Haste and slow, bb!
FFX was so annoying about this, was doing the dark aeons recently and all you can do in those fights is buff yourself and attack, felt pointless unlocking debuff skills at the end of some characters pathways only to never use them.
Looking at you Triple Foul.
I’m working my way through the entire Final Fantasy series now. Currently on 5, but never played X. Seems like I need a strategy guide
The end game of X is very long (think the longest in the series) and stuff like character stat maxxing and unlocking ultimate (celestial) weapons is hard without a guide.
Dont feel bad about looking up a guide either, some of the shit you are required to do is super convoluted and/or tedious. Plus you can easily miss one item in an area and permanently lock yourself out of content.
Getting the celestial weapons had a variety of easy, end-game, and almost nonsense quests.
The dark aeons are very special end bosses though. I remember just paying Yojimbo 10,000,000 cash and then he would just split them in half…
It felt like the Devs overcompensating for making the actual final boss the easiest one in the series.
Especially when you can get locked out of ultimate weapons if you don’t back track early enough. I replayed recently and was waiting to get the airship before back tracking for missed chests and jecht spheres, and by that point I kept running into Dark Aeon bullshit randomly.
I feel like Square-Enix in particular over-corrected on status effects after FF6 had the Vanish/Doom combo, Fenix Down items used on undead instantly killing them, etc.
If by over-corrected you mean made perfect, I agree
Pretty sure Phoenix Down insta killing undead continued afterwards, I recall that working in FF Tactics
Nice. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve played any FFs
There’s something of a tradition in Final Fantasy of having one undead boss that can be killed instantly with a phoenix down.
At least by X they’d toned it down to dealing the damage limit, so you’d have to use a whole 3 or 4 phoenix downs.
RPG has consumables (potions, scrolls, grenades…)
Don’t spend on normal enemies, because there will be bosses
Don’t spend on bosses, because there will be final boss
Final boss: dies in a minute without you spending any
Here we go again
I broke this habit once growing when I decided to finish Mario and Luigi Partners in Time after a break. I had just reached the final dungeon, but before diving in I realized I had more money than I knew what to do with.
I went to the store, got like 99 of all the cool looking items, entered the dungeon, and went to town. Every turn was a question of whether to use a power flower, hammer, or what have you. I mowed through all those end game enemies and the final boss didn’t know what hit em. It was glorious.
Don’t spend on bosses because I dont want to have wasted a consumable in case I die and have to retry the boss.
I wish crafting an item made it a refillable instead of a consumable. I feel like the cracked pots in Elden Ring were going in the right direction as “refillable containers” at least
By the time you get to the bosses, the shitty potions don’t heal enough anyway.
I appreciate the RPG’s that let you craft better potions from the shit ones, but I still never use them.
The funny thing about this in Elden Ring (since you mentioned it), I never learned to use consumables besides the flasks. I’ve seen speedrunners make great use of some of the greases for example, but every time I use something I end up dying anyway. Really hurts because some of the consumables have limited crafting materials (St. Trina lily for sleep pots iirc?).
I ended up beating the base game without them.
I call these things ‘speedrunner tools’ for exactly that reason. If you or I, as a normal player just playing the game, can beat the encounter without the tool but with some practice learning, then using it and wasting it feels bad, so we stop; and by the time we can beat the boss, we don’t need it. We’re also unlikely to revisit that boss.
A speedrunner who has spent hours on a boss and knows the move set and when to punish, though. They can apply fire paper and rip the boss apart in seconds and be at the next boss before the buff wears off.
One thing that is easing me into using items is watching speedruns, of all things. Hell, I used to be an ammo hoarder for side-scrolling games that had them (Jazz Jackrabbit, Mega Man), nowadays I prefer to blast the powerful stuff
I had to actively push myself out of thinking this way. When a game hands something like a consumable to the player, it should be expected that they could use it at any point in time. If that item is non-renewable and certain encounters are designed around needing that item, then you actually playing a puzzle game that lets you permanently destroy the puzzle pieces with no warning.
I think a lot of us have played some super difficult RPG where you get softlocked due to not having enough resources, or punished for using them.
For example, the last game I played, I had the choice of consuming a mushroom for healing. I chose not to and struggled through several boss fights. Later in the game, you can exchange that mushroom for a significant permanent stat upgrade. If I’d used the mushroom, I would have missed out on the upgrade.
Another example; I played a brutally hard tactics game, and I used all my potions and revives on a really hard fight. The next fight was even harder, and I was completely unable to finish the game without restarting. I didn’t keep multiple save files.
Games should stop punishing us for consuming consumables. The reason we hoard everything is because we’ve been trained to do so.
Fully agree!
Replaying Bg3 makes me realize how pointless poisons are most of the time.
