The question of difficulty came to mind while playing Metaphor. It was pretty challenging early on when resources were very limited and I was also learning the gameplay systems, but I’m starting to feel powerful now mid-game (while still being challenged a bit). That’s where I like to end up, typically. It has a nice ludonarrative feel for the games that typically have you killing god.
What do you like?
Difficulty curves are exceptionally difficult in turn based RPG games.
If the game is too easy, you have essentially designed a game that requires the use of very few mechanics and thus lacks depth or replay-ability. Fewer options to choose from essentially makes an easier game to balance the difficulty, but you remove player agency. A good example of this (and I mean good) is Final Fantasy X which has player agency in the form of the sphere grid, but the system is mostly linear until the late game and the mechanics basically force you to use the right character against the correct enemy for the first 10 hours or so of the game. This is good design because it forces the player to engage with the systems that exist in the game but gives them very few options to shoot themselves in the foot.
Conversely, if you want a more open player-agency design, I would recommend looking at the balance difficulty of Final Fantasy V with some notable asterices. This game gives a lot of player agency in terms of team composition and stat allocation (in a round-about way) but this comes with the down side that most encounters have to be designed punishing to certain playstyles to encourage changing your party configuration. While grinding in most games feels like a chore, FFV actually adds achievable “goals” in either mastering jobs or unlocking more job abilities, which basically increases your character’s overall flexibility. The downside is that bosses can be brick walls so a pseudo-fail state (as in, keep progression but respawn in the last inn) would be a nice patch that would make the game easier for new players. Additionally, systems like the 4 job fiesta would be nice as a “hard mode”, if a game were ever to ape that design.
Both of those designs work for me, personally, as long as the game is upfront about it’s design decision and that the difficulty scales appropriately to the number of choices I have (This means the game has to essentially become easier, because permutations dictate that my team composition might be radically different from someone else, or there need to be mechanics that help make “catching up” faster like FFV/Bravely Default)
One thing I appreciate about FF5 is it allows for more of that flexibility. Fewer bosses like FF3’s Garuda or dungeons like Cave of Shadows that will give the player a particularly hard time if they don’t follow the prescribed party composition.
I was mildly concerned, as Metaphor had a little bit more of this than I liked at first. It seems to be easing up on this as the game goes on with more flexible options made available, fortunately.
I always felt the best ones were the ones that had visible fights on screen, like Chrono Trigger, and if you actually just did all those you’d be perfectly leveled the entire way through the game.
Final Fantasy is in weird place here because it has random battles, but also had plenty of non random battles and if you just did all the non random ones and avoided as much random fighting, as you possibly could, you’d also be pretty balanced against the bosses when you made it to them.
But things like Dragon Quest and even Secret of Mana, which I loved, relied heavily on staying in one area and just grinding to get to the appropriate power level to reasonably fight the next boss. I hate this. Once I’ve explored a zone, I want to move on. It should have been balanced that once I poke around in every nook and cranny, I should be ready to move on.
There’s nothing worse than fully exploring everywhere you can, doing all side attractions and what not then moving to the boss to open up more of the game only to be slapped with doing marginal damage and dying to a single attack because you didn’t complete 17,000 fights against the same 4 enemies yet.
Great response. There’s definitely been a lot of change to streamline the experience in this way. Chrono Trigger’s a big part of what started that in JRPGs, too. Its move away from random encounters sometimes overshadows discussions about how tightly tuned that game’s encounters were.
Echoing Chrono Trigger again - you could skip all grinding, and then rely more heavily on item usage in the final battle (megaelixers and the like) or better yet, not, and it became much more fun, and either way you see and therefore expect battles, rather than them feeling like an interruption to exploration.
And if you really got bored, either on the first playthrough or a later one, there are so very many ways to mix up the teams, with new skills to “discover”, or try out if you read them from a guide.
It has its downsides (gfx, length I guess if you ignore the New Game+), but damn no wonder it is widely regarded as hands-down the single best JRPG of all time.
mega man battle network (ds remake) does it proper by slowly introducing stronger enemies n chips to the players when progressing the story. also your health and attack goes up gradually as you find powerups. No exp bar needed, difficulty is tied to the story and area
Difficulty towards the end game should be about using the mechanics in complex ways as opposed to building stats.
Persona 5 Royal was easy towards the end stat-wise but as you came up against enemies that didn’t have weaknesses, you had to rely on technicals. That sort of shift in tactics is welcome.
The top of the fanatic’s tower in FF6 comes to mind as well. You have only magic. There’s multiple non-stat based solutions to it including reraise or endless rasps.
FF3 (or 6 depending)
Give me wicked story lines or branching stories instead of hard, challenging etc…