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When you're stuck in an RPG...
and your only option is to GRIND GRIND GRIND.
Has bosses leveling along with players evaded the Japanese as a technology?
Has bosses leveling along with players evaded the Japanese as a technology?
Comments
To be honest, though, I'm more interested in real-time combat with reasonable light RPG elements. So I'd probably have a fair few puzzle bosses where the side missions give clues and intel about the situation you're going to be in.
In other RPGs, grinding just lets you do a little more damage and get to level 99.
Disgaea? In Disgaea, grinding lets you literally millions of damage with one hit. And then you start doing stupid geo-block stuff and get into the hundreds of quadrillions...
I'm looking at you, Spiral Knights!
Although I did have an idea for a game that's essentially about a siege of one castle town where the training montage idea is pretty much perfect. Not just for the playable character, either, but their immediate allies and the redshirt NPC defenders. There's also exploration and social elements.
Imagine you're a knight with good but incomplete sword skills. You're part of the leadership team, which is essentially made up entirely of knights. Perhaps there's one royal or something. Doesn't matter. You could try and convince the senior armsman (a "fechtmeister", or fightmaster) to pass on their skills. In such a situation, they would very gladly pass on those skills to fellow knights. But what about the commoners that have to become soldiery? They wouldn't be so happy about that. So you might have two options:
- Convince the fightmaster to pass his skills on to the commoner soldiers.
- Train them yourselves with your more limited skills and risk the ire of other knights.
And even that doesn't need to be the end of it. What if there was a combat manual hidden somewhere? You could use that to teach yourself, other knights and commoners advanced techniques without the help of the fightmaster. Or you could go for 100% completion in this respect and do all of the above, turning your commoners into the seeds of future swordmasters.
Of course, you'd have to balance all this out with your time and resources. A batch of swords takes three days to make, and then it takes a day to train a commoner in basic effective combat skills for them. Plus the core iron resource that goes into making swords as compared to spears, shields and axes.
In fact, you might even say that a fair part of the game is grinding taken to its logical design conclusion.
"Has bosses leveling along with players evaded the Japanese as a technology?"
Well, they tried that in Final Fantasy VIII. Many people complained the game was easier if you didn't level up (but then, that's Square balance for you; not that it's a hard game anyway). Though at least the game kept grinding to a minimum, since you're probably going to be playing the children's card game a bunch anyway.
I'll be more likely to be stuck in an RPG because of a puzzle or fetch quest than because of a boss or dungeon, like Vagrant Story's block puzzles and Breath of Fire's late-game fetch quest to restore Nina's memory.
Of all the RPGs I've finished/almost finished this year, I haven't really done any major grinding other than buying one mandatory item in Mint's story in Threads of Fate, the final dungeon of Final Fantasy NES, and the prologues of Wild Arms 3 (only because they provide more EXP than the first few full-party dungeons).
At least with WRPGs you don't have to worry about that nonsense.
I also prefer the idea of doing the bonus dungeons making the final boss scale even higher and be more absurdly epic instead of getting trivialized, but not a whole lot of games have even done that.
This is an interesting contradiction here. You hate that grinding is the "only solution" to being stuck, and yet your suggested fix would make it so that even that doesn't work, so your only choice is to just give up.
Also, monsters levelling with the PCs was tried in Final Fantasy VIII and its one reason that game is so despised.
Bullshit.
Aren't RPGs primarily popular among Otaku? In my experience the mainstream Japanese like much the same thing Americans like--twitchy action games. Keep in mind that shmups are still big in Japan while the genre is virtually dead here.
I think honestly the appeal of grind-RPGs is just that they're relaxing. I know when I get done doing an intense workout, the last thing I want is a game that demands I keep focused on a million bullets at once, so that's when I stick in an RPG.
That being said, I haven't been playing RPGs all that often lately.
The feel of doing a ton of damage after some good-old grinding is just addicting.
Makes it a pain in the ass to level your whole team when Audino is the only viable Pokemon to level against
Suikoden did something similar. You could overgrind in that game, but it made you kind of a moron and you were better off looking for better gear.
Of course you were still likely to grind for potch to upgrade weapons. Kind of wish they just upped the smithing prices considerably, but made the upgrades apply to all characters. You'd get a lot less benchwarmers out of the 108 that way.
^^^Mostly I find it a serious design flaw that so many games have the answer not be 'try a different strategy' but RAISE YOUR POWER LEVEL.