Unfortunately, in my opinion, what death teaches you is grind, grind, grind, and again in my opinion, grinding is a failure of game design.
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What that also did for me, discounting the grinding, was actually made the game boring because it was never actually challenging. Once I learned grinding was the key, I would grind until I could just slaughter my enemies.
This response made very little sense from what I understood, so I went back to looking at the game. My wife has been the primary player of this game so far; I've spent a fair bit of time watching her, and a few things have slowly dawned on me. Such as a revelation that explains why people keep talking about grinding and getting blank looks from me. A confession is in order - while I have plenty of experience with the roguelike subgenre, my knowledge specifically of this particular series is nil. So I was surprised to learn that, well..
You don't lose all of your levels when you die?!
I might not have to spell out what consequences this has, but I'll give it a shot anyway. In most games in the subgenre, all character development is utterly ephemeral. At any moment the classic "It breathes. You die." event may make all of your leveling and equipment collection and effort instantly irrelevant. This alters all sorts of strategic issues; if there's a very long leveling game, one hopes that death becomes increasingly unlikely towards the end of it, because at that point the stakes are very high. There are several roguelikes with gameplay like this, including Angband and Nethack. Dying near the end of these is not uncommon, but you do in fact generally have warning that it's going to happen and lots of ways to avoid it. If you didn't, they'd be awful games.
This game essentially removes the "permanent death" aspect of roguelikes, and n my opinion it suffers very much for this decision.. Why? Because it means that you can just power through dungeons by going elsewhere and gaining ten levels. The developers have no control over what overall and job level you bring to the dungeon, so content can be obviated by overwhelming power. In other words.. it makes grinding possible, and since it's possible it becomes mandatory in short order. It shouldn't even be meaningful to grind in a short roguelike.. but here we are. Ugh.
And yes, that means I feel that a major problem with the game is that the death consequence is not harsh
enough; it breaks the fundamental gameplay.
Especially in a roguelike, death is not only a lesson but a damn hard lesson at that.
In this particular case, where the only thing death has to say to you is "grind more," there's not much positive to be said about it. Let's pick a more useful example.. say, IVAN. It comes up frequently enough in discussions of roguelikes that despite it being very obscure compared to mainstream games I feel comfortable saying it's relatively well-known. IVAN's full name is Iter Vehemens ad Necem, and the webpage for it helpfully reminds me that that translates to A Violent Road to Death.. which is a fair description. Among other nasty features, IVAN makes becoming more powerful a major risk; your enemies will without fail become more powerful to match.
I have never won a game of IVAN. I've come very close, close enough that I'm fairly sure I know how it's done, but I must nonetheless admit defeat. The duration of my longest game has been perhaps three hours.. and that is really the core of my point. Most of my deaths have taken up less than twenty minutes of gameplay. The ones that have lasted longer have been desperate, odds-defying exercises of wit, strategy, and sheer luck. For all that they were the product of a simple turn-based game, they were exciting and difficult and.. yes, in the end, frustrating. But I got all the way to the Enner Beast that time! And after a while, something becomes apparent: when you find a strange, unknown room, item, creature, what-have-you, it is imperative that you try it out. Even, or perhaps especially, if it kills you instantly.. because if it doesn't, it may lead to learning something that will keep your next character alive a little bit longer.
It is also very important to note that each character is a wildly different experience in IVAN; it is very important that you become familiar with all the things the game can possibly throw at you, because you will only see a small subset of them in each game.. and it is imperative that you exploit whatever oddities the game grants you this time around to have a chance of survival. There are all sorts of things you can do to hugely increase the power of your character.. if only you are lucky enough to have access to them.
This game does not dream of recreating that experience. To reiterate, I agree. The grinding it teaches you represents a serious failure.
Just for fun, what would you consider a game that follows all other conventions of a roguelike and doesn't contain random dungeons?
It depends on just how much randomness you're subtracting.
If you go for a completely static world.. IVAN would not be the same at all if I knew, every single time, that I could get shrines of gods X, Y, and Z at certain points in the game and that I should therefore hang onto certain sets of items to sacrifice to them so that I could instantly gain their favor, pray to them, and get various huge advantages.
I think the mechanics of sudden, permanent death and randomness are fairly strongly tied together. If the world is the same or even very similar each time you trek through it, we are reduced to the scenario occurring in multitudes of games consisting of a save point that's too far from a difficult boss. Your eighth trip through the first couple levels is no longer interesting because this time the game gave you a wand of lightning and some major problems were obviated; instead, it's a humdrum trip through "open secret door Y, pick up wand of lightning, fry monster Z, blah".
Maybe some truly inspired designer could decouple those two mechanics. I would be very interested in seeing the game that would make it fun.
Topic: REVIEWS: Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Read 13702 times)
