Metal Slimes and Wealth Hands

The two games that my brother and I have been writing about lately, Dragon Quest 8 and Persona 3 FES, share one thing in common: they both have really rare enemies that drop large rewards if you manage to kill them. In Dragon Quest 8, these creatures are the Metal Slimes (and variants) that drop very large amounts of experience points if you can defeat them. In Persona 3 they are the "gold Shadow" Wealth Hands (and variants) that drop rare items. Both are very rewarding if you can kill them, but the process can be very troublesome.

Both the Metal Slimes and the Wealth Hands share a number of characteristics. For one, they don't show up very often under normal circumstances. When they do show up, they can be really hard to kill. Metal Slimes are very hard to hurt and will run away at the drop of a hat. Wealth Hands tend to run away quickly before the battle even begins, and always get the first action (which they may use to run away). So, in the case that you find one of these rare creatures, one of the most common results is that they run away before you even get a glimpse of them, which is annoying to say the least. As such, these creatures can be hard to kill, but at least the rewards for doing so are in line with the difficulty.

Despite the similarities, though, I would say that I think Wealth Hands are the much better implementation of the concept, for a number of reasons. The most important of these reasons is that defeating Wealth hands is far less random than being able to defeat Metal Slimes. The greatest barrier to defeating a Wealth Hand is the way it runs away and vanishes before the start of the battle itself, and this is something that can be overcome if the player is cautious and uses a good approach strategy. What is more, finding them is easier because their gold coloration makes them stand out compared to other enemies, so you can reasonably process through a hundred enemies to find a Wealth Hand without fighting a single battle. To actively find a Metal Slime, on the other hand, you may need to tediously fight through a hundred battles. Finally, in the uncommon situation where an entire floor of Tartarus is full of Wealth Hands, the game turns into a Wealth Hand hunt, and defeating Wealth Hands can actually turn into a fun diversion from the normal routine of exploring Tartarus.

Another difference between the two kinds of rare monster is related to the rewards you receive for defeating them. The reward for killing Metal Slimes is a large amount of experience, which is certainly a significant reward in a game where levels can be hard to build up, but not a reward I would consider to be good. Having rare creatures drop very large amounts of experience makes the rate of gaining experience and levels far too random. Whether the player is behind the expected level curve, at the curve, or ahead of the curve can depend far too much on the random chance of a Metal Slime appearing and sticking around long enough to be defeated, which can be problematic. Even more importantly, experience points are not a very satisfying reward. They are important, but in my opinion they are simply too nebulous and vague to serve as a proper reward. Gaining levels is something that just happens across the game, so gaining more levels never feels very special. Wealth Hands, however, have a much better reward, since they are guaranteed to drop rare items. Whether it is a Medal item you need to complete a request, a Coin that you can sell for a lot of money, or a Nihil item you can use for Weapon Fusion, you usually get a great reward for defeating a Wealth Hand.

These kinds of monsters are a form of a rare opportunity for the player to get a rare reward. This is a good concept, but it is important for the people designing such a challenge to remember that they should not steal away a once in a blue moon opportunity before the player has enough time to seize the chance, and that the reward for such an effort should be worth the trouble.

Order of Actions in Turn-based RPGs

All RPGs have a strong element of strategy built into their combat systems. Victory or defeat is determined by whether or not the player can adapt his strategy to match changing battle conditions. However, in order to create a strategy, a player must be able to predict how his choices will affect a battle. In turn based RPGs, one of the most important things a player can know is in what order the various characters (both hero and monster) will act.

If a player knows the order of actions, it becomes possible to control the flow of battle very precisely. For example, lets assume a situation where one of the heroes in a battle is very low on hit points. The character will probably die if it takes another hit. The natural course of action would be to heal the wounded character before the monsters get a chance to attack that character again. Therefore, the most logical course of action would be to make the fastest character on the team (or at least a character faster than the monsters) use a healing item or skill on the wounded character. This is a very basic kind of strategy in this type of game.

The only reason I am talking about this is because I recently played a turn-based RPG where the action order was not very reliable: Dragon Quest VIII. While the order of action in Dragon Quest VIII was based on the Agility stat, there apparently was a strong random element that controlled the order in which characters and monsters acted. Jessica had by far the highest agility of any of the characters, and Yangus had the lowest. However, while Jessica did tend to move first, there were numerous times where Yangus would act first in a turn, and Jessica would act last. It was impossible to know for certain who would more in what order during a battle past rough estimations.

