engaging in ff8 'properly' makes the game actively harder
it's a poorly designed system
Fighting random encounters makes the game harder!
The level 1 run is actually easier than playing normally iirc?
When I played FF8 I did the Level 1 run and at no point was I in any kind of danger on boss fights because my Junctions were insane. Even their super moves were like light breezes. Tonberrry especially with Everyone's Grudge.
And then there's Last Remnant, which was on the SaGa system of stat increases where you didn't gain levels, you had random stat ups. Except that there WAS actually an invisible experience system controlling how strong enemies got, and it scaled incorrectly to your stat gains, and on top of that, you could completely break the scaling (in a bad way, making the game super difficult, if not outright impossible) if you played the game the way it told you to play it and having the gall to do things like sidequests.
Later re-releases tweaked a bunch of things to address it and make it an easier game overall, but it was easy to get yourself into a situation where grinding only made things even worse. Combined with a couple nasty difficulty spikes, and it was ragequit city.
Starting up Bravely Second since it's been enough time and I'm in the mood for a long jrpg again. I've kept pretty spoiler free about it, how would people say it compares to the first time wise? About the same? Because the first took me like 100 hours and...I'd kind of like it to be shorter.
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
Starting up Bravely Second since it's been enough time and I'm in the mood for a long jrpg again. I've kept pretty spoiler free about it, how would people say it compares to the first time wise? About the same? Because the first took me like 100 hours and...I'd kind of like it to be shorter.
The thing about times is there's a lot to take into consideration that makes things vary like crazy especially in an RPG.
Are you looking to just do the main story? Some side quests? All side quests? What difficulty? Grinding out all the classes just because you can? Just focusing on what you need? Do you skip through dialogue(I swear this one people always forget about when they get through a long RPG way faster than other people and then say things like "I don't even understand how you had that many more hours" despite the fact they actively skipped through hours and hours of dialogue)?
Because it's probably like 40 some hours on the low end to over 100 at the high end.
EDIT: thought you meant BD2. Damn these terrible naming conventions.
And then there's Last Remnant, which was on the SaGa system of stat increases where you didn't gain levels, you had random stat ups. Except that there WAS actually an invisible experience system controlling how strong enemies got, and it scaled incorrectly to your stat gains, and on top of that, you could completely break the scaling (in a bad way, making the game super difficult, if not outright impossible) if you played the game the way it told you to play it and having the gall to do things like sidequests.
Later re-releases tweaked a bunch of things to address it and make it an easier game overall, but it was easy to get yourself into a situation where grinding only made things even worse. Combined with a couple nasty difficulty spikes, and it was ragequit city.
huh.
now i wonder if that's why i just hit a wall with that game and dropped it. i sure as hell had been doing all the sidequests when they came up.
I just call Bravely Default 2 as Bravely Default 3 to avoid the name confusion because it is very clearly the third one when Bravely Second was clearly intended to be the second.
I just call Bravely Default 2 as Bravely Default 3 to avoid the name confusion because it is very clearly the third one when Bravely Second was clearly intended to be the second.
But then what are you going to do when Bravely Second 2, the direct sequel to Bravely Default 2, comes out?
I just call Bravely Default 2 as Bravely Default 3 to avoid the name confusion because it is very clearly the third one when Bravely Second was clearly intended to be the second.
But then what are you going to do when Bravely Second 2, the direct sequel to Bravely Default 2, comes out?
Starting up Bravely Second since it's been enough time and I'm in the mood for a long jrpg again. I've kept pretty spoiler free about it, how would people say it compares to the first time wise? About the same? Because the first took me like 100 hours and...I'd kind of like it to be shorter.
The thing about times is there's a lot to take into consideration that makes things vary like crazy especially in an RPG.
Are you looking to just do the main story? Some side quests? All side quests? What difficulty? Grinding out all the classes just because you can? Just focusing on what you need? Do you skip through dialogue(I swear this one people always forget about when they get through a long RPG way faster than other people and then say things like "I don't even understand how you had that many more hours" despite the fact they actively skipped through hours and hours of dialogue)?
Because it's probably like 40 some hours on the low end to over 100 at the high end.
