No game is perfect, there’s always something to pick apart. JRPGs are my guilty pleasure. I love the long convoluted stories, repetitive battles and crazy characters. They have their share of faults and eccentricities of design, but I’m of the sort to generally overlook them. Yet occasionally there’s a feature so bad that the only fitting punishment is for designers to be chained to the side of a train before asking them if it’s “on rails” enough for them. The feature which only serves to piss off, frustrate, and annoy players. Here’s how to get on the wrong side of your players, JRPG style.
Take a scenario common to Persona players: a party member gets knocked out and you cast a simple Recarm spell to get them back in the fight. Cool, we all get knocked out every now and then, no problem. So obviously when a pack of shadows end up using a Mudo spell and instantly kill your main character, you’ll just wait until it’s a party member’s turn before using Recarm on the main character right?
Nope. Instead you’re given a game over screen. Not too bad, you’ll just get sent to the moment right before the battle and- oh wait, nope! Instead you’re taken to the main menu screen, forcing you to start from the last point you saved. How does any of this make sense? It doesn’t matter which game I’m playing, if I have party members who are still alive and able to revive me on their turn, why can’t they? Yes, I get that the main character’s important. Yes, I get that there’d be no story without them. Yes, I get that their survival is normally essential to progression. But if you’re going to create an established mechanic that goes against reality, why is reality suddenly reinforced on the main character? While we’re at it, how come none of my Phoenix Downs work on Aeris!?
![33555-Dragon_Quest_VI_-_Maboroshi_no_Daichi_(Japan)_[En_by_NoPrgress_v0.90Beta2]_(-Dragon_Quest_VI_-_Land_of_Illusion)-2](http://138.68.50.239/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/33555-Dragon_Quest_VI_-_Maboroshi_no_Daichi_Japan_En_by_NoPrgress_v0.90Beta2_-Dragon_Quest_VI_-_Land_of_Illusion-2.jpg)
Speaking of Final Fantasy, why the heck would I not want all of my party members, including non-active ones, to level up at once? This is an annoyance prevalent in many early JRPGs such as Dragon Quest and the Final Fantasy IV that only serves as a disincentive to party experimentation. If I wanted to try out a different combination of characters at a later time, the result would be a partially or completely gimped party. The only way to avoid that would be to constantly grind not only for my current party members, but to switch out and grind my non-active members, doubling my required grind and effectively wasting my time.
Sure, levelling up all characters doesn’t work in every game. I sure as hell know that I’d hate it if all of my Pokemon or Disgaea characters levelled at once, but party based story JRPGs do not need the kind of character control that unit collection based grind JRPGs do. I also understand that many older JRPGs may not have had the programming available for that, instead utilizing experience scaling to quickly re-level lower characters. Experience scaling, if done well, can surely soften the blow, but will normally leave the lower character a few levels weaker than the main party once the effects of scaling become mute. If you really don’t like the idea of players having characters sharing exact levels, you could always combine experience scaling with diminished group experience like in Final Fantasy VII. Just please, don’t waste my time and bring out my OCD.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of levels, if you’re going to force me to grind a bit at least have the decency to make the correlation between my work and the experienced gained easily accessible. The use of an experience bar that fills up after each battle clearly shows how my actions affect my character’s growth.
What does not clarify the fruits of my labor is to hide my experience behind a bunch of menus, showing only experience needed and experience currently owned variables, or not showing me at all. If you do any of the above, players will not feel encouraged to grind at all as each battle carries no purpose. Even if you for some reason can’t show a bar, at least show me a marginal experience variable. If you say I have 12,389 experience points and I need 14,809 total experience points including the 12,389 to level up, don’t make me do that math. At least seeing a large number slowly round down to zero provides some of the same feeling as watching a bar slowly fill.
JRPGs are known for their incredible length and investment, requiring hours upon hours to be spent. Having stupid design like main player death, individual levelling, and non-progressive experience tracking will only waste more of your player’s precious time, and set them back even more than the hundred hour plots. Much of JRPG design doesn’t necessarily cater to the largest common denominator, but if you manage to design something that pisses off even your target niche, you’ve done something horribly wrong.