This had a decidedly negative impact on my ability to control my fighters. For example, if I tried to do a combo where Jessica cast Oomph (an attack power buff) on Yangus just before he executes a powerful attack, I had to cross my fingers and hope that Jessica actually cast the spell before Yangus moved. Healing mid-battle was similarly hair-raising; I often resorted to having two characters try to heal the same person at once, just to get some assurance the heal connected before the enemy's attack did.

In short, my control over combat in Dragon Quest VIII was not precise. I was limited to controlling actions on a turn by turn level. In comparison, there are RPGs where it is possible to influence events on a much more precise level. In Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete for the Playstation, action order was much more predictable. My fastest character always went first in the turn, usually before the monsters did. My slowest characters always moved after the enemies. So I could predict how a battle would turn out, and plan accordingly. I could have my fast character use a resurrection item on a dead teammate, and then be certain that my slower healer character could heal the newly revived hero back to full health on the same turn. In this case, my control over the characters is very precise. I could control events on an action by action level.

Now then, someone could argue that the added randomness to action order makes Dragon Quest VIII harder, and presumably more interesting. However, the added randomness is not the good kind of difficulty. The fun of RPG combat comes from the creation of strategies along the lines of what I described earlier. Good RPG battles are first and foremost a test of wits. Adding wildly unpredictable elements into this battle of wits to make it harder is like making a driving game harder by making the steering randomly stop working every once in a while.

Furthermore, this unreliability can have significant effects on character balance. For example, agility is the only stat at which Jessica is the best character. Her physical stats are all inferior to the other three characters, and her magic power is second to Angelo. Yet, her one best stat is not much of an advantage in a system where luck has as much effect on turn order as stats. So, Jessica sometimes feels like the weakest of the four characters in the game. On the other hand, a character who is reliably fast is inherently useful. The one fast character from Lunar 2 I mentioned above was very useful because of her speed alone, despite not having many strong powers for most of the game.

Persona 3 FES: Managing Time

A major part of Persona 3's gameplay revolves around deciding how you will spend your time. As I mentioned before, the flow of time is central to the story and gameplay of Persona 3, and the decisions on how you spend the limited time you have are very important. There are many different things you can do on any given day, as well as some things you must do, but you can only do a few things in any one day. At any given time you may have to choose between building up different Social Links, raising your social attributes, hanging out with a friend to build up a friendship, praying for good fortune, studying, getting rest, or various other things. The importance of these choices can not be understated, and much like with Harvest Moon, the emphasis on the choice of how to spend your time really adds a lot to the game.

One thing I particularly like about Persona 3's implementation of the idea is that you never have to worry about wasting time by walking around and exploring a little. The time you are managing is "scene time", not real time; you have to worry about wasting an Afternoon, not five minutes. I think this is an improvement over the system used by another game with a similar concept, Way of the Samurai 2, where time was broken up into sections, but each section had a limit based on the passage of real-time. With no dependance on real time (you can spend five hours in the "Dark Hour"), you can feel free to spend time taking care of minor errands and exploring the town without impacting more significant choices. At the same time, you can skip through a particular chunk of time very quickly.

Another good feature about time management in Persona 3 is that you have to make different choices depending on time of day and day of the week. After-School hours on the Weekdays usually give you the chance to build up Social Links, build up attributes, or pray at the temple. Evening hours give you a choice between going to Tartarus (which gives up the Late Night hour as well) or going to the mall to build up attributes. During the Late Night hour you can sleep or study. On Sundays and Holidays you have a large number of special choices for the valuable Daytime hour. Beyond this, every character has their own schedule of what they do during the week, this all has to be balanced with the need to go to Tartarus and recover from the fatigue of battle, there story scenes and special events come up reasonably often, so it is very difficult to even have a reliable schedule, so you have to deal with each day as it comes. The game simply won't let you sit back and stop thinking about how to manage time.

Of course, while I really do like the system Persona 3 uses, there are a few places that I think it could use some improvement. I guess I might as well just list them...

1) I don't like the way days pass by so briefly during exam weeks. For some reason, you can't do anything on an exam week other than take exams. I don't really see the need for completely removing all chance to do anything on those days, when exams already limit your ability to build up Social Links and go to Tartarus a week beforehand. It makes months with exams and months without exams far too different.

2) I think there is too much stuff that can only be done on Sunday. There are too many contradictory things that can only be done on a Sunday, and most of them limit your ability to wander around and see what is happening on Sundays, even though that is the day out of the week where wandering around is the most interesting. It would be better if you had more freedom to explore. Maybe it would help if you could explore a bit before going to meet a friend on a Sunday "date"?

