Soul Nomad: Combat and Gameplay

I have been playing Soul Nomad obsessively for at least four days now. It has been plenty of time for me to get a pretty good idea of the game system. While Soul Nomad can be a very fun game to play, it also has quite a few glaring faults in its gameplay. These faults can lead to a frustrating experience at times.

The combat system is actually very simple. When a battle starts, the main character's unit is by itself. The first thing the player has to do is summon the other allied units into the battlefield. Summoning units cost the player a certain amount of money, which figures into the game's system of unit upkeep, though it never has been a problem since I have always had enough money to summon all of my units. However, the summoning system does have some difficulties associated with it. The first problem is that summoning units require space. For example, a 2x3 unit requires a 2x3 spot of unobstructed space on the battle grid to summon the unit. Early in the game this is no problem, but later in the game, when the player has seven or so 3x3 units, finding the space to summon every unit becomes a real problem, albeit not an insurmountable one. However, the real problem with the whole summoning system comes as a consequence of other aspects of the combat system.

Combat itself, like in the Ogre Battle series, is very simple. When you attack the enemy, the soldiers in your unit automatically attack the enemy unit using attacks determined by the row they are standing in. Melee attacks are usually executed from the front row, while the best ranged attacks are launched from the middle or back rows. Attacks can hit anything from only a single target on the enemies front row to the entire enemy unit.  After your attack concludes, the enemy will counter attack once, if possible. However, there are quite a few complicating factors of this system:

1) Targeting is completely random (or at least determined by unreliable hidden factors). 

There is no way to control which enemies each individual character attacks. Even if you want your Archers to shoot the row of enemy Pyromages, they might shoot the row of enemy Knights instead, and there is no way of predicting that outcome. This is much more frustrating in the case of allied support characters, who buff or heal at random. A certain degree of dependability is necessary in games where you have no direct control of the characters.

2) Targeting is done in one big wave.

Even if your first soldier's attack kills an enemy soldier, the rest of your unit can still waste their attacks on that dead enemy. This is particularly troublesome for melee units, which can only target the frontmost row of the enemy, making them generally weaker than ranged units. When this fact is combined with the fact that targeting is random, it means that the effectiveness of attacks can vary heavily.

3) Attacks are often very lethal.

It is often possible to wipe out an entire row of enemies, or lose an entire row of allies, in a single exchange. While melee units are pretty durable with support, mages, archers, and support characters are as fragile as glass, and die quickly to even regular attacks.

4) Once a unit's leader is dead, the entire unit disappears once both sides have attacked.

In a unit lead by a fragile character such as a mage, this means that an entire unit can be lost to a single attack by a ranged attacker.

5) Once a unit has lost even a few key units, its combat effectiveness drops quickly.

Many units are built on synergy. A mage unit with 4 mages in it has more destructive power and access to more tactics and special skills than a mage unit with just the leader. And a melee unit is in trouble if it loses its healer.

On top of all of this, there are also special attack skills that can be used by an attacking unit that has lost 20% of its stamina (the main unit resource besides individual soldier's hit points, which is drained after every action). While these skills vary in their effect (some hit only the enemy leader, while others can hit various rows or columns of enemies, or even the entire enemy unit), any skill will generally kill whatever it hits, particularly if the enemy has taken damage. Since it is really easy to target the enemy leader with one of these skills, since each unit probably has several choices by fairly late in the game, a single use of these skills will destroy an enemy unit. There has not been one battle in the game where I have had to deplete close to a third of uses of these skills in order to win, either. On the other hand, every enemy in the game also can use these skills, so if you let an enemy live too long, it will generally wipe out one of your own units.

Because of all of this lethality built into the system, actions are a very valuable resource in the game. Being able to get the drop on a potentially deadly enemy, such as a large mage group, is essential. This means that ACT is the single most important stat in the game. ACT determines both how often a unit's turn comes up, as well as how far it can move. Units with high ACT will be able to act much more quickly than other units, and move further with each individual movement. In other words, high ACT units will be able to rush in first, wipe out the first enemies, and move on before lower ACT units even have a chance of getting into position to help.