EDIT: thought you meant BD2. Damn these terrible naming conventions.
I'm looking to do all the story content, in BD1 I did the quests to unlock all the asterisks even though I barely used the last couple. I go through scenes as fast as I can read all the dialogue. I'm not going to max every asterisk. If there's other non-story endgame content I probably won't do that.
The thing about BD1 is that I felt like I had to do 100 hours just to see the story and be strong enough to beat the final boss. It didn't feel like there was as much variability as you're saying unless I was just very specifically rushing the whole game, and also knew the specific tricks to make fights easier.
Starting up Bravely Second since it's been enough time and I'm in the mood for a long jrpg again. I've kept pretty spoiler free about it, how would people say it compares to the first time wise? About the same? Because the first took me like 100 hours and...I'd kind of like it to be shorter.
The thing about times is there's a lot to take into consideration that makes things vary like crazy especially in an RPG.
Are you looking to just do the main story? Some side quests? All side quests? What difficulty? Grinding out all the classes just because you can? Just focusing on what you need? Do you skip through dialogue(I swear this one people always forget about when they get through a long RPG way faster than other people and then say things like "I don't even understand how you had that many more hours" despite the fact they actively skipped through hours and hours of dialogue)?
Because it's probably like 40 some hours on the low end to over 100 at the high end.
EDIT: thought you meant BD2. Damn these terrible naming conventions.
I'm looking to do all the story content, in BD1 I did the quests to unlock all the asterisks even though I barely used the last couple. I go through scenes as fast as I can read all the dialogue. I'm not going to max every asterisk. If there's other non-story endgame content I probably won't do that.
The thing about BD1 is that I felt like I had to do 100 hours just to see the story and be strong enough to beat the final boss. It didn't feel like there was as much variability as you're saying unless I was just very specifically rushing the whole game, and also knew the specific tricks to make fights easier.
I think I beat each BD in about 30-40. I think Bravely Second was similar to all the others.
It has some very outlandish classes
League of Legends: Sorakanmyworld
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
I just call Bravely Default 2 as Bravely Default 3 to avoid the name confusion because it is very clearly the third one when Bravely Second was clearly intended to be the second.
But then what are you going to do when Bravely Second 2, the direct sequel to Bravely Default 2, comes out?
Bravely Default 4
Octopath Traveler is actually Bravely Default 8, and Triangle Strategy is actually Bravely Default Tactics 3
The way I see it, Bravely Default II's name is like when Final Fantasy games advance to another number. Whereas Bravely Second is more of a "Final Fantasy X-2" situation.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
And then there's Last Remnant, which was on the SaGa system of stat increases where you didn't gain levels, you had random stat ups. Except that there WAS actually an invisible experience system controlling how strong enemies got, and it scaled incorrectly to your stat gains, and on top of that, you could completely break the scaling (in a bad way, making the game super difficult, if not outright impossible) if you played the game the way it told you to play it and having the gall to do things like sidequests.
Later re-releases tweaked a bunch of things to address it and make it an easier game overall, but it was easy to get yourself into a situation where grinding only made things even worse. Combined with a couple nasty difficulty spikes, and it was ragequit city.
Oh that explains why in the original I had a boss fight that was suddenly exponentially harder than anything I'd faced to that point.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Yeah so, FFVIII has enemies all scale to your level
But because the designers assumed that at higher levels, you'd have better weapons and junctions, enemies also scale higher than you
A low level enemy is relatively weak compared to a similarly level character, a high level enemy is many times stronger
So, the easiest way to play the game is to simply get No Encounter ASAP and never do any random encounters at all, instead you convert triple triad cards into whatever materials and spells you need.
A low level character with high level spells junctioned is wildly more powerful than any enemy in the game.
If you just want power without Triple Triad there's also the Seifer Solo strategy where on the very early mission where it's Seifer, Squall, and Zell you just kill off Squall and Zell so they don't get any EXP at all then power level Seifer. Because while the enemies themselves don't change, the spells you can Draw from them get better as their level rises. So you can start with an enemy having Fire spells you can pull off them and by the end of the grind session those are Meltdowns instead. Draw, Junction, and move on when your coffers are full of ill-gotten arcana. After the mission you then have a boatload of the highest level magic to Junction so you can beat up the optional boss needed for that Encounter None ability (bosses don't give EXP so it's safe to kill them), and then casually stroll through the entire game as living gods.