3) There was not enough done to make Saturdays seem special. The characters are supposed to have more free time on Saturdays (since they don't have afternoon classes), but there are no special things you can do only on Saturdays. Maybe it should have been possible to hang out with friends on Saturdays like you could on Sundays.

4) The Online Game you can play on Sundays seems to take up an excessive amount of the day. It is the only choice in which you must give up the ability to do anything in the Evening and the Late Night hour (including any chance to save) in addition to a Daytime hour.

5) This is a minor issue, but it feels like there should have been some choices open to you in the Early Morning hour to match some of the choices available at Late Night hour. Maybe something like a choice to sleep in late or interact with the other characters living in the dorm.

These few complaints aside, the time management system in Persona 3 is really good. There are a lot of things you need to do each month of the game and only a limited amount of time to do them in. There is always a constant pressure to keep doing things, so the game never really hits a boring lull moment. The choices are interesting, and the game itself never artificially gets in the way of making your choices. Figuring out how to spend the day is a lot of fun.

Conserving MP

Whenever I play an RPG, I typically conserve MP (or AP, SP, etc) to a ridiculous degree. For example, I always watched my MP like a hawk when I was playing Dragon Quest VIII. Since Angelo had a move that allowed him to restore his own MP, I always kept his MP full. I only felt comfortable using his expensive spells when his MP was near full. Furthermore, I typically ended a dungeon with more than half of Jessica's MP left over. Since she couldn't regenerate MP, I typically avoided using her magic if possible. I only started using her cheap 2-4 MP cost moves regularly once she had a MP max over 250. I conserved Yangus's MP the most, since he only had a fraction of what the other characters did. So, he typically ended a dungeon with three quarters of his MP remaining.

I think my approach to using spells and skills is actually an outgrowth of the way Dragon Quest VIII and other RPGs are designed. Typically, a dungeon is a long haul full of monsters that in of themselves are not a significant threat to a party at normal fighting condition. However, most RPGs have a boss encounter at the end of a dungeon (or multiple bosses throughout the dungeon) that do represent a significant risk. So, a reasonable strategy for a player would be to maximize his chances at defeating the boss by saving up as many resources as possible for the fight.

This strategy is reinforced by the common trend of making regular monster encounters simple to overcome without the use of magic spells or other significant resources. For example, I was able to defeat almost every regular enemy in Dragon Quest VIII using nothing but regular physical attacks and 0 MP special moves. I only resorted to using magic when fighting certain enemies with very large HP totals or unusually large groups of monsters. In most Final Fantasy games, I see similar patterns.

Perhaps the single best example of this phenomenon in play is the Playstation game Breath of Fire 3. The main character of the game, Ryu, possessed the strongest healing magic of any character on the team. He had the best all-character heals and revive spells. Yet, I never used these spells much at all over the entire length of the game. Why? Because Ryu could use his dragon transformation powers during boss fights instead. By using up all of his AP, Ryu could sustain his transformation for about five to six turns, while dishing out the most damage of any character. If I had used up Ryu's AP earlier in the dungeon by using his healing a lot, his time spent in dragon mode would be much shorter. Since AP restoration items were rare and expensive, restoring Ryu's AP before a boss fight was never really an option.

I think this pattern of gameplay can negatively impact a game's experience. Since the player is discouraged from using his flashier and more strategically complex special moves and spells, it reduces regular monster encounters (which typically make up the largest part of the game experience) into a very repetitive grind. It can also make the player feel like they have wasted their resources if they come out of a dungeon with characters who still have most of their MP.

However, there are several games that break out of this pattern. One of the best examples is the original Grandia. In Grandia, I used magic spells and special attack skills much more often than my basic attacks, even against regular enemies. This is because Grandia did two things differently than most RPGs. First off, a character in Grandia could only learn new spells and special moves by using their current magic spells a lot of times. This encouraged the player to actually use magic. Second, save points that automatically restored the party's HP and MP were consistently located just before every boss fight. This freed the player from having to worry about saving enough resources for the boss. So, instead of saving MP in Grandia, I ended up trying to waste it.

Another game that pulls this off is Persona 3, and for similar reasons to Grandia. Once again, Persona 3 allows the player to approach boss fights in peak fighting condition, no matter what. However, instead of encouraging the player to use spells through a "level up through use" system, it did so by making battles hard. Since individual monster encounters in Persona 3 have the very real risk of ending in game over, the player is encouraged to not hold back with limited resources like SP.

Since the condition where a player plays through a game is the result of the developers' game design decisions, and may have a negative impact on the player's experience, figuring out ways of breaking out of traditional patterns in the way games like Grandia and Persona 3 did is not a bad idea at all.