This is where the summoning system can become a problem. When a unit is summoned, there is typically a delay before they can take their first turn. This means that the enemy has the chance to move first. This leads to two different possible starting situations in a stage. In the first, the army has to run a certain large distance to reach the enemy. In this case, your units will have plenty of chances to buff themselves up and wear down their stamina to the point where they can use special attacks, and thus will wipe the floor with the enemy when they arrive. However, the slower moving units will probably be dropped and miss most of the fight. In the other situation, the player starts right next to the enemy. In this case, the enemy will get to move first, and might do some serious damage to the player's units before the player can act.

While every unit possesses special skills called Tactics (usally self-buffs), they don't see much use. The only really valuable buffs are ACT boosting ones, which I often use on the first turn so I can close in on the enemy. However, as soon as my units close in to combat range, tactics become useless, thanks to the value of each individual action. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to have made them more similar to swift actions in D&D: actions that don't waste a regular action, but can only be done once a round. The only exceptions to this trend are the mage tactics, which include spells that can hit every soldier in three adjacent unit for enough damage to kill every soldier but the leaders. Those spells are so over-powered that they can make mages really annoying opponents.

One last note; there are two kinds of battle you can fight in the game. These are story battles and Inspections. Story battles are the finite in number battles that progress the game's plot, while Inspections are the randomly generated fights you can try at any time. Unfortunately, Inspections tend to be filled with a large number of enemies that all share a predictable power level, and one leader who is usually way higher in level than the party. For example, my level 24-31 party dove into an Inspection with a listed level of 19+. The boss was over level 70. Even characters that were effective against the boss couldn't land a single hit. Thus, Inspections have so far been very frustrating and difficult. Thankfully story battles have provided plenty of rewards to keep me going through the game.

Old Favorites: Way of the Samurai 2

I wrote about Way of the Samurai in my last post, but there are still quite a few things I want to mention about the game and what it tries to achieve, so I decided will write about about its sequel, Way of the Samurai 2.

In many ways, Way of the Samurai 2 plays very differently than its predecessor. Instead of the small, nearly-abandoned train station setting of the last game, this game is set in a thriving, densely populated town. This game spans a longer period of time (more than a week, as opposed to just a few days) which now pass based on actual game time, rather than based on plot events, and the player now needs to rest and maintain a stamina meter. Also, the developers made quite a few changes to the combat system which help speed up combat and make it easier to fight large numbers of opponents (though this introduces an overly simplistic dominant strategy to the game), as well as a few improvements to the sword collection/improvement system.

Despite those other changes, the biggest change comes from the very different way the story is structured in the two games. In the first game, every phase of day has pre-determined plot events open to the player, and all of the important factors that decide what happens in the game come from your choices and actions in these events. However, Way of the Samurai 2 uses a more abstract system of calculating a numerical value for how much each of the different factions likes or hates the hero. With a few exceptions, your actions in story scenes affect that value, rather than affect the story directly. One of the most important ways of affecting that value is to take optional jobs for the different factions and earn their trust through work, completely independent of plot sequences. The final significant change is that none of the plot scenes in Way of the Samurai 2 allow you to control your character normally. Instead, they only present dialog options, so it it is no longer possible to move around freely, ask questions at your own discretion, draw your sword whenever you like, or just walk by a scene and ignore it entirely.

Because of all of the changes, Way of the Samurai 2 does not have its predecessor's perfect fluidity between dialog, free movement, and combat, which was responsible for a lot of the unique charm of the original game. The difference makes the player feel more distant from the character, and less immersed in the game. Also, the importance of faction value, rather than previous decisions, reduces the amount of potential variability of the plot and the potential complexity of the story. In order to get the best or worst endings of the first game, you need to play off of both sides of the central conflict, but doing so is impossible in this game. In fact, some seemingly viable and interesting routes through Way of the Samurai 2, such as helping Sayo and the Magistrates at the same time, are not actually allowed by the game. The game mostly allows you a number of normal endings for each faction path, as well as one or two "bad" endings for each faction path.

