This is a ridiculously good good with insane amounts to do, character development, and story. It’s wild to me how much the original game had and wasn’t DLC or a separate game.
Its odd, because I played the crap out of VIII, but hardly got into Monstrum Nox and am not even sure if I’m getting Nordics when it comes out on Switch. I probably will, but I feel like the series peaked with Dana.
Tap for spoilerDana technically shows up in Monstrum Nox, and that game kind of continues alluding to themes from Lacrimosa, depending on your interpretation.
I think most Ys games are slow to start and easy to let go of, but if you hang in there, the stories eventually reach a point at least for me that I can’t stop.
IX wasn’t nearly as good as VIII, IMO. The movement and combat felt good but the pacing was awful (too Trails-like) and the story and characters were nothing special.
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.
There’s nothing more annoying than chilling in ff 8 doing your own thing, then the loudest fucking music ever interrupts your fun time, ff 10 was awful about it too.
But other games it’s no problamo, I think the best way to do it is how the mother series went about it, with them being semi random and dodgable if you were good and didn’t want to do them.
8 was so bad with randoms. You can go like 2 inches at a time between over world encounters. And they were so time consuming even when it only took 2 hits to kill everything - intro transition, battle animations, victory splash… so long!
I have no idea how I managed to sit through those back in the day. Sooooo tedious.
I like the tales series for how they did, mostly dodgeable, but combat could also be fully automated if you were bored. And there’s a lot of combat, so it gets boring. Needless to say I used auto combat a lot (not for bosses or unique enemies tho). I’d prefer if it didn’t do the battle transition, but I understand the function of it.
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.
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
I actually only like random encounters when I’ve changed up either builds or party members and want to play around with it for a little bit. In that sense, I guess you could say I don’t like random encounters, but rather easily accessible encounters.
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.
You could play Ghost Recon: Wildlands or try some of the older Ghost Recon or Delta force games. Some of the weapons on offer are older in it.
There’s a tag on Steam named coop campaign that might help find a few for you. I saw a real time tactics game called War Mongrels that might be of interest though it’s obviously not a shooter.
Also, obviously there’s “hell let loose” but it’s not a campaign experience
I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.
Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.
For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.
I agree these games made big improvements but I still see them as bandages to the inevitable problems that came with random encounters. There’s no undoing the interruption of flow you know.
I think it’s a tradeoff though like I said. Because I don’t know how you can have a combat system as cool and creative as say Undertale (blending turn based and realtime bullet hell) or battle network (blending turn based, real time and card game) without it being completely separate from the overworld.
This is actually a few different design paradigms you are talking about.
The first is the exploration map transitioning into a battle map during encounters. The second is randomly spawning encounters. The third is forcing players to fight those encounters. Games like Zelda 2 had a exploration map transition into a battlemap, but the encounters are visible on the exploration map and could be avoided if you want so they were never forced or random. On the other hand games like Shining in the Darkness had exploration and battle on the same map; there was no transitions and the view perspective did not change, the game just randomly forced you to fight encounters while you walked around. Then you have something like Vermintide 2 which is a realtime first person action rpg/shooter where random monsters are spawned in at random times on random places on the map to attack you, but the monsters only spawn out of sight in places you are not looking at, and you are not forced to fight them.
IMO battle transitions and forced encounters are outdated mechanics designed around the technical limitations of 8 bit era systems, while random encounters are a great way to improve exploration and overall replay value of a game.
Good point. I guess it is 2 things I’m talking about.
I think battle transitions are a tradeoff. They free combat but at the cost of interrupting flow. If you don’t do anything with the freedom they give you and you just make the same tired pokemon style choose from a menu combat it’s not worth it.
Aye. Like all design paradigms, there are places where they can be useful or can be used to achieve a certain feel.
I actually hate “choose from a menu combat” but have thought of a few cases where it would make sense - for example a Legend of Galactic Heroes style space warfare game based on hyper-realistic combat between massive fleets of 20,000+ ships each, which according to lore, line up in nice neat firing lines and shoot at each other for 12+ hours until one side has won via attrition. There is no way to simulate that in real time and be fun, and the ranges at which combat happens in deep space means that there is basically literally no room for maneuvering once the battle has began…
Random combat is the number one thing that makes me drop a game.
