5. Emancipated Freemen to the Grind
One of my favorite developers over the past several years has been NIS. NIS stands for Nippon Ichi Software, which I'm almost certain translates to Kickingest Ass Software, despite the very real fact that I just made that up.
No one was more surprised than me that I would be a fan of NIS. This is because no one I know plays NIS games and doesn't care that I do, so I was the only contestant in that particular surprise contest. The reason I was surprised was that NIS games look, at first glance, like goofy anime bullshit. More specifically, like low budget goofy anime bullshit that panders to stereotypes. And to be fair, it kind of is goofy anime bullshit a generation behind in graphics but decades ahead in underwear technology. But it is also so, so much more.
The first game I picked up by them was Disgaea 3. The internet hive mind review told me that this would be a foolish move on my part, as I would find the characters, game world, story, gameplay and everything else about the game confusing and unapproachable. And graphics. Can't have a review these days without that getting brought up. Thanks, I can see the screen shots jackass, this isn't 1992.
This wasn't true, of course. Well, I mean the graphics, yeah, but fuck you it's fun. I was a bit confused at first, but this was only because I'm so unused to in-game narratives just starting. "How am I supposed to know what's going on if every detail isn't explained in triplicate, verbally and in writing, and cross-referenced by at least 3 different NPCs over the course of several hours?!"-Average Game Designer, putting himself in our shoes and falling over, hopefully breaking a chair and landing on a pie. Also: fart noise.
Anyway, the beautiful thing about D3 and other NIS titles is that they're long. As near as I can tell, they don't really end until you finish playing, yet at the same time the main story line could be completed in a day. Okay, it could probably be completed in a day if you had a walkthrough, no friends and a large pile of methamphetamines, but still. After completing the story, though, is when the game really opens up, with an epilogue story, new game+, item world, new characters. They even have DLC for this game that I will probably never touch, because I've put well over 200 hours into this game and only have around 35% of the trophies.
What NIS has mastered, along with other things, is grinding. Grinding can be roughly defined as repeating certain in-game actions many, many times until a number changes. The actions are things like killing all of the blue skeletons in sector 70-2 for experience, killing the Winged BloodSnake of Azir-Tah over and over until he drops a certain weapon, or playing a mini-game repeatedly for money.
Some people love grinding, some people hate it, some people claim to hate it, but do it anyway because they're fucking liars, and some people do it until they get bored or find something better to do. Where some companies screw up is in making a grind mandatory, intentionally or not. Two Worlds II is a good example of bad design leading to constant grinding. In the world of Two Worlds II: 2 Fast Too Furious, everything costs a damn fortune. I'm not sure, since it's one of those aimless "Why am I killing this ostrich again?" sandbox western RPGs, but I think the main character wants to assassinate the Emporer because of inflation. In the world of 2 Worlds II a book costs 900 gold, and a piece of armor can range anywhere from a couple hundred to multiple thousands.
This wouldn't be a problem if it was just a cheap currency, like pesos or yen or the American dollar five years from now, and killing a group of whatever-they-decided-to-call-their goblins netted an appropriate amount. Unfortunately, finding gold in Two Worlds II Legit 2 Quit is almost as hard as finding gold in real life. Compounding this problem is the designers' decision to only respawn enemies that drop worthless crap. The majority of the game is spent picking flowers to sell, killing the same group of why-the-fuck ostriches and hyenas over and over, playing the impossible-ass Guitar Hero knockoff mini game, or playing dice, losing, reloading, playing dice, winning, saving, playing dice, losing and reloading until you have enough gold to upgrade your equipment every three or four levels. The semen frosting on this particular shit cake is that vendors' prices adjust to their own stock in real time, so to sell 10 of a particular item the gamer has to run back and forth between multiple vendors or suffer the insane game logic of one ostrich egg selling for 40 and 10 ostrich eggs selling for 56. This is clearly bullshit of the highest order.
