Words Of Wisdom said:
5 & 4: You're not making the game more or less challenging by adding these. You're reducing tedium. 3 & 2: Old RPGs required you to spend countless hours fighting the same enemies over and over to afford items and allow you to survive the next area. This didn't make the game more fun, it simply made it longer. Out of all the things you can do in a jRPG, grinding the same enemies over and over is quite possible the least fun thing you can do. 1: Personal preference thing. I don't care either way. |
I agree with Words of Wisdom. 5 and 4 are just huge piss-offs if they aren't around, I mean, if you lose a fight you have to spend two hours to the whole f**king dungeon again and when you have finally done it, you may lose again? I mean, how many times are you going to do this? Giving Retries and save points give you the possibility to try to fight the boss several times, until you are finally good enough to beat him. If they are not available, most people will give up after a few tries.
I'm kinda mixed about points 2 and 3. I can feel you about the money, if you only do the fights you have to but you still have enough money to buy everything, even special accessories and stuff.
About the leveling, I think that you should be able to beat a game if you just follow the main quest, but take all the fights. I hate it in SNES-RPG's when you would be able to go to the final dungeon, but you know that you are at least ten levels to weak to even have a chance. Of course if you are overlevelled it isn't to funny either, but amongst "real" RPG's (I mean classic series like FF, Tales DQ and its newer clones) I haven't ever had that problem.
I think I can feel you the most about point 1. Although I freaking hate those moments when you are in the middle of a dungeon and low on health, they also give excitement, so taking the random battles away definitely makes this part of an RPG vanish.
However, overall I think you have a quite egoistic view presented in your points, since you could just play the games with less armor or healing items to make it more difficult, while it would be impossible to play the games if your points were removed for a lot of players.
This whole "games are getting to easy" thing is something we as old-school gamers just have to deal with. I can also breeze through Zelda games nowadays when I had to tackle some bosses seven times in A Link To The Past, and getting 120 stars in Mario Galaxy was not a real challenge for me either. But have I enjoyed the game anyway? Of course I have. And this is what you should do too.
