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Forcing you to play in a specific way
7 years ago
General
I am a big fan of jRPGs, and I noticed how some games have weird design decisions behind them, which heavily impact how you play the game. Let’s go to the very first Final Fantasy game!
In that game your characters increase their attributes as they level up (kind of randomly), BUT at some point in the game, your characters evolve: Black Mages become Black Wizards, Thieves turn into Ninjas, etc. This causes them to gain more stats once they evolve, but that implies that the end game stats could be vastly different, if a player were to evolve his/her characters much earlier. A player who knows this, will be motivated to NOT grind, enter as few battles as possible, not waste any time if possible, evolve as fast as possible, and then they could grind away and have stronger characters. This felt like a pretty weird choice to me, cause the game has a random encounter system, where you cannot control the number of fights you get into, aside from just going straight to fight a boss, or the like. BUT OK, first game in the franchise, they made an early mistake! They would never…. Oh dear!
Final Fantasy 6 had a system where characters gain stats to begin with, but they gain extra stats if they have an Esper equipped. Espers sadly get unlocked quite a bit into the game, so you know what that means: Reach that point with the lowest level possible, and then…. STILL be careful with leveling, cause the Espers from later will give you more stat gains. And again: Random Encounters, making this kind of tricky.
I could name other examples, like Junctioning/Drawing Magic in FF8, or the Sphere Grid in FF10, or I could even go outside the Final Fantasy franchise, but the point remains the same:
These games introduce something, which makes the game a bit more complicated in a bad way.
-I could just dash through the dungeon, kill everything in sight, but it would be more beneficial to avoid battles
-I could crush the enemies as fast as possible, but the game wants me to instead use this mechanic
-Yeah, I keep winning every fight no problem, but I won’t win if I keep this character low-level, so I better use him/her anyway
These games force us to play a specific way, or rather, punish us for NOT playing how the designers wanted us to play. Naturally this is a rather broad range of games, and the examples I mentioned are not equal. Some stuff is of no consequence, you can catch-up, or if not, then the drawbacks are only minimal. Still, I felt like mentioning it, just cause it’s something that I noticed.
Whatever, silly thoughts!
In that game your characters increase their attributes as they level up (kind of randomly), BUT at some point in the game, your characters evolve: Black Mages become Black Wizards, Thieves turn into Ninjas, etc. This causes them to gain more stats once they evolve, but that implies that the end game stats could be vastly different, if a player were to evolve his/her characters much earlier. A player who knows this, will be motivated to NOT grind, enter as few battles as possible, not waste any time if possible, evolve as fast as possible, and then they could grind away and have stronger characters. This felt like a pretty weird choice to me, cause the game has a random encounter system, where you cannot control the number of fights you get into, aside from just going straight to fight a boss, or the like. BUT OK, first game in the franchise, they made an early mistake! They would never…. Oh dear!
Final Fantasy 6 had a system where characters gain stats to begin with, but they gain extra stats if they have an Esper equipped. Espers sadly get unlocked quite a bit into the game, so you know what that means: Reach that point with the lowest level possible, and then…. STILL be careful with leveling, cause the Espers from later will give you more stat gains. And again: Random Encounters, making this kind of tricky.
I could name other examples, like Junctioning/Drawing Magic in FF8, or the Sphere Grid in FF10, or I could even go outside the Final Fantasy franchise, but the point remains the same:
These games introduce something, which makes the game a bit more complicated in a bad way.
-I could just dash through the dungeon, kill everything in sight, but it would be more beneficial to avoid battles
-I could crush the enemies as fast as possible, but the game wants me to instead use this mechanic
-Yeah, I keep winning every fight no problem, but I won’t win if I keep this character low-level, so I better use him/her anyway
These games force us to play a specific way, or rather, punish us for NOT playing how the designers wanted us to play. Naturally this is a rather broad range of games, and the examples I mentioned are not equal. Some stuff is of no consequence, you can catch-up, or if not, then the drawbacks are only minimal. Still, I felt like mentioning it, just cause it’s something that I noticed.
Whatever, silly thoughts!
I think it's easier to get away with low level challenges in RPGs with action-based combat since it's all about reflexes and skill rather than sheer stats (though decent equipment helps at least). Turn-based combat requires more thinking if you plan to gun it at low levels, but sometimes you need to be at least a certain minimal level to actually withstand a boss's damage.
Then you have games like the SaGa series that tell you in a not so subtle way that grinding is not a good idea early on, and longtime fans like you and me know why that is. XD