Sometimes mandatory grind sessions feel like obvious padding (White Knight Chronicles, most strategy RPGs.) Other times you don't even realize you should have been doing it until it's too late and you've used up all of your recovery items, died, and somehow respawned at your base with half your money gone (Resonance of Fate, every Dragon Quest.) The single problem with both of these things is that they almost always forget to make playing the game fun. Grinding can be FUN. Remember fun? Theoretically the entire motivation behind going to Gamestop, paying $60 for a dolled-up DVD and catching whatever local communicable illness you haven't had yet? Seriously, don't touch those display models. Fun is not a hard thing to put into a video game. It's been done successfully since the fucking oscilloscope was the cutting edge of electronic amusements and diversions. It just seems to always get put on the back burner until it's too late, even though it's going to be on the front burner for the majority of the game. Burning, usually. Here are some examples of fun grinding in RPGs throughout history:
Diablo
People still play Diablo, because playing Diablo is like having sex with your mouse for 10 hours. On the off-chance someone doesn't know what Diablo is: Diablo is fucking perfect. This despite it being rendered entirely in eye-strain and stick figure and having about three lines of dialogue. Back in 1995 Blizzard had one of the biggest lightbulb moments in RPG history. Something so obvious that no one had really thought to do it before: "If we make combat visceral, engaging and rewarding, people will want to keep doing it." Shortly after marrying primeval man's desire to kill shit with an axe with modern man's powerlessness over Skinner Box reward systems (think slot machines,) Diablo went on to sell more copies than there were computers to play it on.River City Ransom
River City Ransom for the NES was one of the best games ever made and probably the first Action/RPG hybrid to succeed at both. You punched and kicked bad guys, they turned into coins, you then used the money to buy food, books and sexy shower scenes that somehow made you punch and kick better. Repeat. That's the entire game. There's no shitty-ass fishing minigame. It doesn't force you to collect ten mutant cabbages that only drop one out of fifty times to get a new fireball. It doesn't take three fucking hours to explain the basics. Button 1=punch, button 2=kick, button 1+2=jump, good luck. That's the goddamn tutorial.Tales of Phantasia
Tales of Phantasia was the best game for the Super Nintendo. That's not an opinion. That's based on like seven different kinds of science and three schools of wizardry. It wasn't released in America until years later because Japanese game companies secretly love that most American gamers think that JRPGs are cliche, repetitive pieces of shit that haven't changed in 25 years. One of the main reasons it was so good was the combat system. Unlike the games everyone remembers (FFVI/3, Chrono Trigger,) it had a live action battle system to go with it's convoluted story, goofy fucking RPG hero cliches and dozens of things named after, but having nothing to do with, Norse mythology. While Square was trying to come up with a new needlessly complex magic system and Enix was trying to figure out how to make it harder to get the copper sword before the first boss fight, Namco figured out how to put actual fighting into a JRPG fight. I'd also like to mention that Star Ocean came out around the same time with many of the same innovations, and has been playing Tales Studio's ugly friend ever since.
The thing about these games is that they improved on working formula, and they did it so well that ham-fisted, shameless ripoffs of these games are even good.
6. If I'm Lost, It's Your Fault
One of the problems that has needlessly plagued RPGs throughout the ages has been poor communication with the player. This began in the early 80's, before anyone had figured out how to speak Japanese AND English and most video game translations were delegated to the nearest hyperactive child with poor grammar. This eventually became known as Engrish and later as "Would you stop typing ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US every fucking time! No one's impressed anymore!" The problem with this was that between the hit-or-miss translations and early games only being able to hold 255 of anything was that sometimes crucial plot points got passed over so that nameless NPCs in villages could inform the player that "Timmy's a good boy!" or "No more cider!" even though this information is insane and unhelpful. But thank god for it, otherwise 12 year old me wouldn't know what to scream at my TV while I repeatedly wandered between the same village, field, dungeon and field over and over all fucking day trying to figure out where to go next.