Anyone beefy who I might like to debuff or DOT is inexplicably immune to poison, blindness or falling asleep. Not even just bosses, feels like anyone I can’t kill in two rounds with Lae’zel is immune to these poisons I lovingly made.
Some elixirs are cool though.
In my first walkthrough of BG3, I think I only ever used healing potions, and even they were situational as I tried to keep Shadowheart stocked on spell slots, and my main character was a wizard (and for a large portion of the game, Gale was in a party too)
Oh, and I straight up didn’t find Lae’zel, Karlach, or Wyll in Act 1, and I lost my chance to add Halsin and Minthara, so I was limited to casters + Astarion anyway. The game didn’t accentuate that I really, really need to look around, and that only struck me in Act 2, by the point I couldn’t return to Act 1. Still, I got Jaheira on my side, which basically turned every melee battle in an enclosed space into a meat grinder for enemies (wizard’s Grease followed by Spike Growth and then cleric’s Spirit Guardian, Astarion shooting from the rear to take down buffier and ranged enemies). Made it a challenge to get Minsc though, as hostile Boo is absolutely destroyed by this grinder too.
I actually can’t tell if the whole “this is urgent you need to hurry” in an open world game is a new trend or not but I see it everywhere too.
Earliest I can think of is Skyrim. Everything was a big emergency. Finish one quest and the character dialogue was like “Another dragon attack! You need to get to this next quest right away! Hurry!”. But it’s supposed to be game designed for screwing around. I can’t help but feel it’s influenced this trend.
Playing Oblivion re-mastered I’m realizing Oblivion wasn’t this way. The stakes were high but much more of the dialogue was like “Ready yourself, take the time you need, and we’ll talk next steps”. There’s important stuff to handle but exploring dungeons was treated as you getting prepared to handle the big bad.
Impending dragon attacks in Skyrim, missing son in Fallout 4, turning into a mindflayer in Bg3. These feel urgent, not conducive to exploration and meeting everyone and crafting potions and shopping for deals on weapons.
All that being said I had the same problem in Bg3. Didn’t long rest enough in the beginning because of it.
Interestingly, Skyrim was exactly the thing I thought of when thinking of this trope’s origin, so there could indeed be something to it.
Recently however, I’ve seen an interesting spin on it in The Blood of Dawnwalker. There, too, you are faced with a time-pressing issue as part of your main quest, but the difference is: it is actually time-pressing. You can fail one of the main objectives of the game by not being there in time. And while it is debatable whether it’s good for the exploration aspect of the game and whether it presses the player too much, at least it is consistent.
Played Alan wake a couple days ago and for the first few level it was the same. But then I noticed that I lose all my stuff at the start of a new chapter. So I might as well use it.
So maybe there is something to be said about taking away players stuff in intervals to force them to use it.
That’s the reason that consumables and money don’t carry over between levels in Thief: The Dark Project. No point in hoarding stuff, you might as well use it. Except of course that if you’re good, you don’t need to use any items at all - not even the blackjack.
I like that. Anti-hoarding mechanics, I guess. I can’t remember which game it was, but one I played recently recharged your mana/energy/mojo or whatever between fights, so you were encouraged to actually use the abilities instead of tediously avoiding it for most of the game. “How do I best use the total available mana for each battle” is a bit more fun than “Better pretend I don’t have these abilities most of the time.”
This is similar to why I actually came to like the rapidly breaking weapons in the Switch Zelda games. Once my mindset became “don’t bother hoarding good weapons, just use whatever you want because you’ll just find new ones all the time” it stopped being annoying and instead kept things fresh.
That is indeed a curious mechanic
Maybe also having more consumables in the world and less fitting in your inventory would be a good thing? So that the player feels they’ll just waste it if they don’t use it, and it’s not that rare anyway.
The consumables are for plebs that need the help. No, thanks. I’ll just explore every corner of the world collecting all of the consumables in chests and pots and whatever(never using them, mind you), fighting every random encounter, and hitting the level cap before the third act. Who needs tchotchkes when I can transform into/summon a glorious esper and cast Ultima?
Shattered pixel dungeon has an interesting approach: everything is unidentified, including potions. If you want to identify them, there are scrolls of identification (once you figure out which ones they are, though I believe most classes auto id them) but most of the time it’s experimentation. Drink it and see what happens. Took me a bunch of runs to even realise that was something I should do (because you don’t need to identify potions for them to just sit in your bag for future use, but I figured “fuck it” and tried one, which made me float, and I realized what I needed to do to get to chests in rooms full of traps without using all my hp and waiting to heal).
