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loves2splooge on 26 April 2010
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Words Of Wisdom said:

.jayderyu said:
I'm going to play a bit of devils advocate.


So no. RPGS have shitty game play and pretty much consist mostly on story and hopefully an amusing minigame. Remove the massive amounts of healing, remove the endless meaningless combat and these combat mechanics will be more meaningful. As it is I sorta agree with the poster. Why play a game when the game isn't a game at all? Well just play it for the story. Heck Square seems to agree.

Hold L1 and R1 to run.

Massive healing from items bought with your mountain of gold?  Gone.  Endless combat?  Mostly gone.  Easy battles?  Gone.


Never understood the complaints about RPGs being too easy.  It's not that they're easy, it's just that they give the player the ability to select the difficulty and, given the choice, most people pick easy.  Spend 40 hours grinding mooks to hit the level cap before the second town and yeah the game will be easy.  You just spent 40 hours making it easy.  Complaining at that point is silly and complaining that the developer decided to give you a choice is even sillier.

Exactly. Even if you want challenge, the game can give you a challenge if you play the game a certain way (ie. 4 white mage playthrough in FF1 or low level speed runs). One of the main reasons why I like RPG grinding in the first place is that it offers you almost infinite difficulty setting customization. Did you just die in a dungeon? Is that dungeon pissing you off? Grind a bit more and try again. Is the game too easy? Don't grind at all and if that's not good enough, start running away from some battles too.

I can understand how gamers can think that a game is too hard because not every game allows you to grind until the game is easy or has an easy setting. But mostly every game out there can be challenging if you decided to give yourself a challenge (why does the onus have to be on the game developer to make the game hard? For mostly every game out there, it's possible to give yourself a challenge).

This reminds me of the time I played Blue Dragon. I selected the Normal Mode after I was warned online that Normal Mode is easy and you should go with Hard. I figured they were underestating the game's difficulty because you know how gamers are online right? They love to talk about they beat so and so game so easily to show off their e-peen right? So I just went with Normal. Then when I go through playing the game, I find that the game is not challenging me that much (the only time I died was due to carelessness) as I was warned online. But I didn't complain. Why? Because I could have easily made the game harder if I played it differently. First of all, I played it on normal. Second of all, I went out of my way to find the higher-level magic spells that were scattered throughout the world to prepare myself for the final dungeon (I didn't want to be stuck in a rut where I was unprepared and there was no turning back. You know, the whole point of no return thing in jrpgs). And in the process of doing that, I ended up bumping into a lot of enemies (and I didn't run away because I figured that the extra experience and skill points would be helpful). Which in turn led to my levels and skill levels going up. Well it turned out this was over-preparation. And my level balooned from level 34 to level 52. The game could have been beaten at lower levels with lower skill levels. Is the game designer at fault for that? No. Sakaguchi-san didn't put a gun to my head saying, "you must get those uber Fire-All and Cure-All spells (or whatever they're called)!" You can't fault the game designer for the game being easy when you consciously made the decision not to challenge yourself more than you could.

This is why I feel it's unfair when people complain that Blue Dragon is too easy. If they want a challenge, they can go download free DLC (unless they don't have broadband internet) that will give them more difficulty options (which they can access right away, no having to beat the game on Normal first kind of deal) and choose Hard Mode. Or they could limit the amount of fighting they do on Normal Mode.