Category: JRPG

Anything loosely falling into JRPG category. May be Final Fantasy, may be Disgaea.

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Game Ramblings #223 – Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined

More Info from Square Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series, Windows

This is an easy ramblings for me to write. In a lot of ways it boils down to one question – do you like traditional JRPGs? If the answer is yes, then frankly you’ve probably already played this game. However, for as good as the original and 3DS releases of this game were, the game is just unnecessarily long. That’s something that is incredibly common for Dragon Quest games in general, though it’s been getting better in recent years. That is really what my mind was focused on coming out of this.

I had put off starting this one for a while because I didn’t really want to tackle an 80 hour JRPG. I just don’t really have that kind of time to play games anymore. I’d heard some people recommend it and noting that it was shorter. I then noticed that its How Long to Beat page was seeing 40-50 hours as a more common time to complete. That kind of time investment is a bit more doable. That drop in length by about half comes about in a few ways. However, it’s not unfair to say that it’s simply because the game just loads quicker. Getting into fights is quicker. Getting into zones is quicker. Getting through the time portals is quicker. It just compresses the experience through lack of loading.

However, the more beneficial part was how much quicker leveling can be, and that’s entirely up to the player. One of the things that recent Dragon Quest titles have been doing is giving players more control over difficulty. It started with things like an “easy” difficulty that ramped up player damage, ramped down damage taken, and ramped up XP gained. It then added a lot more over world automatic battles when you as the player have gotten strong enough. DQ7R is the most granular control that they’ve given, and it’s much to the game’s benefit.

The way that I chose to play this title was with the following settings:

  • Damage: Normal for given and received
  • XP Gained: Increased
  • Gold Gained: Increased
  • Job Points: Increased

What this essentially is is a settings group that is the game at intended difficulty, but with significantly less grinding. I was essentially choosing to just have less combat for the sake of making the experience faster while preserving difficulty. This gets combined with the fact that battles are no longer random in recent titles, so you can choose to simply skip combat entirely if you’re at an appropriate power level.

This simply makes the game faster and it’s much better as a result. The pattern I like in JRPGs is to figure out the enemy setups, fight them a few times, then move on. I don’t need to fight things dozens of times to get my value. At that point it’s just boring. In a case like this where XP gained is high, I can simply fight things to get my entertainment, then move on.

There’s additional little gameplay things that are added like save/heal points that appear frequently right before bosses to act as safety and time savers for the player. There’s a weird side effect that comes out of this – I use MP-based skills far more often. Because I don’t need to fight as much, I can dump my resources for the sake of fun. Because I know I’ll heal before a boss I’m not preserving my resources for the boss. If I’ve used everything and don’t want to spend items, I can simply avoid fighting. The combination of these things further enhances the speed of playing the game because I can simply be aggressive on offense, which is something that a lot of older JRPGs didn’t really allow.

I’ve said similar things about recent JRPGs that have pushed into streamlining the experience for the player. A recent example includes Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. I just don’t buy arguments about JRPGs needing length to be of value. To me empty grinding is just fluff and I’d rather have a shorter experience. The DQ1-3 HD2D remakes and now this DQ7 remake show that Square is taking the idea of a cleaner experience seriously for the players. This is everything about the story and metagame that made the original great, now combined with modern sensibilities around not wasting the player’s time. It’s a far better game for it.

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Game Ramblings #218 – Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter

More Info from Falcom

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, Steam

I played the original release of this game on PSP but admittedly it’s been long enough that I don’t really have much of a consistent memory of the experience. I do know I enjoyed my time with it, but I feel vaguely not enjoying the grind of leveling. Going into this I was a bit suspicious of whether that would happen again. Luckily what I found was a game that felt like a heavily modernized JRPG in terms of how it respects the player time, but this is definitely not a game without problems.

The thing that increasingly makes JRPGs live and die for me is combat, but not necessarily how good it is. It’s more often than not how much I need to engage in combat at this point. In particular, how much I need to engage in useless combat. I hate combat for the sake of combat because it feels like wasted time to me. The remake of Trails 1st really does a lot of good things to reduce that.

Similar to PSP, enemies are visible in the overworld, which on its own does a lot to reduce my need to engage in combat. However, there’s a number of things that reduce my need to be in combat. For one, there’s XP scaling based on level. At a surface level this allowed me to simply avoid combat with enemies that are lower level than me by knowing that the rewards are no longer relevant. On the opposite side though, this meant that I could effectively power level by engaging in combat with things higher level than me. What this really meant is that I was always in a level band that was relevant to the gameplay of the story around me. As a balance point it reduced my need to be in combat to just when it was important or worthwhile.

