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.
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…
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