RPG games with insane random encounters?

[Jumpin]

DonFerrari said:

Illusion said:

Honestly, I really enjoy classic RPG's with very high random encounter rates as long as level grinding my characters enables them to beat bosses later with relative ease. What I can't stand is spending hours level grinding through a dungeon only to get to a boss where there is some kind of special trick or tactic that needs to be discovered that requires your party to die a few times before you can actually beat the boss regardless of your level. The reward for level grinding should be the ability to easily beat bosses, otherwise there is really no point.

 

I think westerners generally don't enjoy old-school RPG's with high encounter rates because we can't understand the concept of utilizing game time (as opposed to  playing skill) as our resource in games.  There is a lot of reward (and in my experience, a lot less frustration) in investing time (ie. by levelling up) as the means to defeat a game's enemies as opposed to your own skills as a gamer.  There is something very satisfying about watching your over-powered party lay waste to a difficult boss especially when it was your time spent strengthening them.

It trully is delicious to obliterate enemies from time to time, but the investment is to high. I would say the concept of to much random encounters came from the idea of the time to make the person play a lot to see value on the game as much as the difficult in several 8-16 bits games were to hide a 1h game as something very time consuming.

Haha, maybe not that extreme in most cases - Dragon Warrior was about a 5-10 hour game but probably had around an hour to two of unique content. But I fully agree with what you’re saying with the grinding in early RPGs, particularly NES/SMS/SMD. In fact, I’d say Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 were the only RPGs of the 8-bit generation that didn’t require grinding MOST of the time (they required a little if playing reasonably, but maybe 10-30% of the game was grinding as opposed to the majority of RPGs at the time which hit the 80%+ mark (Phantasy Star series anyone?!?!). The first RPG I recall that didn’t require grinding was Mystic Quest Legend and the extremely rare Final Fantasy Legend games for Gameboy - but all those games took only a few hours to finish (FF Legend 2 had way more content than any NES RPGs but you could finish it in a sitting). I can point out the exact moment of change: Secret of Mana, that game required a ton of grinding like most RPGs before it, but just about every RPG after it could be done free of the stop-and-grind. But you’ll notice that FF6 has significantly more content and story than any Square RPG before it, and that’s probably the reason for the ease of balance.