A major problem in both games are the "bad" endings for each path. In the first game, after going through a lot of effort in order to unite the different factions to fight against the military, the villain gives you the option to spare his life and join forces with him. Refusing gets you the best ending, and accepting gets you the worst ending. There are no other variables between those two paths. Almost all of the "bad" endings to the sequel are the exact same, including an ending where you take a young girl you have been protecting and teaching for the entire game and hand her over to a the slimiest thug in the city without any qualms. Pretty much all of these endings involve a spectacular reversal of the hero's implied personality and involve complete betrayal of everything he has done up to that point in the game. These kinds of endings feel more like cheap ways to increase the number of endings to the game, rather than proper routes. Important decisions that affect the outcome of a game should not come at the very end, and they should not involve complete departures from the course the hero has taken up to that point.

Anyways, while I am talking about endings, I should say a few good things about Way of the Samurai 2 in which it improves upon the original game. In Way of the Samurai, every story path results in a full-scale battle against the Japanese army, and every final battle is against the general of that army. However, in Way of the Samurai 2, the final sequence can play out very differently depending on which route you take through the game, and there are a few different final opponents (mostly the faction leaders and their lead henchmen). None of the ending sequences are quite as dramatic as the final battles of the original game, but they are more varied and more appropriately reflect the different paths through the game, and the game is more interesting because of the variation,

Before I forget, I should mention that I don't like Way of the Samurai 2's emphasis on earning trust through work, and the large length of time that comprises the game. As a whole, the number of plot events the player will take part in across the length of the game is very similar in both games, but each playthrough of Way of the Samurai 2 is longer, so the gameplay between plot events in the sequel feels more like filler than rewarding gameplay, especially because there are so few jobs available to each faction, and some of them are fairly boring (finding the parcel) or annoying (getting the kid home, pick-pocketing, and extorting money from peddlers). The occasional random attack by a ninja or homicidal maniac helps keep it interesting, but hardly seems to make up for some of the monotony.

Another major complaint I have with the game is the general arbitrariness in the connection between what you say and how it affects events and your standings with certain characters. For example, the very first dialog option you have in the game, after Sayo gives you some food, is a choice between telling her to get lost, and two different ways of thanking her. If you thank her one way, she will wander off and you can go onwards on your own business. If you thank her another way, she will wander off, bump into some thugs, and you will begin a completely different scene. Your choice determines the following scene, but the connection is not logical. As a result, I can never remember which choice does what in that scene, no matter how many time I play through it. Also, your choices in some of these early scenes, seems to affect how Kasumi (another major character with her own faction value) views the hero, even though she is not present to see the scene. This problem gets especially bad in the jobs that involve long conversations (both of which I labeled above as annoying). The consequences of your choices often make almost no sense.

Finally, I will say that I like the system of rewarding the player with a title for completing a playthrough particularly well or under unusual restrictions. In particular, I like ones titles like Pacifist, which requires you to choose an ending carefully in order to earn the title (Pacifist in particular is a good one because it reinforces the central themes of the game. The only way to get through the game without harming any one is to let an innocent child die, meaning that you need to raise your sword and fight in order to protect people.).

Anyways, while I sound harsh in my discussion of the game, I still like it. I never played it to 100% completion of all endings, titles, and swords, but I rarely do that kind of thing in a game, and I still get tempted to pick it back up and try to see some ending or sequence that I haven't seen yet.

Soul Nomad and Skipping Cut-Scenes

There is one thing that has really been bugging me about Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: the way it gives you the option of skipping cut-scenes. Of course, the option to skip long cut-scenes is a valuable tool in a game where you may need to retry certain battles with lots of cut scenes preceding them. However, it is the way that the function is handled in Soul Nomad that is annoying me.