Special thanks to Saotome for authoring this article.
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Well said! Mass Effect was the game that taught me that you don’t have to grind each and every character separately. I think JRPG makers are more comfortable with the idea of setting up and taking part in tedious chores, which is really ridiculous. I remember the sense of horror I felt when playing Final Fantasy Tactics… I had four of my weaker characters surrounding a goblin, hitting it and healing it, over and over and over again. That’s a broken game design.
1 – game over screen on MC death
Agree, this is harsh, but old Japanese hardcore players loved the harsh punishments, if you died and went to main screen and got upset that your save was 3 hours ago, that was seen as YOUR fault, for not saving often. the point of having to encounter difficult enemies every once in a while is to remind you of hard hostile and difficult the world around you is. In FF3 (DS remake) I recall having a really hard time exploring the world right off the bat, with enemies hitting me for 1/3 to 1/2 my health right away! but as time went on, this mentality faded and now days the Japanese players of the current era find that same mentality to be too difficult. It’s probably the advent of auto save features that caused this change, and we’ve seen an equal shift from ease to harshness for the western players, with games like Dark Souls and The Witcher become the more popular gaming trends.
2 – recovery items to bring back “story dead” characters
Don’t agree, this is story breaking. I listed this because it seems like a different thought than the above. I get what you’re saying about “use phoenix downs on Aerith” but I always reconciled this issue with different types of deaths. Deaths that can be revived are “soft deaths” and deaths for the story purpose are “hard deaths”. Think of this like, how a human can be officially considered “dead” but sometimes can come back with medical help, like those people whose heart stops for minutes at a time but then are successfully resuscitated. Another way to think about it is common vampire lore, when a vampire get’s injured it can heal, even injuries that would kill a normal human, but cut off it’s head and there’s no healing back.
3 – all characters progress at once
Disagree, this is a difference in play style. Personally I enjoy the ability to level each and every character independently, it makes it feel more official, like I got this X character to level 100 on my own, rather than X character is level 100 because Y character is level 100. It’s more for bragging rights really, in a game that makes you level each character like Type-0, you know that someone had to spend a lot of time and has lots of experience battling if they have all characters up to high levels (assuming they didn’t cheat). It’s the same for games like Diablo and MMOs, each character has it’s own level because each character requires your attention and love. When you play with the character and go through the motions, you are more likely to build an interest and connection with that character.
4 – visible experience tracking
Totally Agree. It’s very annoying to have to jump through menus and do math in order to get a simple result like how much experience I need to level up. What’s worse is that this trend is also happening in western games that have even slight RPG elements like leveling up and unlocking abilities. Many times, it’s even worse because there is no “points” system, but rather a goals system and having to remember specific goals to achieve in order to unlock the next level or ability is very annoying. (Think Watch_Dogs or even Destiny). But the worst offender is one that provides bars, but no numbers. Sure I like seeing a bar move and it quickly helps to assess the progress, but every once in a while I also want to see numbers. Think Diablo again, you need millions of experience to start finishing off the higher levels (in any version 1,2, or 3) and it gets to the point where progress on the bar is minuscule, so I’d rather see some numbers like : 10,000/10,000,000, on top of that bar, that way when I kill an enemy: 11,000/10,000,000 it gives me a good indication of how much experience that monster is valued, rather than having to wait for the bar to fill in one pixel width.
In regards to 2, this could clarify it a bit more. Aeris did suffer a hard death, but here’s the actual description of Final Fantasy VII’s Phoenix Down:
Revives a KO’d ally with 25% of max HP.
Meaning only knocked out characters. She could have bled to death way too quickly or was instantly killed (which seemed likely, unless you refer to that FFVII game theory). Then again, this WHOLE THING can be argued when you consider that you’re often riddled with bullets by soldiers, etc, and you come out practically unscathed in comparison to one stabbing that causes instant death.
yeah, in the end, it’s best to remember “it’s a game” and not try to create a universal logic that bridges our lives and laws with the lives and laws of video game characters 🙂