They can be depending on your propensity for grinding. Honestly I did my one and only run as a Level 1 run specifically because I only wanted to advance the storyline so I could access more Triple Triad players and all the random encounters/plot could fuck off.
Instead of immediately starting Trails of Cold Steel 2 after finishing the first one, I decided to start up Tales of Vesperia instead as a palette cleanser
Y'all, this game is SO GOOD
I had assumed I was just burned out by the Tales formula, because Xillia 2 did nothing for me and I dropped it after only a few hours. But it turns out if your main cast and writing is strong enough, I will definitely still mark out for a Tales game. Yuri, Estelle, Rita, and Karol have really entertaining dynamics with each other, and I love them all for totally different reasons.
Triple Triad in FF14 is super fucked because you can't change rules, the cards you get are loot box level random, and from Heavensward onward they give the NPC's the worst combos of rules so you never get to use your deck against them because WHOOPS RANDOM AGAIN LOL as it picks five random cards from the NPC's pool of single digit possibilities then picks five random cards from your collection of hundreds. Guess whose deck has the major advantage there.
Also some NPC's can only be fought at certain times of day, the tournament were able to be rigged through exploitation of the point mechanics that SE never cared about, and it was generally just way worse than the original format in FF8.
I dunno skipping random encounters sounds pretty nice
That’s the eternal issue, isn’t it?
In almost any RPG with random or even visible-and-chasing encounters, the ability to turn encounters off, kill them quickly, or escape without fail seems to be a holy grail; you want that power to skip all the battles.
But on the other hand, combat is a primary feature of games like that. Ideally, the fighting is something that’s enjoyable, and that you want to do. But so many of these games have a feature to avoid or trivialize random fights, because people want to be able to do that. Hell, sometimes even a bunch of boss fights are cheesed routinely; I know I’ve never actually fought the sea trench boss in Final Fantasy V.
So what’s the deal. Is the combat in these games actually not fun? Or, what are we rushing to if we want to dodge fights? Or is it just a question of quantity; fun fights become a problem when they’re too frequent
I dunno skipping random encounters sounds pretty nice
That’s the eternal issue, isn’t it?
In almost any RPG with random or even visible-and-chasing encounters, the ability to turn encounters off, kill them quickly, or escape without fail seems to be a holy grail; you want that power to skip all the battles.
But on the other hand, combat is a primary feature of games like that. Ideally, the fighting is something that’s enjoyable, and that you want to do. But so many of these games have a feature to avoid or trivialize random fights, because people want to be able to do that. Hell, sometimes even a bunch of boss fights are cheesed routinely; I know I’ve never actually fought the sea trench boss in Final Fantasy V.
So what’s the deal. Is the combat in these games actually not fun? Or, what are we rushing to if we want to dodge fights? Or is it just a question of quantity; fun fights become a problem when they’re too frequent
Combat can be fun until it isn't just through repetition is my take on it. Sure it can be rewarding to strategize an encounter, acting and reacting in time with the flow of battle to come out on top, but when you have to do that several hundred times it's gonna drag on or you start looking for ways to cheese encounters. In Bravely Default 3 for example I'm perfectly happy to stomp all the random encounters I want to fight with my free AoE attack that murders everything on the screen so each fight lasts less than five seconds barring loading/animations.
Some enemies inspire this too by way of being annoying. Maybe they inflict a status ailment that's hard to get off, can instant death a random person way too often for it to be fair chance, or otherwise drag fights out constantly.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
All these alternate methods of playing ff8, while maybe technically easier, sound goddamn miserable.