In Soul Nomad, whenever you select to go to a plot related place from the overworld screen, a dialog box appears that asks if you want to skip the next cut-scene, and presents you with "Yes" and "No" options. If you select "No", the typical menu cancel sound is played and you watch the cut-scene. If you select "Yes", you skip right to next point of controllable action. This dialog box also appears after every battle where there is a cut-scene (though oddly enough, not if you select a cut-scene from a town menu). I find this process very frustrating, mostly because it is really easy to accidentally skip a cut scene and not even realize it.

The problem is that every time I have ever seen a confirmation dialog box in a video-game, I have simply selected "Yes" without even thinking about it. Most of the time I see such a dialog box is in Final Fantasy games and other such RPGs when I am trying to save. In order to speed up the process, I got used to selecting "Yes" without even thinking. Since I see the "Skip cut-scene?" dialog box so often in Soul Nomad, I end up answering it without thinking a lot of the time too. So, there are a few times when I accidentally skipped a cut-scene. A few minutes ago, I just ran into the worst case of this yet, where I think I might have accidentally skipped a cut scene that took place right after a pretty long battle. The only way to know for certain is to fight the entire battle over again. Joy...

I vastly prefer the much more common method of having to skip cut-scenes by pausing the cut-scene, then selecting a "Skip Cut-scene" option from a pause menu. That way, a person can only skip a cut-scene deliberately, and is at least informed of the cut-scene's existence before skipping it. Unfortunately, it is somewhat more common for game developers to make it so that you can skip cut-scenes by simply pressing Start, without giving a pause option during cut-scenes. This actually led to a problem for my brother a few months back, where he wanted to pause a game during a cut-scene and had no idea whether pressing Start would pause the game or skip the scene.

There just needs to be some more consistent standards for this kind of basic thing... Oh well, I will probably post some more detailed thoughts on Soul Nomad later this week.

Old Favorites: Way of the Samurai

I don't think Spike/Acquire's unusual action game Way of the Samurai has ever been widely known or very popular, but I think it is a game which does a lot of interesting things with its story and game flow. Most notably, it is a game which embraces both interactivity in the plot and a very movie-like style, and combines both with a lot of replay value.

In terms of the main combat system of the game and other elements of being an action game, it is not outstanding in any respect. The combat system has its variations and a few good mechanics that keep the game interesting, but a few annoying ones (like the difficulty in acquiring special moves and ease with which you can break swords). As an action game, the game is mediocre to average, at best. However, the action elements are just part of the real nature of this game.

As a whole, this game is about choosing your path through a story. In each scene of the game, there are countless things you can do, and each choice has a distinct impact on the plot. Most importantly, these decisions are not merely prompts asking you for a limited number of written options, since simply ignoring an plot event is often possible, and you can often choose from many events simply by choosing where to go at any particular point in time. Also, at almost any time in the game, including the middle of many story sequences, you can just draw your sword and start attacking people, and the plot will respond accordingly. This last element gives the game an unrivaled fluidity between story and action, so the player almost never gets pulled out of the sense that he is in control of the character's actions and identity.

You can see a great example of the variety of choices open to the player in the very first scene. Here, right when you start the game, you see a gang of thugs in the process of kidnapping a young woman. The first option is to simply walk by them without saying anything, and pick one of the two different roads to take to different areas (and different scenes). The next option is to speak to the thugs, and choose from one of the dialog choices, which results either in a fight or the thugs tying the hero to some railroad tracks. Another option is just draw your sword and provoke a fight with the thugs. Finally, you can just wait around a bit until another character shows up and starts a fight (and I only know if this one from FAQs). Based on what happens here, you can get introduced to characters on completely different sides of the central conflict and see the story from very different perspectives. I consider this one scene to be one of the best moments in all of the videogames I have ever played, and it is just one of many similar scenes with different outcomes.

