I got tired of discussing ME3's endings when the game came out and I walked away happy and had to deal with endless crowing about it, so I'm not going to step into that. But I did want to talk about this particular point.

Quote Originally Posted by PhoenixPhyre View Post
Edit: The "illusion of choice" issue (where you make choices and say things, but it basically changes nothing beyond the responses back) so common to WRPGs is one reason why I'm fairly accepting of JRPGs and their blatant "no, you don't really have any choices" stance. Because I'd rather the game be honest about the fact that I don't really have any meaningful choices. WRPGs, I can turn the dial but it doesn't actually do anything. JRPGs, there's no dial. There might be exceptions, but they're few and far between.
See, the irony here is that I tend to prefer JRPGs a lot myself... but it's not because I feel my choices aren't impactful enough in a lot of western RPGs, even though that's frequently the case. It's that I don't care about their impacts.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest if my choices don't necessarily change much in the overall plot. Yes, it helps if there's some change, obviously - I'm making a choice, it should have an impact! But I don't get really upset that, say, I can't choose to have Shepard say "screw the Alliance, I'm happy to be part of Cerberus" in ME3. As the quote in another forumgoer's signature note, agency just means you get to make choices, not that you get to say what impact those choices have on the world. The reality of game development, writing, and simply making this stuff approachable means that you are probably going to have two or three major route-defining choices in a game at most, along with a plethora of choices that have an impact but not a major one, and none of them allow a major deviation from the main plot. That's fine with me.

What tends to turn me off from a lot of western RPGs isn't whether my choices matter, it's whether or not I care about any of them. Like, I know that people love to point to Fallout 3's early choice in Megaton (blow it up or don't) as a terrible choice for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it's you being a monster for basically no reason, but it's also a bad choice because I do not care. I don't know these people. I don't have an emotional attachment to them. I don't have an emotional attachment to my father who I'm supposed to be seeking out. I don't have an emotional attachment to this world. The one person I had any kind of emotional attachment to was the overseer's daughter, and she's back in the vault!

Compare that to Tales of Berseria, which is a game with no major narrative choices whatsoever... but over the course of the first half hour or hour, depending on how fast you play, builds up an emotional connection to a whole cast of characters who are mostly going to be absent for the entirety of the story so that when they're reintroduced you care about it.

I don't need my choices to knock the world off its axis every time. I need to have an investment in what those choices are, so that they matter to me.