I won't recommend any weird strategy with Seifer
But the normal No Encounter run involves playing triple triad for awhile and then never doing any random encounters but otherwise generally playing normally
It is, by virtue of the lack of random encounters, a much more fun way to play the game
all that stuff is beyond my experience of TT so I can't say it impacted my experience of it
anyway, random encounters are an interesting thing for sure. with the sliders in bravely default I usually left them on normal, but sometimes you just don't want to deal with them and the control aspect was nice.
the situation reminds me of how people are always rushing through stuff in mmos with the goal of getting to the next thing to rush through it as fast as possible and needing to take a step back and saying "what is actually going on here?"
RPG encounter mechanics I like a lot:
Earthbound's "instantly kill shit you overpower"
Bravely Series' random encounter sliders
Zeboyd Games' random encounter counter
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I really can't say FF8 was ever difficult enough where I felt the need to go out of my way doing anything.
There were a few really hard fights but they were all optional.
I played FF8 on the PC, where you could A.) Just leave the Pocketstation thing running in the background and it would easily cap out on items, giving you a bunch of literally every rare material you could want, and B.) If you didn't remember to close the Pocketstation game before playing FF8, it wouldn't actually take the items out of it, so you could get INFINITE of literally every rare material.
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AJRSome guy who wrestlesNorwichRegistered Userregular
I'll always prefer games with on screen enemies that I can reliably avoid most of the time. I tend to go out of my way to kill enemies when I'm in a new location. But if I've had my fill, or I'm returning to an old area, I like just being able to run around them and focus at the task at hand.
Random encounter with a slider or an off switch is fine, but I generally prefer on screen enemies so I can judge whether I want to engage in combat on a case by case basis.
Guardian's Crusade has my favorite way of handling encounters. So first, it's one of the games where you encounter them in the field, and they'll take you to the battle screen if you touch them.
In the field, they're represented as these... I guess sperm ghosts? The sperm ghosts take on three appearances depending on their level relative to you. Equivalent levels, they chase after you, and you can try to avoid them if you want, but it's tricky. Significantly higher level sperm ghosts, it's the same behavior, but their appearance is scarier, to suggest that you shouldn't be in their area yet. Also, they might be faster? I haven't played it in a long time.
If a sperm ghost enemy is significantly lower level, they run away from you, like they're scared. That way, it's easy to avoid encounters when you revisit a lower level area, but you can chase them down and fight them if for some reason you really want to.
Don't think I've played any other JRPGs that have handled it quite the same way.
Guardian's Crusade has my favorite way of handling encounters. So first, it's one of the games where you encounter them in the field, and they'll take you to the battle screen if you touch them.
In the field, they're represented as these... I guess sperm ghosts? The sperm ghosts take on three appearances depending on their level relative to you. Equivalent levels, they chase after you, and you can try to avoid them if you want, but it's tricky. Significantly higher level sperm ghosts, it's the same behavior, but their appearance is scarier, to suggest that you shouldn't be in their area yet. Also, they might be faster? I haven't played it in a long time.
If a sperm ghost enemy is significantly lower level, they run away from you, like they're scared. That way, it's easy to avoid encounters when you revisit a lower level area, but you can chase them down and fight them if for some reason you really want to.
Don't think I've played any other JRPGs that have handled it quite the same way.
I'm pretty surprised you haven't seen that anywhere else. It's far more common than purely random encounters these days, especially paired with a map mechanic where if you swat them, you start the battle at an advantage. Valkyrie Profile used it (RIP). Persona has used it from 3 on. Atelier has used it from Iris 3 on. Tales has (mostly) used it from I believe Symphonia on. Etc. Shit, even the most recent Pokemon uses it. I mean, they're rarely generic color coded ghost blobs (except for Persona and the PS2 Ateliers), but it's more common than not.
I dunno skipping random encounters sounds pretty nice
That’s the eternal issue, isn’t it?
In almost any RPG with random or even visible-and-chasing encounters, the ability to turn encounters off, kill them quickly, or escape without fail seems to be a holy grail; you want that power to skip all the battles.
But on the other hand, combat is a primary feature of games like that. Ideally, the fighting is something that’s enjoyable, and that you want to do. But so many of these games have a feature to avoid or trivialize random fights, because people want to be able to do that. Hell, sometimes even a bunch of boss fights are cheesed routinely; I know I’ve never actually fought the sea trench boss in Final Fantasy V.