The plot of the game is built on the idea that there is a certain set series of events that will occur, and that the will of the player is the only variable that can alter these events. In fact, one of the characters comments on this, and asks the main character to leave the area in order to prevent him from interfering with what will happen. The player can observe and alter every major event in the plot (though not every event in one playthrough, of course), and these choices affect the rest of the plot and change the ending. This is not implemented perfectly (the final sequence, the battle against the military invasion of the area, is mostly the same in every plot path and can't be avoided), but it lets the player understand the situation and deliberately act to try to control known future events, which is greatly empowering.

The consequence of having a game with so many flexible choices is that the game is very short on each playthrough. It is rather easy to finish the game in one or two sittings. But at the same time, the game has a lot of replay value, and the game developers have introduced a few things to make multiple playthroughs more fun. The ability to collect the swords of your opponents, and then improve those swords and bring them into the next playthrough of the game, is a nice touch that lets you try new fighting styles and combat strategies, even when going through the same fights from a previous playthrough of the game.

Way of the Smaurai is not a perfect game, but it does many things to create a great sense that the player is the character he is controlling, and has the power to influence the game world just as a person in that world should be able to do. It provides an immersive game with a lot of freedom.

Random Outcomes

I finally got the chance to start seriously playing Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, a game I got for Christmas. It has an interesting mix of features from both the Ogre Battle series and more traditional Nippon Ichi tactical RPGs. I like it so far, but there is one part of the game that is already annoying me: acquiring new rooms for units. In this game, you construct battlefield units by placing characters inside "rooms", which possess in-built properties, such as how many characters can be part of the unit and in what formation. The formation is an important thing, since what row a character is placed in determines which attack they use. Different rooms can also grant special bonuses, such granting a power boost for moving further.

The frustrating element of these rooms comes from how you get them. The only way to change what rooms you have is to use the Change command, which swaps out every room that is not locked for a completely random new one. There is no way to control what properties or formation the new room will possess. This means that if the player wants a room suitable for a melee unit, they need to continuously swap out rooms until one appears that has plenty of front-row spaces and has an effect that is half-way decent for a melee team. It can take dozens of Changes to finally get what you want.

This kind of mechanic is not that uncommon in videogames, and RPGs in particular. For example, it happens quite a bit in Persona 3 when fusing Personas. While you always get the same Persona whenever you fuse two old Personas, the spells and powers that the new Persona inherits from the old ones is randomly determined. So whenever my brother fuses Personas, he always has to continuously cancel fusions and try again until the resulting Persona has the right moves that he wanted it to inherit. I have seen him cancel fusions thirty or forty times in a row until the Persona finally got the right moves. The same kind of thing can happen in older RPGs that emulated some kind of dice-rolling mechanic for coming up with stats.

These kinds of mechanics are just annoying and frustrating. The randomness of these outcomes forces players to constantly try them over and over until they get what they want. It can also force players to be frustrated when they pass up an option, hoping to get a better result, only to regret it later since that option was the best outcome they came across. I know that has happened to me. Since these kind of situations rarely spell out what all of the possible outcomes are, it can be difficult to judge whether an individual outcome is good or not.

If I was a designer for Soul Nomad, I would have argued against swapping out rooms randomly. Instead, I would have elaborated more on the "home" system of the game, where a character can purchase certain rooms. I would have allowed the player to buy rooms for every unit (not just one unit), and have expanded it to include the ability to unlock or purchase new formations. This means that the players would have a greater flexibility in designing the units they want. Intentionally limiting this flexibility with random elements doesn't really improve the experience on the player. This change would eliminate the possibility of "bad vibes" hanging out in a new rooms, but that feature doesn't really do much in Soul Nomad anyways.

Ar Tonelico Part 1

Game Completion: Hard to say... 30-50% complete, I imagine.