Wanna lose 2 weeks of your life in a sudden inexplicable haze? Dungeon Crawl: stone soup
Id your strength and upgrade scrolls by number (and remembering which floors you found them), figure out your health potion by seeing the right enemy drop it, then turn the remainder of your (unused) potions into energy and scrolls into stones (because you dont need consumables, all the energy for my trinket! If I dont have level three mimic tooth before floor four I am restarting)
If you don’t know it you should try nethack if you like SPD. Stuff being unidentified was the norm in DnD and rogue was an early attempt at making a computer game of that, with nethack being the pinnacle of that era’s evolution
Nethack is one that has been on my periphery for a while, though I never looked too closely at it (and assumed it was a game about hacking networks lol). I’ll have to put some attention directly at it.
Though I’m still on the fence about this kind of RPG tbh. Like a high level of detail in an RPG can be fun or tedious. Like these seem like games that I should be taking notes for and I’m not sure I want to give it that level of attention. That is despite seeing “How to Survive the Game as a Barbarian” and wanting a game like that lol.
A bit like SMT (me playing Nocturne) where not a single one of your demons has the required skill that would make it so much easier.
This armor is a gamechanger because it gives me a decent elemental resistance boost to some random element, I’m gonna organize my build around it
Statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged
I will only stay in this one area where this specific type of enemy spawns to get the most out of this resistance. I don’t want to see the rest of the game.
And you find the plate mail with 80% fire resistance not at the end of the water dungeon, but at the end of the fire dungeon. You will never see another fire elemental after you exit here. Fire damage will be completely irrelevant, even in the final boss fight where Satan himself shows up and only uses dark attacks.
Hate to agree with an anon but that was always my exact experience playing any RPG outside of Pokémon. Between that and not having any indication how much stat-boosting moves actually boosted my stats, it trained me to never use anything other than offensive skills.
Outside of Pokémon???
The game where you can spam 1 move on one Pokémon to finish the entire game?
I think that’s a (very slight) exaggeration but I recognize Pokémon is babby’s first RPG which is why I generally don’t count the series when discussing RPGs.
In the case of the topic at hand, tho, all the Pokémon games I’ve played have encouraged the use of status ailments against bosses and has hard caps on stat boosts that are easy to wrap your head around.
In competitive Pokemon, buffs and debuffs are absolutely critical.
In a single player run, they’re useless.
Winning the entry hazards war or getting an Intimidate attack debuff on the opponent’s physical sweeper can make the difference between a win and a loss in competitive. It’s why Gholdengo is so ridiculously overpowered by being immune to status moves and why Pokemon with the Unaware ability are used so much despite having lacklustre stats.
Yeah, dude acting like leer and tail whip were used any more than nil.
Yeah, but swords dance and calm mind are used.
It’s a game where it’s useful to use status moves on wild Pokemon (mostly to catch) and also all status moves work the same against bosses as regular enemies.
Almost accurate, except the boss is randomly weak to one of the 20 status effects. Also, said boss fight is nearly impossible without exploiting that one status weakness because fuck you.
It’s worse if it’s a status effect only attainable by learning it from a random enemy somewhere in act 2
eh, depends. I use them quite a bit in some games. Persona and the FF, but you have to know what you are doing, and they are mostly useful on stronger basic enemies or minibosses particularly.
But yeah, pragmatically, the learning/experimentation curve for status effects is too high/annoying for most players/playing. They require a lot of experimentation and remembering weaknesses or how to stack them.
The secondary effects they have in persona is pretty cool, a lot of them up the crit rate substantially, but also they can transfer to your characters if you ‘touch’ them with a normal attack.
The games where status effects basically have healthbars that apply the effect when they break and get bigger when they recover so you can’t keep applying the same one easily figured it out. Lets you do things like blind the boss and take no damage for a bit without trivializing by blinding the whole fight
They shine during group encounters (like MMORPG raids), but yeah, solo it often feels like a waste of time.
Stop hitting the mobs that are sleeping!!
I was a survival hunter specializing in CC for a long time and boy do i feel that
I played as rogue and then hunter. Felt it on both.
Play Etrian Odyssey where status effects are an integral part of every encounter.
Game designers, and I’m including tabletop rpgs, love having status effects that freeze, paralyzed, or do a percentage of health of damage; but they always neglect the fact that they’re ineffective against hordes of weak enemies and are overpowered against strong solo enemies.
Really wish they would have more foresight than to just make it have zero effect on bosses. I’d be satisfied with it applying a weakened effect instead of being outright immune.
Crystal Project does exactly that. The DoT effects do health percent damage, and the stronger enemies and bosses have resistance to it rather than full on immunity.
As a sometimes-DM who enjoys making interesting encounters, the answer is to either avoid solo bosses, or have multi-phase bosses where their tactics/immunities change. Steal liberally from JRPGs, they were absurdly popular for a reason!
Cast confuse, end up being punched in the face anyway.
ffxi, we gave Bard a song that deals damage over time. Everything is immune to it.
To be fair to them, they EXPLODED ffxi because it was so shit.
I think you mean ffxiv?