This is combined with the fact that you can do some basic real-time combat in the overworld, allowing me to mow through weak enemies simply to get rewards without being in the slower turn-based combat. If I needed specific items for cooking or Sepith, I could quickly dispatch a bunch of weak enemies and get them. This change also meant that running past enemies allowed me to simply run past them because the game no longer has the JRPG mechanic of battle starting immediately on first contact. It’s a small mechanical change with huge implications to the flow of the game.

Once in combat, there’s then a highly enjoyable system in place. It’s the same type of combat on PSP where the player has a mix of skills and magic. However, it leans into two things that I don’t think are seen as much as I would prefer – positioning and turn order.

The player has a wide variety of shapes of attacks from AOE circles to lines to cones, as well as bonuses for some attacks from the side or back. All of this allows the player to enforce positioning as a benefit. There were many times where I would knowingly drag some of my own units into different areas in an attempt to pull mobs into the line of fire and increase total damage output. The flip side of this is that defensively it’s also important to pay attention to where magic attacks from enemies will be so that you don’t leave your own party in range of attacks.

The reason this is important is that turn order is not static and magic attacks are not always immediate. Under normal circumstances magic attacks require a turn to start and a turn to execute. While that is happening, it’s obvious where the attack will go due to targeters on the ground. This gets into turn order manipulation. Some attacks can delay turns or reduce player “speed” that leads to determining turn order. Attacks can be cancelled by executing some moves that impede the target. Stuns can cancel a target’s turn if timed correctly. Basically, combat becomes a balance of getting damage out while also attempting to delay or cancel the enemy’s turn as much as possible, allowing the player to get through any battle with as little damage taken as possible.

Generally speaking, this all works great – right up until it doesn’t. That gets into my one big problem with the game. The boss fights in the game are just not tuned well, and it all comes down to the rage mechanic. Pretty much every boss in the game has some rage trigger where they gain a ton of basically every stat in the game. They gain speed to attack more often, typically several turns in a row. They gain attack and defense to be tankier and hit harder. They gain healing buffs to get their HP back up. It’s a good idea to make boss fights more dynamic. The issue comes in with the fact that the rage mechanics are universally able to send the player’s party from 100% to dead without the player even getting a turn to mitigate the situation.

It’s incredibly frustrating to be 5+ minutes into the fight, feeling like you’re in control, then having a rage turn kick in and send the party to its death. If it was generally avoidable that would be one thing, but a lot of them simply happen because of health drop. What ended up being my go-to was to just save all of my big attacks up until I had nearly stunned the boss, then dump them all at once. In a typical boss fight, I could get the boss to around 50% health, let it have a turn, then just absolutely nuke it with every attack I had – full 200 combat point attacks, party combo attack, etc – and get it to 0. That would generally avoid the rage mechanic, whether it was health based or due to killing off one of the enemy’s party members. However it was slow to grind out to the point where I felt comfortable doing that attack dump and when it didn’t work and I would be sent from 100 to 0 with no ability to do anything to prevent it, it was infuriating.

The nice thing is that unlike the original release, I could immediately retry the fight with lowered enemy strength. Boy did I take advantage of that option to just get through fights without the time spent on it again.

So I suppose at the end of the day this is a really good and generally fun JRPG that feels tuned to inherently screw over the player specifically during boss fights. I don’t remember that of the original, but I suspect that’s just a consequence of time since I played it. It’s so close to being a great game if a little more care was put into the tuning of boss fights. They can be difficult normally and still allow the player to actively avoid being nuked. It’s a thing I hope they look at before 2nd chapter comes out because it felt like the one thing heavily holding this game back.

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Game Ramblings #204 – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

More Info from Sandfall Interactive

  • Genre: Turn-Based RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Xbox Series, Windows

All this game really needs to be an all timer for me is more granular gameplay settings.

….ok lemme back up a bit, but this is truly going to be full on rambling today.

This game is simply exhausting. That isn’t necessarily as negative as it sounds. Really what it comes down to is a need to be focused at all times, and that ultimately leads into both the things that really burned me out on the combat in this game, as well as where I think they are a couple tweaks away from being simply a very good game into something that is truly timeless.