So what’s the deal. Is the combat in these games actually not fun? Or, what are we rushing to if we want to dodge fights? Or is it just a question of quantity; fun fights become a problem when they’re too frequent
These games are generally just too long. What was fun at hour 15 is a chore at hour 60.
Bravely Default's system of togglable encounter rate is a step in the right direction, but the way I played the game was to grind like hell in a safe place to a reasonable point, and then turn off the encounters for the whole dungeon. The boss fights in that game were really good, they tested your understanding of your classes and your ability to put together a strategy, and they kept you from relying on the same tactics the entire game.
But you still had to grind, and it really shows how unnecessary random encounters are to the game. I don't know what a turn-based JRPG looks like without random encounters, but if BD2 had a way to just set your level to "appropriate" for boss fights, I'd actually consider playing it. Complexity progression is already gated behind asterisks. Just give me the class with all abilities unlocked for everyone once I beat the boss. Stop making me fight 200 bees before I'm "ready" to see the next piece of interesting content.
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PaperLuigi44My amazement is at maximum capacity.Registered Userregular
What's funny to me about Persona 5 Strikers is that I'm someone whose enjoyment of musou games began and ended playing Dynasty Warriors with a mate one afternoon on the original Xbox, but since Strikers (past the first dungeon) allows you mop up a lot of encounters in seconds, I'm actually happy when large waves show up.
Basically I feel like I'm being indoctrinated back into the genre.
Has anyone played that new Mistwalker game on Apple Arcade? I wonder how well its "put enemies into a pocket dimension and AoE them all down later at your leisure" encounter system works in practice.
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Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
What is everyone’s feeling on the Trails games? I’ve heard some really effusive things lately but it’s a lot to get invested in
The first one looks like it has a neat battle system and I am charmed by its look
I dunno skipping random encounters sounds pretty nice
That’s the eternal issue, isn’t it?
In almost any RPG with random or even visible-and-chasing encounters, the ability to turn encounters off, kill them quickly, or escape without fail seems to be a holy grail; you want that power to skip all the battles.
But on the other hand, combat is a primary feature of games like that. Ideally, the fighting is something that’s enjoyable, and that you want to do. But so many of these games have a feature to avoid or trivialize random fights, because people want to be able to do that. Hell, sometimes even a bunch of boss fights are cheesed routinely; I know I’ve never actually fought the sea trench boss in Final Fantasy V.
So what’s the deal. Is the combat in these games actually not fun? Or, what are we rushing to if we want to dodge fights? Or is it just a question of quantity; fun fights become a problem when they’re too frequent
These games are generally just too long. What was fun at hour 15 is a chore at hour 60.
Both these things are reasons why I feel Mana Khemia is (mostly accidentally) such a beautifully constructed game on a mechanical level. Rather than having a big pool of HP.MP, you have smaller pool that regenerates while characters are in reserve. Three people up front, three people in back. You can swap people in and out on the fly (with cooldowns) to perform support attacks or defenses. As you advance through the game, the support abilities differentiate themselves very drastically and you're able to use them more often. Like one character's assist attack bumps them straight to the front of the attack queue. Another one applies a defense debuff. Another is an AoE. You want to constantly be using skills, but that means that you need to constantly rotate people in and out and where you are in your rotation affects how you approach fights. And not only do you unlock improved support abilities that differentiate characters more the further into the game you get, your skills and even basic attacks upgrade as you go, getting increasingly over the top aniations and having more/specialized effects.
It's just a shame that the game is easy enough that you don't really need to figure out all the ins and outs, but there's still a lot of fun to be had because every character is powerful in their own ways and no matter which you leave behind (there are 8 total, so gotta always dump 2 once they all join), you wish you had them too in order to deal with whatever the highly specialized enemy irritant is that they specifically counter. It was a lot like FFX in that regard, except that instead of enemies just being essentially immune to everybody but one person, there were mechanic counters.
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When I played FF8 I did the Level 1 run and at no point was I in any kind of danger on boss fights because my Junctions were insane. Even their super moves were like light breezes. Tonberrry especially with Everyone's Grudge.
