikoden is not a word I know, but it's in a language I don't speak and I've not played the series. Zelda is a person's name.

Unless it's a spoiler, what is a Fantazio? That is not, as far as I can tell, a word in any language. I suppose it could be a noun in a non-English language (i.e. one I don't speak). If it were someone's name, okay - but imagine applying that to someone else's name. What would a ReKazin be or mean? A ReWisteriaHysteria? etc.
Exposition Owl said:
It was actually the original spelling in English and French, reflecting the word’s Greek roots.
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Ah, I didn't know that! This further proves my point lol. Even without knowing that, though, Phantasy Star is still legible, if spelled "wrong". It is, perhaps, a fantasy in space! Or had I not played, say, Chrono Trigger, I could assume that game is about some sort of time-based thing, perhaps with a gun? I could at least guess, even if I ended up being wrong. Metaphor: ReFantazio involves, I would assume, a metaphor for something, but that's all I've got without having played the game because how you would craft a metaphor for whatever the hell a "ReFantazio" is, I have no idea.
 
Kazin said:
Those are all, at least, words (Nier aside. I cannot answer that one for you). Suikoden is not a word I know, but it's in a language I don't speak and I've not played the series. Zelda is a person's name.
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They are real words, but without context they mean nothing and are jibberish. They're the exact same situation in the abstract. Here's a title whose name might mean something, but means nothing to anyone uninitiated, and tells you nothing about the game you're about to play.

Kazin said:
Unless it's a spoiler, what is a Fantazio? That is not, as far as I can tell, a word in any language.
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Google tells me Metaphor's name during development was "Project Re:Fantasy" -- being that they were REturning to Fantasy as a setting/subject matter as developers, after doing so many games taking place in a modern setting. Google also tells me "fantazio" is the Esperanto word for "fantasy".
 
"Fantazio" is a word in an existing language, in Esperanto. Metaphor uses Esperanto a lot, in song lyrics and other assorted contexts.

Personally I think the game's two-part title is one of the most plainly stated around as far as communicating creator intent: the developers from the start of the game's inception stressed their aspirations to tell a fantasy-contextualized narrative about society, providing the "metaphor" for real-world mirrors, and they also had the lofty aim of reimagining the fantasy genre in video games as a whole, accounting for the second half. I don't think you even need to be aware of the related commentary to read the title as such.

I don't know if this tangent is genuine annoyance or an exaggerated bit, but I will say that I'm a little uncomfortable about aggressively interrogating and crying foul over words and language simply because they don't track as common English.
 
Yeah, the game plays with language a ton, and the battle theme is in a hybrid of Latin and Esperanto if I remember correctly? Whatever language it is it kicks ass. And the twisting of language and history plays a part in the game.


But I agree this bit is kinda tiresome, same vibes as "how can there be more than one Final Fantasy" pedantry.
 
Peklo said:
genuine annoyance or an exaggerated bit
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A bit of both. Stupid game titles have always been a bugbear of mine - I will probably never play Untitled Goose Game because I hate the title, to give you an example solely made up of common English words that I still think is dumb.

It doesn't have to be "common" English, and I had no idea it was Esperanto or that that language features heavily in the game, but this game has been localized into English and if they wanted to sell me on the game, having a title that I could parse would help. As it is, I'm only interested because of its reputation - if it didn't have one so so sterling, I doubt I'd ever give it a look.

And setting aside the whole parsing in English thing, a large part of my objection to the title is and remains the "Re" part of it, which does not parse as "reimagining" at all to me without your explanation. Hence my complaint at it being a bad title - heavy context either within the game or via development history is needed to have a clue. "Re" at the beginning of a word, to me, implies a reply or a repeat. Reimagining would be far down the list. And even if I was able to parse all of that somehow, putting "reimagined" or, worse, a weird shorthand of it in the game title itself is still dumb. At the very least, given how this thread has gone even besides my own posts about the title, it is not "plainly stated."
 
Kazin said:
I will probably never play Untitled Goose Game because I hate the title, to give you an example solely made up of common English words that I still think is dumb.
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I... don't even know what to say to that.

But uh, yay for being consistent? You do you, and it obviously doesn't affect me if you don't play a game, but definitely sad for you at the same time to miss out on such damn fun games. Oh well!
 
I find the Fantazio part of the name being from a language I don't know a relief, knowing they didn't just make up a word and put it in the title of their game, but still take issue with the title overall, primarily the Re part as I've explained at length above. But go off on how I'm racist or whatever, I guess
 
Lokii said:
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72. Metaphor: ReFantazio
​
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I swear every single time I see this title it's all I can think.
 
I think that Metaphor: ReFantazio is a snappy and memorable title (with good SEO), and parseable for English speakers despite only being partially in English. Everything that a title should be. I dearly wish that I had played it so that I could try and wrangle this conversation back to something more experiential. I recently bought it on a Steam sale and look forward to trying it soon! I seem to recall that it has a skill and/or job system that sounded pretty fun and that I thought would be very much up my alley; can anyone else comment more on that?
 
