I think, it works kind of well in games where you’re able to enslave/recruit the random encouters (Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei and such), as it’s then a surprise what you’ll find, somewhat like a slot machine.
But the way the more recent entries work in these series, that you find out what creatures roam the world by exploring, that kind of works, too.
More generally, I don’t particularly like the problem that random encounters solve. Which is that you’ve got sections of gameplay where nothing happens, so you throw enemy encounters into there. That also goes for non-random encounters.
RPGs do this and I used to enjoy RPGs as a form of escapism. But now that I’m doing more stuff in real-life, I want it condensed down in roguelike form, or I’ll just play other genres…
Treat it objectively and ignore that it’s a Final Fantasy game.
I loved it. Everything from the story to the music to the combat. I bought and played through both DLCs as well. For me, it is the perfect mix of a great movie and great video game.
Plot: The Ezio trilogy.
Core Gameplay: Black Flag/Rogue.
Replay value: Odyssey.
I just want to chill out after a long day: Odyssey.
I actually want to get sucked into the setting and characters: Black Flag.
FF style? Hate 'em. I’m not a fan of the turn-based combat in those types of games either. Outside of boss fights/special enemies, you’re usually just spamming A to select the first option (attack) until you win. It gets hella old, hella fast and the random encounters happen every so many steps you take.
Fallout style, on the other hand, is awesome. More like Fallout 3 and beyond than 1 or 2 which are still a bit like FF in that you can’t see shit, you just walk the map and then FF battle music fade to black and pop into the encounter.
The Yakuza series does them well. They’re visible when wandering around, but they’ll also just appear at random all over the city walking down streets or chilling in alleys. You can’t always tell exactly what you’ll fight but you’ll know how to get around them if you don’t want to fight.
Of course I also like roguelikes. The entire game is a random encounter.
I agree FF style turn based combat is boring. I mean games that have an auto button that plays it for you are admitting it.
That’s why I like games that have more creative combat that blends different genres. Undertale has some turn based, some realtime bullet hell. Battle network has a real time grid based with card game elements.
There’s so much you can do but so often devs fall back on choose from menu watch cutscene.
Oh yeah, Undertale is gnar. They actually did something new and different with the style, which is what I’m really about here. Octopath Traveller is another good one; the thing that it has going for it is the sheer number of options you actually have. It’s not just “attack, item, magic, defend, or run away.” It also has a lot of other Western RPG elements in it like actually having dialogue choices that matter making it an actual game with branching paths and not simply a story with some minimal interactive elements.
I’m in the “if I can’t avoid them, I’m not playing the game long” camp.
I don’t hate them, and they can be fun. But most of the games that do them make them impossible to bypass. Like others have already said, when you’re questing, they just derail the gameplay experience. There’s times that’s okay, but if a game has them often enough, it ends up making me hate the game and quit.
It’s why I don’t go back an replay the final fantasy stuff.
They’re not the worst thing ever, but I’m happy when a game finds another way to challenge the player that isn’t “throw an enemy encounter at the player every ten steps”.
Nowadays I particularly enjoy games where the encounter is fought on the map itself instead of having a transition screen and a separate map. Games like Sea of Stars, or Yakuza Kiwami for example. I find that removing the transition screen also removes much of the tedium I feel with enemy encounters in video games.
Man…this question would have SO much more gravity if it weren’t about gaming.
Like if you’re thinking back on your life. You met your wife at a coffee shop, but what would your life be today if they got a bagel instead? Where would your life be, 20 years later?
Or what if you’re single? Did you make the wrong arbitrary choice? Did you walk left instead of right? Did you miss out on meeting your special someone because of a choice you didn’t realize had ramifications?
And how should we feel about that today, knowing nothing in the past can be changed?
Haha I have thought about that too actually. Mainly because my career path and favorite hobby were both decided by small random moments. It’s definitely made me more open to new experiences.
Unity was the best in my opinion. Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla are all the new design of Assassin’s Creed games that earned their own set of fans, but they’re so different from what came before with their faux RPG design. The fantasy is broken for me when I sneak up behind someone, stab them in the neck, and their health bar only goes down a little bit.
The first Assassin’s Creed game was very repetitive, but they gave you small assassination missions for you to figure out how to get, kill your target, and get out. The next several games in the series were better in every way except for perhaps these missions that mattered most, which they made extremely linear and scripted action missions.
Unity (set in Paris in the late 1700s) was an answer to those frustrations. There was a point in the dialogue where they specifically called it out. “So what’s the plan?” “The plan? Come up with your own plan. I’m not here to hold your hand.” They gave you expansive areas to carry out your mission, and you could find your own way in, kill your target, and get out. The game has some of its own baggage, like the loot system taking any challenge out of the combat later in the game, when the whole idea was that you were squishy that you should avoid combat, but it delivered on the experience the best since the first game.
Then Syndicate came out next, and they highlighted different ways to do your assassination like you were a big dummy, and they made a significant part of the game about street brawling, so I gave it a hard pass. The next game in the series was Origins, which brings us to the modern faux RPG era.
I kinda liked Syndicate. It looked and felt kind of cartoony in a lot of ways, but I actually liked the dynamic Evie and Jacob had. And the combat for the brawling actually looked pretty badass imo too.
The whole “using a whole train as your base” was kinda weird though.
Unity was the game I was most hyped for, especially because of its graphics and bigger maps. I even went to speedrun through the last three games to catch with the lore and begin playing it as soon as possible.
Alas, my PC couldn’t meet up with the heightened hardware requirements and I had to give up after barely finishing the tutorial with the awful frame rates even with the settings set to minimal.
I got my gaming rig recently and played all the releases up to Rogue only this year. I assure you my specs are modest enough and it’s just the game that is poorly optimised. Even Watchdogs 2 ran better than this.
I played it on Xbox and then PC even back in the day, and I’d 100% believe that it’s poorly optimized; they patched it a few months after launch to remove a lot of extraneous, unseen detail on the map that was hurting performance. It’s still surprising if you can’t run a 10 year old game well on a modest modern PC.
my favorite one is Unity… In old AC cities and the tools given for moving in it are the most important parts and both Paris modelisation and the controls of Arno are the best of the best.
I still haven’t played it since at the time the game was poorly received, but I have friends who also love that period who swear by it as their favorite, and in the end, thats all that matters in AC, that you love the vibe, right?
AC 1 & 2, I know they’re pretty jank now and black flag stole the show, but it was entrancing for young me, it felt like I was entering another world. I would no shit just wander the world for hours just taking in the simulated culture and learning how people lived, it was so fascinating to see how life was back then. I guess that’s why AC3 bored me so much, American history is just not interesting to me as it’s so recent relatively
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