Later re-releases tweaked a bunch of things to address it and make it an easier game overall, but it was easy to get yourself into a situation where grinding only made things even worse. Combined with a couple nasty difficulty spikes, and it was ragequit city.
The thing about times is there's a lot to take into consideration that makes things vary like crazy especially in an RPG.
Are you looking to just do the main story? Some side quests? All side quests? What difficulty? Grinding out all the classes just because you can? Just focusing on what you need? Do you skip through dialogue(I swear this one people always forget about when they get through a long RPG way faster than other people and then say things like "I don't even understand how you had that many more hours" despite the fact they actively skipped through hours and hours of dialogue)?
Because it's probably like 40 some hours on the low end to over 100 at the high end.
EDIT: thought you meant BD2. Damn these terrible naming conventions.
huh.
now i wonder if that's why i just hit a wall with that game and dropped it. i sure as hell had been doing all the sidequests when they came up.
But then what are you going to do when Bravely Second 2, the direct sequel to Bravely Default 2, comes out?
Bravely Default 4
I'm looking to do all the story content, in BD1 I did the quests to unlock all the asterisks even though I barely used the last couple. I go through scenes as fast as I can read all the dialogue. I'm not going to max every asterisk. If there's other non-story endgame content I probably won't do that.
The thing about BD1 is that I felt like I had to do 100 hours just to see the story and be strong enough to beat the final boss. It didn't feel like there was as much variability as you're saying unless I was just very specifically rushing the whole game, and also knew the specific tricks to make fights easier.
I think I beat each BD in about 30-40. I think Bravely Second was similar to all the others.
It has some very outlandish classes
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
some real cool story moments though
Octopath Traveler is actually Bravely Default 8, and Triangle Strategy is actually Bravely Default Tactics 3
Oh that explains why in the original I had a boss fight that was suddenly exponentially harder than anything I'd faced to that point.
But because the designers assumed that at higher levels, you'd have better weapons and junctions, enemies also scale higher than you
A low level enemy is relatively weak compared to a similarly level character, a high level enemy is many times stronger
So, the easiest way to play the game is to simply get No Encounter ASAP and never do any random encounters at all, instead you convert triple triad cards into whatever materials and spells you need.
A low level character with high level spells junctioned is wildly more powerful than any enemy in the game.
All these alternate methods of playing ff8, while maybe technically easier, sound goddamn miserable.
Y'all, this game is SO GOOD
I had assumed I was just burned out by the Tales formula, because Xillia 2 did nothing for me and I dropped it after only a few hours. But it turns out if your main cast and writing is strong enough, I will definitely still mark out for a Tales game. Yuri, Estelle, Rita, and Karol have really entertaining dynamics with each other, and I love them all for totally different reasons.
I've played TT in ff14 though and it's not something I'd want to do at all
Also some NPC's can only be fought at certain times of day, the tournament were able to be rigged through exploitation of the point mechanics that SE never cared about, and it was generally just way worse than the original format in FF8.
That’s the eternal issue, isn’t it?
In almost any RPG with random or even visible-and-chasing encounters, the ability to turn encounters off, kill them quickly, or escape without fail seems to be a holy grail; you want that power to skip all the battles.
But on the other hand, combat is a primary feature of games like that. Ideally, the fighting is something that’s enjoyable, and that you want to do. But so many of these games have a feature to avoid or trivialize random fights, because people want to be able to do that. Hell, sometimes even a bunch of boss fights are cheesed routinely; I know I’ve never actually fought the sea trench boss in Final Fantasy V.
So what’s the deal. Is the combat in these games actually not fun? Or, what are we rushing to if we want to dodge fights? Or is it just a question of quantity; fun fights become a problem when they’re too frequent
Combat can be fun until it isn't just through repetition is my take on it. Sure it can be rewarding to strategize an encounter, acting and reacting in time with the flow of battle to come out on top, but when you have to do that several hundred times it's gonna drag on or you start looking for ways to cheese encounters. In Bravely Default 3 for example I'm perfectly happy to stomp all the random encounters I want to fight with my free AoE attack that murders everything on the screen so each fight lasts less than five seconds barring loading/animations.