This game’s combat is really focused around actively avoiding damage. That’s something that’s been done before in JRPG-style combat, but it’s incredibly present here. Being hit in boss battles is often 20+% in one hit, and bosses often have entire attack chains, and later bosses in particular have multiple turns of entire attack chains, so you are always in a condition where screwing up your dodge/parry timing at the start of a chain is potentially immediately deadly. The problem for me is in how precise this all needs to be, and that’s totally a me problem.

Being extremely precise in this combat is a factor of a few things:

  • Learning the attack tells is part of it.
  • Leaning the specific timing is then part of it.
  • Quickly processing what type of defense you need to do is then part of it – is it a dodge, jump, or parry? You’ve got 4 buttons to choose from very quickly.
  • Consistently achieving that so you aren’t wasting your turns on healing is then part of it.

To some extent I just generally don’t think their combat tells are that well telegraphed. A lot of the animations do this thing where they run incredibly slow to start, then speed up without notice to do the attack. When you combine inherent input latency, frame latency to the screen, and inherent fatigue this can really quickly get to a point where I was just always a couple frames late on attacks. This is something that I think they got a better handle on later in development because later bosses particularly start making much better use of sound as part of the tells instead of pure animation, but it felt somewhat like too little too late. However, that really was not my core problem.

The issue that I consistently ran into was that whether or not I actually enjoyed combat or whether or not I wanted to spike my controller was generally based on how much sleep my 1 and 3 year olds let me get the night before. The very precise timing here both required very good focus, but also good memorization and reflexes. Those go away quickly with weird sleep patterns. That focus then causes me to mentally get exhausted quickly especially when I am already tired, leading to further degradation of my experience. Normally my instinct is to then reduce difficulty a bit, but this game simply has one setting – story mode difficulty. This does a few things, one of which is aggressively increase the dodge/parry timing window. The other is that it basically cuts damage by what felt like 90%. This is not what I want.

I see an opportunity here for the game to very quickly allow the player to tune combat to what their comfort level is:

  • They clearly have the tech to change incoming damage, so rather than being a core nuke on story mode why not allow the player to tune this a bit more? Frankly this isn’t something I wanted to change at all, but being able to tune this separate from timing would allow for more granular tweaks to my gameplay. This also then inherently opens up an opportunity for players that want a harder base level experience to take more damage without necessarily having to go to expert mode.
  • They also clearly have the tech to change the timing window on dodges and parries. I don’t want to tune the timing window all the way to where story mode landed. Really what I wanted was just a couple frames more to account for what felt to me like local latency that I was constantly fighting against.

Ultimately I suppose I think that timing-based gameplay that the user can’t tweak is bad design. It completely ignores the reality that there is a huge disparity in people’s setups that can add a lot of latency. TV screens are wildly different from each other. Adding amps can add latency. Even just the difference between the development environment on low latency PC screens can wildly throw off balance when moving over to a console. It’s pretty frustrating to not be able to modify this a little more specifically when this is not an entirely new thing. Hell, this is entirely why Guitar Hero has their timing configuration screen!

This is something that I really fight for in games I develop. I really hate on/off settings. If I’m putting tech in to modify settings then sure – have a set of easy values that players can just poke at for preconfigured settings. However, the tech is there to give more granularity so use it. It’s such an easy accessibility win that really lets players find the game that they want to play. My vision of where difficulty should land for me? Same damage as normal difficulty, 3 or 4 frames extra window for dodge/parry. Other players may want low damage but precise timing. Other players may just want to really ramp it beyond where even expert difficulty is. The tech is there, so use it.

The entire reason these ramblings came together like this for me was that as the game went on the fights clearly got longer and the rewards relative to time spent in combat clearly got worse. It turned into a grind where the game in its early stages was not. This even extended into boss fights where I was spending 3 or 4 turns effectively waiting while the bosses just got chains of attacks off that I had to be perfect on or wipe before I could have a chance at healing. It was just too much focus required for me outside of very short periods of time, which under normal circumstances is not a great way to even play a game where skill via repetition and remembering is important.

The reason why this is all so frustrating is because this is a game that is absolutely worth playing for the setting alone. This is such a good game from the story to the characters to the world. When the combat works for me it is simply world class in terms of JRPG-style combat. All of that makes it just incredibly frustrating when the difficulty choice for me is so easy I’m bored or maybe I got enough sleep today? The thing that gives me some hope is that they are clearly already tweaking difficulty. A recent patch made story mode even more forgiving on timing, so they are at least poking at it still. I just hope that they take it a step further and really allow players to refine their experience with tech that is already underlying the existing difficulties.