As I said before, Ar Tonelico is a quirky RPG. It has a unique setting, unusual mechanics, and a very interesting battle system. I talked a lot about the Grathmelding system over the last week, so I think I will just focus on the game's battle system for today. It is fairly complex, though, so I think I will just try to dissect it piece by piece.

Reyvateils: The central focus of Ar Tonelico is its cast of girls known as Reyvateils, and the battle system is no different. Unlike pretty much every other RPG I have played, where characters are mostly differentiated by stats and abilities, Ar Tonelico makes Reyvateils completely different than other characters. They are controlled differently, are the only characters to have MP, they can't use normal attacks, they use different kinds of equipment, only one can be in the party at a time... Most importantly, they are the single most important member of the team, with every non-Reyvateil character being a glorified meat-shield in comparison. This is even taken into account in the plot, with every strong group of enemies or NPCs having a Reyvateil or two in the team. I think this kind of total separation to be a really interesting idea that could be really useful in a lot more games, and it used to great effect in this game.

Song Magic: Reyvateils are important in battle because they use Song Magic. The song magic system is very different from typical RPG special ability systems, since it is based on MP being a restriction of power and duration, rather than being a simple limitation of how often a spell can be used. The MP cost of a spell is constantly counted down in small iterations of time between character actions, so that a Reyvateils MP reserve, which can easily be thousands of MP, can be completely drained by a single spell with a cost in the range of 30-70 MP. What is more, it is not a simple system of spells taking a while to cast; it is a system where you can freely control the chanting time, and as such the duration (for support-type Blue Magic) or power level (for attack-type Red Magic) of songs. You can cast a quick and cheap attack spell to do a light hit, or take a lot of time to build up a powerful attack spell that will defeat every opponent at once. Also, whenever you are not chanting a spell, the Reyvateil's MP quickly regenerates, so MP is not something that has to be conserved (though MP restoration items do have uses, and there are limits to how often you can use many songs).

The system is very fluid and fun, and the different powerful spells open up a lot of different strategies for the game (work towards a single finishing blow, work to resist damage, activate healing so that you can freely use the attack skills of the frontline fighters, etc), and it is very easy to switch strategy in the middle of a battle. This is easily one of the most innovative and fun systems I have seen in a game in quite a while.

The Ambience Field: This is the point where the glorified meat-shields come back into the game. As a whole, non-Reyvateil characters have three important functions: protecting the Reyvateil (a minor system, but a good one), another one I will describe below, and empowering the Ambience Field through their regular attacks. Essentially, each time a character attacks an enemy with a weapon, that enemy's Ambience Field value will rise (to a max of three), and that number will fall at other times. The higher the Ambience Field, the stronger the attack of a Reyvateil's Red Magic will be. It is a system which rewards a dedicated attack strategy and good timing with very powerful Red Magic attacks. It reinforces the central importance of the Reyvateil in battle (and thus in the story). It is both minor enough to not be necessary in minor battles, and powerful enough to be invaluable in boss battles, and I like it a lot.

The Harmogauge: The other important thing that non-Reyvateil characters do in Ar Tonelico is boost the all-important Harmogauge. It is a meter which is filled from the left with a blue line (based on the actions of the normal characters) and from the right by a purple line (based on the actions of the Reyvateil). When the two lines connect, a Harmocrystal is filled and the gauge resets (though it can be emptied to the point that a Harmocrystal is lost). Filling Harmocrystals has enormous benefits: the chanting speed of Song Magic increases, the power of normal characters increases and they gain access to stronger Skill attacks, powerful counterattack moves become available, and enemies will drop more items at the end of battle. That last benefit is very important.

It is necessary to get a high Harmoguage level in almost every battle, simply because it is the only way to get enough items for grathmelding and for sale (since selling dropped items is one of the few ways of getting sufficient amounts of money). This turns every random battle into a struggle to build the Harmogauge as high as possible before the enemies die. While that might sound like a chore, I find it is a rather good way to make normal battles more interesting, so they don't become an exercise in just dispatching enemies without any thought or excitement. However, it has a drawback...