Eventually game makers started to learn English or Japanese or sometimes even both, and that would have resolved the issue had this event not taken place in concert with the cutscene explosions. So as game designers developed the tools to effectively tell the gamer where to go next they were doing so while burying the gamer in an avalanche of backstory, made up science and superfluous bullshit, making it that much harder to tell the player "Talk to the bard, then the prince, then the bard again."
Eventually, new tools were created to help combat this stupid ass problem, such as quest logs, map markers or chapter overviews. Unfortunately, the more cunning and inventive the "Go here next" system is the less likely it is to work. Sure, "Talk to Bobby at HQ," sounds like a good tip, until you realize that no one at your headquarters is named Bobby. And while there very well may be someone at the enemy headquarters named Bobby he (or possibly she,) won't be wearing a nametag but will be surrounded by several hundred people that want to kill you.
One of the problems that has needlessly plagued RPGs throughout the ages has been poor communication with the player. This began in the early 80's, before anyone had figured out how to speak Japanese AND English and most video game translations were delegated to the nearest hyperactive child with poor grammar. This eventually became known as Engrish and later as "Would you stop typing ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US every fucking time! No one's impressed anymore!" The problem with this was that between the hit-or-miss translations and early games only being able to hold 255 of anything was that sometimes crucial plot points got passed over so that nameless NPCs in villages could inform the player that "Timmy's a good boy!" or "No more cider!" even though this information is insane and unhelpful. But thank god for it, otherwise 12 year old me wouldn't know what to scream at my TV while I repeatedly wandered between the same village, field, dungeon and field over and over all fucking day trying to figure out where to go next.
Eventually game makers started to learn English or Japanese or sometimes even both, and that would have resolved the issue had this event not taken place in concert with the cutscene explosions. So as game designers developed the tools to effectively tell the gamer where to go next they were doing so while burying the gamer in an avalanche of backstory, made up science and superfluous bullshit, making it that much harder to tell the player "Talk to the bard, then the prince, then the bard again."
Eventually, new tools were created to help combat this stupid ass problem, such as quest logs, map markers or chapter overviews. Unfortunately, the more cunning and inventive the "Go here next" system is the less likely it is to work. Sure, "Talk to Bobby at HQ," sounds like a good tip, until you realize that no one at your headquarters is named Bobby. And while there very well may be someone at the enemy headquarters named Bobby he (or possibly she,) won't be wearing a nametag but will be surrounded by several hundred people that want to kill you.
7. No One Wins the Lottery
Some game mechanics never work. Some work occasionally, but the odds of it happening again are so close to infinity against that they shouldn't be attempted. I'm sure that somewhere, in some forgotten RPG that only video game designers have played, there was a good fishing minigame, an exciting escort quest, a rewarding time trial, platforming that wasn't clunky and infuriating and a stealth quest that wasn't borderline impossible. I imagine this must have been the finest game ever made, with a fluid, challenging and engrossing battle system, a balanced, intuitive inventory, fetch quests so artfully integrated that the player wasn't even aware that they were playing fetch, natural, organic dialogue that didn't involve the village elder screaming about people you've never met in places you've never been to in broken English for the first half hour of the game. The thing about that game is that it will never, ever, ever be your game.
If I see a game called Barbarian Hero, and the cover art shows a picture of a barbarian hero, and the back of the box shows screencaps of barbarian heroing alongside text bubbles screaming "DOZENS OF HOURS OF BARBARIAN ADVENTURE AWAIT!!!" and I decide to buy this game, guess what convinced me to buy it? That's right. I really fucking want to play an agriculture simulator. Let's see, I can kill the mad spider goddess, or rescue the princess from the dragon, or lead the people of the plains in their battle against the people of the mountains, or, wait, I know! I'm going to fish and maybe grow some corn! That sounds so much more like something I can't do in real life!
I can at least see the need for some kind of farming/fishing/sharecropping simulator. It never works, and it almost always is a poorly designed, clunky, user-hostile mess, but I can understand the logic behind it. Your character needs gold. Basilisks and manticores aren't real, but if they were, they probably wouldn't vomit gold when they die.The problem here is that the solution to one small problem always seems to lead to many big problems, like an antacid medication that causes explosive diarrhea, blindness and suicidal ideation.