Persona 3 FES: 1 More and Knocked down

Two of the most distinct aspects of the Persona 3 battle system are the knocked-down condition and the "1 More" effect. Every time either an ally or an enemy hits a target's weakness or hits with a critical hit, the enemy will be knocked to the ground and the attacker can perform an additional action. Further, if an ally or enemy makes a melee attack and misses, there is a chance that character will stumble and fall to the ground. Finally, if all enemies are knocked down, the team can perform a free "All-Out Attack" on every enemy target.

The knockdown/"1 More" effect of hitting an enemy's weakness is incredibly influential to gameplay. With this system, so long as you have the attacks that let you attack the enemy's weakness, you can attack until every enemy is knocked down and an "All-Out Attack" becomes available, which is usually enough to defeat any normal enemy group. This means that, so long as you are prepared, you can defeat foes quickly and easily, making long trips into Tartarus a lot more manageable. Of course, the controllable characters also have weaknesses, so the enemy can easily take advantage of a player's mistake and turn even an ordinary battle into a desperate fight to survive. Because of this, the game strongly rewards good planning and fighting with intelligence, rather than brute force or simple level grinding, which is something I always like to see in games.

One particularly important part of this whole system is the fact that it is nearly impossible to be 100% sure you can take advantage of a foe's weakness. If every allied character had the ability to use every kind of elemental attack, then the entire system would fall apart. In such a situation, every time a character's turn came up they would be able to knock down every foe and launch an All-Out Attack, and the game would be far too easy. However, Persona 3 prevents this by restricting every character down other than the hero down to usually a single weapon type and a single magic element or something equivalent, and limiting how many times the hero can change Persona in one turn. These restriction mean that it is impossible that every character can attack the same vulnerability, and that it is difficult to knock down a mixed group of foes. These restriction mean that even such a powerful game mechanic is not problematic, and they also add to the importance of planning and strategy in the game.

Another major feature of this system is that it makes getting the first turn in battle incredibly important. If you can sneak up on a Shadow you can easily defeat it, but if you are ambushed the enemy may knock down some of your characters and inflict a lot of damage. Thus, the game encourages you to get good at preemptively striking the Shadows in Tartarus and avoiding their ambushes.

Something I particularly like about the system is that an All-Out Attack is not always the best choice. All-Out Attacks are certainly powerful and useful, but they do have drawbacks. Whenever you use an All-Out Attack you have to give up a "1 More" action and all enemies who have been knocked down are able to get back to their feet. You do a lot of damage, but you give up an option and the enemies can launch counter-attacks without interruption. Because of this trade-off, there are many situations where it is a better idea to cancel the All-Out Attack and leave the enemies knocked down, particularly in situations where the enemies have powerful attacks and the heroes are injured. While All-Out Attacks are a useful way to quickly defeat weak foes, they are not a guaranteed way to win every fight. Instead, they merely serving as an additional option in battle, adding to the already impressive tactical complexity of this game.

Needless to say, I really like the interesting variety and solid challenge presented by Persona 3's combat system. It has the kind of complexity and enjoyability of combat that I usually have to turn to Strategic RPGs or pure Strategy games in order to find, and I like seeing that in traditional RPGs (though I suppose it is inaccurate to call Persona 3 traditional).

A Villain's Presence

Good villains have lots of screen-time. This is a recurring trend that I have noticed in many video-games. The best villains are typically the ones who make it a habit of appearing before the player often. It is hard to like/hate distant or faceless villains. So, a good villain needs to make their presence known to the player. And in a videogame, the best way to give a villain screen-time is to let the player directly interact with the villain. In other words, giving the player a chance to confront and fight a villain multiple times across the length of a game is one of the best ways to make a villain interesting and memorable.

Dragon Quest VIII, which I just completed, does a good job of utilizing its main villain. From the outset of the game, it is made clear that hunting down the evil jester Dhoulmagus is the party's main goal. He first appears in a flash-back sequence, but quickly appears in front of the heroes himself, performing all of his evil deeds right before their eyes (and dropping hints to the player as to his real goal). About halfway through the game, the player finally gets the chance to fight Dhoulmagus directly. And yet, that is just the beginning. The heroes battle against the true villain of the game in three more major boss battles before the player even gets to the final dungeon. By the time of the second fight against the main villain, he had even started to recognize the heroes, and knew that he had to be cautious when fighting them. It created a wonderful sense that it was an ongoing battle directly between the main heroes and the villain.