The problem with the Harmogauge system is that an element of it, the Limit Gauge which controls your maximum number of Harmocrystals, is a highly flawed system, because the only efficient way to build that gauge to its maximum is to fire two reasonably charged shots of Red Magic, and it takes far too long to fill the gauge with Blue Magic. As a result, trying to get the rarer item drops of weak enemies (who won't survive two shots of red magic) is incredibly difficult, and the game rewards the offensive playstyle of using Red Magic a lot more than Blue Magic, despite their parity in longer boss fights. The game would probably be a bit better if the Limit Gauge system was altered somewhat.

As a whole the battle system of this game is a lot of fun. The only real drawback is that this game is not terribly difficult, so it seems that it is never really necessary or even possible to use the system to its full extent. This is certainly a battle system that should be used as inspiration for game mechanics of the future.

Exponential Defense Growth

I was talking with my brother about the Legend of Zelda series quite a bit over the last couple of days, and I realized that we had very different experiences in the final battle of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. While took serious damage in the fight and had to heal up using my potions, he managed to beat the entire final boss using up less than a third of his life meter. The difference? My brother was equipped with the power that cuts enemy damage in half. It made me realize how incredible defensive abilities can become in a Legend of Zelda game.

For example, look at The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In that game, the main way of increasing the survivability of Link is to find Heart Containers and Heart Pieces, which increase the number of hearts Link has. However, that is not the only way. It is also possible to effectively increase Link's total amount of life by carrying Red or Blue Potions, which fully restore the life gauge. On top of that, there is a special blessing Link can receive near the end of the game that reduces all damage taken in half. Link starts with 3 hearts, but that can grow to twenty. With four potions, it becomes 100 hearts. With the special defense on top of that, Link effectively can take 200 hearts worth of damage before dying. In order to even challenge a fully stocked up Link, an enemy would need to dish out 8-10 hearts worth of damage with each hit.

The end result of this is a difficulty curve in the game that is skewed towards the beginning. The early stages in many Zelda games tend to be the most lethal. The final parts of the game tend to be the easiest, since it is hard for Link to actually die. This is backwards. The game should be easiest in the beginning, so that a new player can become accustomed to the gameplay and drawn into the story. The later parts should tend to be more difficult, so that the player feels challenged and engaged. As it is, many Zelda games can be frustratingly hard early on and anti-climactically easy once you get to the final battle.

This is sometimes justified by saying that it lets the player choose their own difficulty setting, but I don't think that actually works in practice. This setup forces the players who want an easier time through the game to undertake what could be the most difficult and time-consuming task in the game. It makes the dedicated completionists get stuck with an easy trip through the game. And it makes the early part of the game, before these radical power increases can be acquired, equally hard for everyone.

The problem would not be that bad if the increase in defensive power is more linear. It is easy for a game developer to take into account a gradual, steady increase in character life by gradually stepping up the strength and numbers of enemies. The really problematic element is the doubling of defense. A doubling of defense is the same as doubling the size of the player's life meter. It is something that has a drastic effect on the character's longevity. When game designers balance the difficulty of the game to assume that the player has not collected every item or power, a defense doubling item can throw that balance completely out of whack.

There are plenty of other game series with similar defense mechanics to the Zelda series. The Mega Man series has plenty of games where the player collects Life Upgrades, armor that cuts damage in half, and Life Tanks that fully restore health. The Metal Gear Solid series also has life increases, healing items, and optional equip-able body armor. So, this kind of problem can potentially happen in many other series than the Zelda series.

One way to keep this problem in check is to avoid straight multipliers. If the healing power of potions was a simple set small number of hearts (like how a ration in MGS heals only a set amount of health), then having a potion or not wouldn't have as much effect on game balance. Eliminating the huge effect of the defense doubling would also help limit the wild difficulty swings.