"Non-grind mode" RPGs

[chuckro]

So, I effectively finished Drakengard this weekend--I got four of the five endings, as the last one requires scouring all of the free stages for all 65 weapons (of which I have 20) and apparently consists of an insanely-hard genre-shift simon says game and a WTF cutscene, which I watched on Youtube.

I had played through the game entirely on easy mode, which was exactly the difficulty level I was looking for: I could go through each stage once, move smoothly through the plot without having to stop to grind, and only had trouble on a couple of the really nasty stages and two of the four final bosses I faced. (I had to fight the dragon in the third ending twice; I had to fight the scorpion-angel thing half a dozen times until I got good enough at predicting its dodge pattern and learned how to handle its super-attack.) If I'd played on "normal" mode, I suspect I'd have been spending a lot more time hunting for the best weapons and them grinding their levels (and my character levels) until I could squeak through the later chapters, which would have taken longer but not actually added much to my gaming experience. (FYI, in the case of this game, Easy mode reduces the damage enemies deal and their hit points. You can switch between difficulty modes at any point.)

Then I started playing the DS remake of Dragon Quest 4. I played this game on an NES emulator shortly after I discovered emulators, back in college. It's one of only three Dragon Quest games (out of 8 that exist, and 7 that I've played) that I've beaten "honestly":
Dragon Warrior (NES/GBC) - Beat the NES version with a game genie. Got to the second form of the final boss on the GBC version using an emulator and save states, but couldn't beat him without grinding levels and gave up.
Dragon Warrior 2 (NES/GBC) - Beat the NES version honestly back in high school when I first got it. Got to the final dungeon in the GBC version, again with an emulator and save states, and lost interest.
Dragon Warrior 3 (NES/GBC) - I've played some of both versions, but never got significantly far in them. There isn't enough plot compared to the amount of wandering and grinding (and the length of the game) to keep my interest.
Dragon Warrior 4 (NES/DS) - I beat an emulated NES version in college, and my notes claim I did it honestly.
Dragon Quest 5 (SNES) - I played some of the fan-translated version, but the ROM I had was already hacked for super-high stats, so I ended up teaching myself how to un-hack it so that they didn't overflow and wrap around. Then I got sick of having to re-arrange save-state variables every time I got a new party member, and the pace of the game was too slow.
Dragon Quest 6 (SNES) - Never played.
Dragon Warrior 7 (PS1) - The only game I've ever seen that advertised 100+ hours of play time, and that was all pre-final boss. (The Nippon Ichi tactical games can advertise that, but the actual plot only takes about 30-35 hours. The rest is grinding until you can beat the level 9000 bonus boss.) This game has a great concept: The world map is empty except for one tiny island and a vast ocean. You need to collect map puzzle pieces and go back in time to those areas, then defeat the demons that sealed off that portion of the world. When you do, the area appears in the present. The problem is, the game's pacing is really slow, the experience grind is impressively frustrating, and there are far, far too many of these areas to unlock given the amount of plot involved. I played 30 hours, hadn't made it to Disc 2, and gave up.
Dragon Quest 8 (PS2) - Arguably the best game in the series. They seriously upgraded the graphics to some beautiful cel-shaded art (the PS1 game used SNES-era sprites and mode-7 rotation), added decent voice acting and well-translated dialogue, and moved most of the really nasty level grinding to after the final boss (there were seven bonus bosses, you only needed to beat the first to get the best ending, and he wasn't much harder than any other boss in the game. 2-6 were insanely nasty). The plot actually moved at a reasonable pace, and there were only a few seriously "guide dang it" puzzles.

But anyway, this got me thinking: Why do you need the level grinding at all? Obviously, there are some people who like that sort of thing, but a lot of the time it hurts the plot progression and just feels like filler or fake difficulty. Then I thought of the GBA ports of Breath of Fire 1 and 2, or the "retry mode" in Lufia 2; both of which kept the game exactly as it was, but quadrupled the amount of experience and gold that enemies gave, so you only needed to fight 1/4 of the battles to reach the same level. Pretty much any game in the Dragon Quest series could be improved by quadrupling the XP and gold from every battle, and halving the encounter rate in dungeons.

I feel like this would be an easy thing to add as a secondary mode: In the first screen, when you name your character, you can set "easy" or "hard" difficulty, and that's the only difference.

But barring Square Enix coming upon this idea, I wonder if the emulator community could make rom patches that effectively did this for the NES and SNES era jrpgs. The Final Fantasy games from 4 on wouldn't need them (except maybe 12); and action-rpgs like the Mana series are a different matter, but why not create the option to see the plot at a faster pace?

Comments

[oblvndrgn.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of it comes from the general philosophy of games back then - they had to be difficult and were largely designed with time sinks. Megaman bosses that you could only beat after you memorized the attack pattern, that kind of thing. I think a lot of RPGs that come out these days require a lot less grinding. I hesitate to say any of them are 'difficult' but that's a digression - I consider an RPG difficult when you can't level up too much to beat a particularly difficult boss, such as a cap on levels, enemies that scale with you, or just that over levelling doesn't solve the problems of what makes a couple of the optional bosses really challenging. I'd say a lot of the modern RPGs that are pretty challenging are doing it intentionally, because the audience is fairly niche compared to mainstream video games and it probably overlaps with the people who enjoy a challenge.

Another side note, I've definitely seen pre-patched ROMs that have all sorts of fan hacks, but I think most of them have made games harder, not easier.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

Oh, the idea that games would deliberately be time sinks (and didn't have the memory available for a lot of plot or event flags) is totally there. And I think that still exists today, to some degree. But nowadays, I think there's much more realization that some people play the games for the plot, and some play for the grind, which is why they've started adding the insanely-hard bonus bosses and bonus dungeons to remakes of older games. And I have no problem with games that have the option of 40 additional hours of killing metal slimes so you have a chance against the Super-Secret Demon Overlord; I have problems with the games that require 40 hours of killing metal slimes to beat the final boss.

Maybe it's just that it seems like fake difficulty: There's no challenge, and little actual skill involved, you just need to patiently wander around a field killing things for hours. But then, the difficulty I'm looking for in RPGs tends to be in the self-contained puzzles: The temple of the pushable block. Burn all the plants before they regrow. Use your map tools in a creative way. (Lufia 2 or Wild ARMS 3 are great examples.) I don't like wandering to every town trying to figure out where to go next. I don't like sudden jumps in enemy strength that necessitates stopping to grind. And I don't like arbitrary anti-fun gameplay devices, like enemies that cast hit-all instant-kill spells that you can't protect against (looking at you, 7th Saga).

I'm not sure I've ever seen an RPG that was fan patched for difficulty. Virtually all of them you see are translation patches, and the occasional graphics patches for DW1 and FF1.