Some games (FFXII, 2 Worlds II, Neir,) try to find their way around this by having enemies drop junk items to be sold to the nearest merchant. This also creates problems as most of these same games have customization mechanics that rely on saving the junk to upgrade your weapons and armor. Since there is never an in-game guide illustrating whether or not to sell off your stock of Rotten Kidneys or how many Wolf Hides you're going to need for the next upgrade this inevitably leads to the old guesswork method of learning. And there are very, very few things more infuriating than selling off five of your ten Goat Eyeballs to buy the Improved Short Sword, saving, and learning an hour later that you need seven Goat Eyeballs to forge the Excalibur Blade and there are only fucking 11 Goat Eyeballs in the entire world!
As pointless and time wasting as developers insistence on trying to reinvent this particular wheel is, it's nothing compared to some of the exercises in futility regularly found in these games, such as the time trial, platforming and escort quests.
It's a known fact than an action game can incorporate RPG elements to improve their product. This is NOT a two way street. Platformers are designed to be platformers. The majority of the game is made with this in mind. Adding a sidequest or a hidden dungeon doesn't change that. It just means jumping in new and exciting locations. Adding a platform section to an RPG is basically telling the world "We're not very good at this."
I have never played a good escort quest in an RPG. Ever. And there have been hundreds. Maybe it can be done right, but that's what alchemists said about turning lead into gold. The problem with escort quests is that the person being escorted almost always falls into one of two categories. They're either a complete panty-waste that sucks up all of your healing potions before charging face first into certain death and being right (Sacred II,) or being a complete asshole that won't take orders and constantly gets in the way (Final Fantasy XII.) What always happens in these situations is the game stops being a game and becomes a chore. Whether it involves inching forward while spamming health potions or charging through the dungeon to get this selfish retard back out of your party, it never adds anything worthwhile to the game. Except for once. And that was a Blind Guardian video. If that was at the end of every escort mission I'd be happy.
Time trials don't work either. If I wanted to race I would have bought a racing game. If I wanted a racing game with RPG elements I'd play F-1: Built to Win. If I wanted to play an RPG with racing elements I'd soon learn I was wrong to want that. I first remember this shitty design choice cropping up in Chrono Trigger, an overrated but otherwise harmless JRPG for the Super Nintendo. At one point you have to race a bad guy across a junkyard. The bad guy is some sort of gang leader and also a motorcycle with a mohawk. I've probably played that damn race 30 times and every time I felt as if I had exactly a 50% chance of winning, regardless of whether or not I even held the controller and did stuff. It was impossible to get more than a couple of car lengths ahead or behind and both vehicles handled like they were powered by flubber. Absolutely pointless fucking thing to put in that game, and that was a game that involved walking in a circle three times to learn character-specific magic.
What most people that don't make RPGs professionally learned from that race was that racing doesn't work in RPGs. When the best thing anyone has ever said about something is a shrug, it's probably not something worth pursuing. Of course, following the game making logic of "We're doing it cuz they did it," time trials keep popping up and keep getting worse, with Final Fantasy VIII, a game best described as 'test anxiety,' possibly being the nadir. I remember watching a friend try to play FFVIII about a decade ago. After about three hours she screamed at the TV "GODDAMMIT! I'm a nerd! I don't buy nerd games to show off my reflexes!!"
As if to perpetuate my abusive it'll-be-different-this-time-baby relationship with games, our old friend 2 Worlds II: Too Hot To Handle sucker-punched me with a horse race the last time I played it. After acquiring the horse I came to the conclusion that, even though it steered like a plow and only had two speeds (canter and buck wildly,) it was still marginally quicker than walking. Twenty minutes later I find myself having to challenge the self-proclaimed Hulk Hogan of imaginary horseridering's best time for the privilege of entering his inexplicably walled shantytown to meet my contact. Fuck you, game. I'm taking the kids and going to my mama's.
So in conclusion: Stop doing things that don't work and start doing things that do. Please.
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