Its annoying, it happens too often, it always interrupts me when I want to do something else, and it is too repetitive.
This is why I stopped playing a lot of JRPGs. The other thing I drop them for is when combat only has a single song and always starts with the exact same intro, like what happened with Dragon Quest 11 or whatever it was that I played.
I hate grinding. Its repetitive and boring. Its not fun. If a games story missions are not paced properly with level such that I can do only the story missions and never be underleveled, then I will drop that game immediately.
I also hate grinding but sometimes I get addicted to it. Like my lizard brain likes watching the numbers go up. I recently loaded an old save in final fantasy and saw my level at 99, health at 999/999 and gold at 999999 and was like “I don’t remember grinding any of this”. It happens in a trance.
Not every design choice fits every game (obviously). With that in mind, rarely is any specific design choice always 100% good or bad.
I think rather than just taking a vote, it is more useful to think about what makes a good random encounter, and what kinds of game designs work well with them.
I enjoy CRPG styled games. Often in these random encounters happen when moving through an overworld. This kind of design doesn’t disrupt exploration, since once it is over, you continue on your way. It does disrupt when you are going between known points and just trying to tie something up. That can be annoying. Ways that I think can make random encounters enjoyable for CRPG styled games:
Not every random encounter has to be combat. Some can be combat, some can be social, some can be vendors, and some can just be flavor. Non-combat encounters can be used as sort of optional bonus content for players to learn about the lore or explore, and they might even feel special since it is a random occurrence the player gets.
The ability to put points into some kind of skill that gives the player the option to avoid a random encounter and/or start a combat encounter with a bonus.
Encounters should be tied with regions of the overworld in a way that makes sense. Put tougher encounters in endgame areas to discourage players from poking around too early. Make encounters in certain areas tied to the main faction or location in that area.
Ease up on certain kinds of encounters as the game goes on, so they don’t outstay their welcome. For example, in the early game if there are lots of low level bandits attacking in random encounters, it can be fun, but it gets old once you are powerful enough to rip through them and are just trying to get bigger things done. Solve this by, for example saying that routes between major hubs are secured thanks to player actions. Now the player can travel between main routes without getting hassled.
Be very thoughtful about combat random encounters triggered by NPCs after the player due to player actions. These tend to be more annoying since these are usually higher level NPCs that pack more punch. Making their appearance totally random can be very annoying. It also often feels like a grind if the encounter happens repeatedly. I would prefer the consequences of player actions to firstly always be telegraphed so they know a certain action means a revenge squad is after them. Second, I would prefer this encounter to be scripted- either concretely in a specific location where the game knows the player hasn’t yet been by virtue of the trigger happening while certain areas are still locked by the main story, or in a floating fashion where one of various possibilities is chosen by the game based on whatever triggers first. Once the player defeats whoever is after them, they should never be chased by an identical kind of threat.
These are all CRPG ideas, but I think mostly translate to action RPGs conceptually.
I haven’t played any CRPGs and I’m not familiar with them. Any recommendation of an intro to the genre?
But many of your points are still familiar. Trivial encounters feeling like an annoying waste of time, items or abilities that control the encounter rates, etc.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
Wasteland 3 is a good CRPG style game with modern presentation. There is backstory from the first two games, but the third one is self contained enough that you won’t be confused by the story.
I think making regions safe is a great idea but I would want it tied to a challenging side quest. Like maybe you can intentionally fight a harder version of an area’s enemies to make it safe?
That’s one way to tackle it. The point is that there is something to prevent the experience of being super high level and getting mugged by guys with rusty shivs. I’m throwing out many ideas, which could be refined by specific games.
When it comes to random mobs, a game which relies on them is Kenshi, as an example. Without wandering random mobs to encounter, the game loses a lot of flavor. Kenshi does a few things uniquely, with the main one being that many random encounters that end in defeat don’t end in death. Rather than it being a case where a random mob annoyingly forces a start from a previous save, Kenshi can often be played past the defeat with the player now enslaved, in jail, or injured. The emergent story telling from those fights is what makes the game.
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