The Video Game Revue

RPG Difficulty & Challenge

One thing that I neglected to mention in my previous post about Valkyrie Profile 2 is that it is pretty tough by console RPG standards. You can't just half-heartedly bash your way through the game; you really do need to pay attention to how you develop your characters and spend some time levelling and upgrading in order to advance through certain areas. To me, this is a really good thing. Valkyrie Profile is pretty enough and has enough story to it that I'd probably finish it even if it was way too easy, but the fact that it isn't a foregone conclusion really makes me desire to finish it.

RPG challenge factor lies on a scale where on one end you have RPGs such as Suikoden or Kingdom Hearts (more of an Action-RPG there) where you rarely have to make any sort of difficult decisions (either in combat or in character development) to pass the game, and on the other end you have RPGs such as Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne and Disgaea: Hour of Dakrness (more of a Tactical-RPG there) which require lots of grinding in order to make serious progress through the game. For my examples of games that lie on either end of the spectrum, I picked great games to illustrate a point: a game that's far on one end of the spectrum can still be great. But I do believe that there is a middle ground that should be aspired to.

World of WarCraft rides the difficulty curve better than any other RPG I've ever even heard of, and I think that that is a large part of the reason for its success. One thing to notice about WoW is that it offers interesting challenges at every level of play. And when I say "interesting" challenges, I mean both that the player needs to make smart decisions in order to advance, and that the player needs to work at least a little in order to advance. It is key that WoW offers up challenges that require thought and attention; true "grinding" occurs when a player has to perform repetitive actions that are time consuming but not truly challenging (except perhaps in-so-much as that they try one's patience.) Of course, WoW does dip into the territory of grinding sometimes, which helps for it to appeal to those players who get off on it, and I think that most people do from time to time. But what really makes WoW a hardcore page-turner of a game is that at virtually every point while you are playing it, there is a satisfying challenge that you want to tackle next, and that is true whether you are only looking for a light challenge or whether you really want to push yourself.

To consider another great RPG, look at Final Fantasy X. One of my chief complaints about this game is that, although the characters and story are epic and amazing, and although the exploration is very satisfying and the gameplay is excellent, FF X didn't really challenge me until the end of the game. Sure, I had to make some interesting decisions with regards to character development, and yes, I did get stumped on some of the dungeon puzzles that I had to solve, but in terms of the random encounters, I remember it being a fairly straight-forward affair. "Oh, a flier--I'd better call in Wakka to kill it in one hit. Now I'll get Auron to slash that gnome guy and Lulu to cast Fire 2 on that spider." And that the same strategy worked for the next battle, and the next one, and so forth at least until the next area. I didn't even have to try hard to figure these strategies out--usually whatever first occured to me was a good enough strategy to get by, and if I managed to improve my tactics somewhat it was a mild convenience. Over the long run, for things to be that easy is not a satisfying RPG combat experience. (Disclaimer: I'm hoping to replay FF X at some point and find out whether it really is or isn't the way that I remember it.)

On the other hand, I tend to burn out easily on Digital Devil Saga and Disgaea because, although the combat system in those respective games is challenging and interesting, a lot of the time there's no way to pass through an area without stopping and grinding first. Grinding and levelling up represents a different "flow state" from exploring and progressing through a console RPG. When I'm making good progress through an area in DDS or Disgaea and suddenly find that the enemies are too dangerous and that I need to stop and do some levelling, that's a major interruption--one that is likely to make me think "well, this is a good place to leave off until next time" and then end up procrastinating in terms of starting up the game again. At least with FF X when you were on a roll you could rely on not having to stop until you were actually tired.

The brilliance of World of WarCraft is that you aren't forced to switch between grinding mobs, questing, battlegrounds, instance dungeons, skilling, or whatever you're doing. You focus on one activity for as long as it sustains your interest, and then you can switch to something different. That's why I can play WoW for days on end, yet with Disgaea (which I love) I can typically only handle a couple of hours at a time. Disgaea also offers a lot of different approaches to the game (the Dark Assembly and Item World, in addition to the game's main storyline), although not as many as WoW, but the simple fact is that your progress in any one area is severely limited if you neglect the other two. Unlike in WoW, with Disgaea you might feel like working on one area (eg. progressing through the story) but need to spend time doing something less fun first (eg. slogging it out in the Item World.)

I was also talking about something else (both in this rant and before in others), and that was having the gameplay decisions that you make be interesting and important. How you develop your characters in terms of choosing skills, equipment, classes, and the like should not be so complicated that it's easy to screw up, but it should have enough of an impact on the game that your skill in making these decisions will make an obvious difference in how well you perform during combat. WoW is, of course, brilliant for this: it's a simple matter to build a moderately strong character at any level, but you can obsess for a long time over squeezing more and more power out of your character with items, talents, and ability strategies. I've mentioned before that there's a big difference between a good WoW player and a bad one, even if they have the same character. To me, this is an important hallmark for a great RPG to have.

I acknowledge that RPG difficulty is incredibly difficult to get "just right," particularly since there are so many different breeds of RPG fan out there. One of the reasons that you have great games on either end of the difficulty spectrum is because some players really enjoy mindlessly slashing through an overly simple Action-RPG (or Suikoden) and appreciating the exploration and story elements, while other players really enjoy absurdly challenging RPG dungeons or stubborn skill trees that require dozens of hours of grinding to advance through. Both of these styles of play have merit, and even with all of the ground inbetween, one's personal perference will always play a huge part in determining where the "sweet spot" of the perfect level of RPG challenge lies.

As for Valkyrie Profile 2, from where I stand right now it's been really good, but if it gets much more difficult than this it will likely stray into the territory of too difficult for my taste. Still, that's a less serious fault than not being difficult enough for my taste, although there's a risk that I'll get to the final dungeon and not have the energy to tackle it (this is currently Digital Devil Saga's fate.)

posted by Parappa @ 1:52 PM