Perhaps the all-time greatest console RPG villain is another evil clown: Kefka, from Final Fantasy VI. From the very first part of the game, where Kefka can be seen placing the Slave Crown on Terra's head, he has an almost constant presence in the game. He first appears to the heroes in person threatening King Edgar, lighting Figaro castle on fire, and sending a pair of Magi-Tech armor to kill the heroes, all the while filling the game with his insane personality. Whenever he appears, he does so by making his distinct evil laugh. He commits evil deeds across the entire length of the game, usually right before the heroes' eyes. He is rarely gone from the action for long, and appears in at least three boss fights in the first half of the game.

What made Kefka so interesting was not just his evil deeds and character design alone, it was the way he could be interacted with by the player. He doesn't just appear in cut-scenes to taunt the heroes, he is part of the game-play. When Kefka first appears in Figaro castle, he just stands around and can be talked to like any other NPC. During the chase scene before the poisoning of Doma Castle, he runs around the imperial camp, and the player has to actively chase him down and even fight him a couple of times. During a visit to the Imperial capital, the player can listen to him rant as he stews in a jail cell. These interactions make Kefka a vital part of the game experience, as opposed to just a character in the game's story.

For an action game villain, a great example is Virgil from Devil May Cry 3. Virgil appears as a major boss at the end of all three major sections of the game. Beyond that, he appears in half of the game's cut scenes. While his personality and design are obviously a big part of his success, his strong presence in the game is a big part of his success as a villain.

In contrast, the worst villains in videogames are usually the ones who don't even appear until the very end of a game. In Final Fantasy IV for example, the player doesn't even hear the name of the real villain, Zemus, until the second to last dungeon of the game. He only appears in front of the heroes two minutes before the final battle. Because of this, Zemus has never been a very popular villain. He never even had the chance to be seen as the game's real villain.

Persona 3 FES: Tartarus and the March of Time

Game Completion: Half-way through the first month.

I got my hands on Persona 3 quite a while ago, back when it was first released. I ended up playing about 70 hours of it, enough to get me a bit past half-way through it, but I ended up stopping there. I had just watched a fairly dramatic sequence of events and thought it was a decent enough time to take a small break from the game so I could play a few other games I had recently acquired. For various reasons (which happen to include pretty much every game I have played since I started writing for this blog), I have not played the game since. The recent release of Persona 3 FES seemed like a great opportunity to give the game another chance. So, I have spent a bit of the last two days playing FES, and I have been having a lot of fun with it.

Persona 3 is easily the greatest implementation of a "rogue-like/random dungeon RPG" that I have ever seen. I have played a number of variants on that particular genre, but I have ended up hating them all, with the sole exception of Persona 3. I think this is primarily because Persona 3 thoroughly departs from a lot of the common conventions of the genre, and thus manages to avoid the pitfalls and limitations of such games.

One of my biggest problems with randomized dungeon games is that they tend to have very loose objectives and goals. Usually, the basic premise is that you try to get to the end of the dungeon, with no other primary objectives or ways of marking your progress. This leads to me feeling aimless and unsatisfied. I never know if I am doing well, doing poorly, and I fell like I have very little incentive or encouragement to progress at all. I have never been able to stick with such a game for very long, and always get bored and move on. However, Persona 3 is different. One of the basic themes of the game is that "time marches on", and that property of the story and gameplay changes everything. More than just saying "you need to explore Tartarus", the game tells the player "you need to reach the next barricade in Tartarus before the next full moon". This results in both a sense of urgency and achievable intermediate goals for the player. What is more, if you reach the barricade two weeks before the full moon you know you are ahead and doing well, and if you reach the barricade only two days before the full moon you know you are cutting it close and probably not doing something right. These goals and timeframes give the player a reason to keep going further and further into the tower, and also give a player some signposts so he knows if he is doing well, which is essential for encouraging the player's sense of accomplishment.

The passage of time in the game has another major benefit: it provides a structure for the plot. Plot events happen completely independent of your progress in Tartarus. Your ability to survive those events is not quite so independent, but the events themselves will occur whether you are ready or not. The plot is constantly moving forward and things are always changing, so things outside of the random dungeon never feel static or boring. Both the inside of Tartarus and the ordinary town where the heroes live are never the same two days in a row, so there is almost always something new to do. The fact that base towns in random dungeon RPGs tend to be static and boring has always been one of my least favorite elements of the genre, but in Persona 3 the town is probably more lively and interesting than the dungeon.

Persona 3 is an unusual game that happens to be both long and very, very good, so I will probably be writing about it for quite a few weeks to come.