Some enemies inspire this too by way of being annoying. Maybe they inflict a status ailment that's hard to get off, can instant death a random person way too often for it to be fair chance, or otherwise drag fights out constantly.
I won't recommend any weird strategy with Seifer
But the normal No Encounter run involves playing triple triad for awhile and then never doing any random encounters but otherwise generally playing normally
It is, by virtue of the lack of random encounters, a much more fun way to play the game
anyway, random encounters are an interesting thing for sure. with the sliders in bravely default I usually left them on normal, but sometimes you just don't want to deal with them and the control aspect was nice.
the situation reminds me of how people are always rushing through stuff in mmos with the goal of getting to the next thing to rush through it as fast as possible and needing to take a step back and saying "what is actually going on here?"
Earthbound's "instantly kill shit you overpower"
Bravely Series' random encounter sliders
Zeboyd Games' random encounter counter
There were a few really hard fights but they were all optional.
Random encounter with a slider or an off switch is fine, but I generally prefer on screen enemies so I can judge whether I want to engage in combat on a case by case basis.
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In the field, they're represented as these... I guess sperm ghosts? The sperm ghosts take on three appearances depending on their level relative to you. Equivalent levels, they chase after you, and you can try to avoid them if you want, but it's tricky. Significantly higher level sperm ghosts, it's the same behavior, but their appearance is scarier, to suggest that you shouldn't be in their area yet. Also, they might be faster? I haven't played it in a long time.
If a sperm ghost enemy is significantly lower level, they run away from you, like they're scared. That way, it's easy to avoid encounters when you revisit a lower level area, but you can chase them down and fight them if for some reason you really want to.
Don't think I've played any other JRPGs that have handled it quite the same way.
Only one of those lets you run them over with a horse as much as you want though.
I'm pretty surprised you haven't seen that anywhere else. It's far more common than purely random encounters these days, especially paired with a map mechanic where if you swat them, you start the battle at an advantage. Valkyrie Profile used it (RIP). Persona has used it from 3 on. Atelier has used it from Iris 3 on. Tales has (mostly) used it from I believe Symphonia on. Etc. Shit, even the most recent Pokemon uses it. I mean, they're rarely generic color coded ghost blobs (except for Persona and the PS2 Ateliers), but it's more common than not.
These games are generally just too long. What was fun at hour 15 is a chore at hour 60.
But you still had to grind, and it really shows how unnecessary random encounters are to the game. I don't know what a turn-based JRPG looks like without random encounters, but if BD2 had a way to just set your level to "appropriate" for boss fights, I'd actually consider playing it. Complexity progression is already gated behind asterisks. Just give me the class with all abilities unlocked for everyone once I beat the boss. Stop making me fight 200 bees before I'm "ready" to see the next piece of interesting content.
Basically I feel like I'm being indoctrinated back into the genre.
The first one looks like it has a neat battle system and I am charmed by its look
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Both these things are reasons why I feel Mana Khemia is (mostly accidentally) such a beautifully constructed game on a mechanical level. Rather than having a big pool of HP.MP, you have smaller pool that regenerates while characters are in reserve. Three people up front, three people in back. You can swap people in and out on the fly (with cooldowns) to perform support attacks or defenses. As you advance through the game, the support abilities differentiate themselves very drastically and you're able to use them more often. Like one character's assist attack bumps them straight to the front of the attack queue. Another one applies a defense debuff. Another is an AoE. You want to constantly be using skills, but that means that you need to constantly rotate people in and out and where you are in your rotation affects how you approach fights. And not only do you unlock improved support abilities that differentiate characters more the further into the game you get, your skills and even basic attacks upgrade as you go, getting increasingly over the top aniations and having more/specialized effects.
It's just a shame that the game is easy enough that you don't really need to figure out all the ins and outs, but there's still a lot of fun to be had because every character is powerful in their own ways and no matter which you leave behind (there are 8 total, so gotta always dump 2 once they all join), you wish you had them too in order to deal with whatever the highly specialized enemy irritant is that they specifically counter. It was a lot like FFX in that regard, except that instead of enemies just being essentially immune to everybody but one person, there were mechanic counters.