"ReFantazio" sounds vaguely Italian to me, so I like to say it in a fake Italian accent,. So imagine Mario's voice. "Re Fan TAAAAH Zee OH"

It makes me chuckle.
 
Kazin said:
I find the Fantazio part of the name being from a language I don't know a relief, knowing they didn't just make up a word and put it in the title of their game, but still take issue with the title overall, primarily the Re part as I've explained at length above. But go off on how I'm racist or whatever, I guess
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I don't think you are racist, but I do think it is intellectually lazy to see a title that you don't immediately understand and decide it's bad instead of considering whether there's any particular intent behind the name that you simply haven't realized yet.
 
Juno said:
I don't think you are racist, but I do think it is intellectually lazy to see a title that you don't immediately understand and decide it's bad instead of considering whether there's any particular intent behind the name that you simply haven't realized yet.
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This is a fair point. The problem, though, is I've since learned the intent behind the name and still think it's bad. In any case, all this is wrapped up in a more complex conversation I should have elsewhere (around marketing, language, localization decisions, etc) as I'm clearly annoying people in the thread. I'll drop it.
 
Hulkenberg looks like the older, tougher sister of Nei from Phantasy Star II. Immediate love.

Having not played Metaphor, that's unfortunately all I have to add, aside from everything about it looking amazing.

I guess it's wishful thinking, that I have some hope that PS II will appear on this list, haha.
 
JBear said:
I think that Metaphor: ReFantazio is a snappy and memorable title (with good SEO), and parseable for English speakers despite only being partially in English. Everything that a title should be. I dearly wish that I had played it so that I could try and wrangle this conversation back to something more experiential. I recently bought it on a Steam sale and look forward to trying it soon! I seem to recall that it has a skill and/or job system that sounded pretty fun and that I thought would be very much up my alley; can anyone else comment more on that?
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Basically you unlock "archetypes" as you play the game, and all the characters can use all the archetypes which unlock different skills and grow into a more powerful version over time. It's been a bit since I played it but that's the gist of it.
 
Bongo said:
I think that video game titles should be even dumber.
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i was about to just say "true" but there are a lot of dimensions for a title to be dumb and honestly i think a lot of them are highly contextual. like the first time i saw one of those light novel style titles that just explains the premise as a run-on sentence i actually thought it was really funny, but of course by about the third time you realize that this is just going to be a Thing and the novelty and memorability of it basically completely evaporates. for an opposite example there was a recent tweet complaining about the titles of big games coming from american studios that said something like "not every western game is called 'highguard' but spiritually they're all called 'highguard'"...individually a phrase of like, two common english words appropriate to a game's setting/aesthetic/"vibe" is fine but it's become SO overwhelmingly common that it's easy to feel like it represents its own kind of generic trend. but of course if you choose only one word then you run into the problem where it might be so generic people can hardly even figure out that you're talking about a game.

and like sure there's that real-world explanation that's supposed to explain why FF is called that but what does it really mean for a fantasy to be "final"? why didn't our parents understand the word "pokemon" and completely mispronounced it? on that note, was there ever any chance of english speakers knowing how to pronounce "ys" correctly? really that tweet bongo posted a screenshot of raises a whole aspect that i think is easily overlooked which is that sometimes just choosing words for how they sound even if they come off as meaningless (and maybe kinda loops back around to sakaguchi saying he wanted a title that would abbreviate to a repeating letter, which in english tends to imply alliteration).

anyway, metaphor doesn't really have that, but i think it's got a pretty good title. like if you imagine a chart with axes like "descriptive"/"evocative" and "blunt"/"difficult to parse" it kinda lands in a weird spot near the middle, which to me ends up feeling memorable and kinda interesting. it says what it's about but in a sort of offbeat way. and while i haven't played it i have to say that kind of contributes to my overall impression of the game, which is that it interests me more than pretty much any major atlus game they've made since i played catherine, which was the biggest factor of a few that really diminished my interest in persona and megami tensei. i mean, i'm still not sure i'm ready to play something that represents hashino's view of the world or whatever, but taking the stuff that i liked about the late ps2 games and on, and moving it further away from modern settings and the burdens of comparison with kaneko et al's work at their peak does absolutely have some appeal to me.

although also the fact that they didn't announce a switch 2 port has not lowered the kinds of suspicions one might have about the game getting the Enhanced Rerelease treatment. so there's that. although i didn't really like most of those better anyway so i'll probably eventually just give it a shot when i don't feel like i'm juggling quite so many games as i am right now.


catching up on posts i wrote like one sentence of and wanted to think of more but couldn't:

devil survivor's whole motif of the internet as a tower of babel fascinated me at the time and i kinda only feel it harder now that the world is being eaten alive by people who are on social media much more than i am. the music is kind of weird and fun also i kept feeling like i came up with some incredible broken party cause it perfectly countered a hard boss, and then the next boss would completely annihilate that and force me to come up with some new broken thing, that would still only last for another boss fight. really fun experience in that style of game (didn't vote for it though)

pokemon moon i only played for a few hours which has less to do with the game and more to do with the fact that as exciting as it was conceptually it was not as easy for me to get into when i wasn't riding buses almost every day.
 
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