"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

This was one of my biggest problems with Persona 3. Well, okay, instant part leader deaths was my biggest problem, but the spell lists didn't help much.

Well it wouldn't be magic if it made sense now, would it?

(Don't ever play the Persona series either).

EDIT: Damn it, double ninja'd.

Break, poisona, esuna, stona, dia, -ra, -ga, [-ja], wall, reflect???, traveler, limit glove, matra magic...

Or perhaps the best example of all, ????

Of course there are still some oddballs, but Fire, Ice, Thunder, Cure and Raise are all pretty damn clear.

If there is truly any benefit whatsoever to the DQ approach of "buff, buff, attack", surely the random nature of revival and healing effects completely nullifies it. There is no reason in the universe for this kind of thing. Just the fact that spells can miss at all is insane.

There's a deep conversation to be had here, about the nature of risk vs. reward, and I think both the DQ and FF series struggle with it. However, a random "you spent your MP for nothing!" system isn't the solution. Penalizing the player for trying to work his way back into a fight is neither fun nor challenging -- especially if he's in the situation he is because the RNG decided to use four breath attacks in a row.

In fact, I think FF2 did more to smooth that whole process over than any RPG before or since. ATB is a huge boon in this regard, because wasted actions are not as devastating. In a turn-based system, if a hero dies, reviving him is always a total crapshoot. You can't control the order in which your PCs move, so there's no guarantee Potion-guy will get his turn before Revive-guy does. Reviving on one round and healing on the next is equally dicey, because now your very-close-to-dead hero has to survive upwards of two full rounds before he's out of the woods. I'm sure we've all been stuck in situations where we're frantically throwing revival items at a dead hero, only to watch him die, round after round, just because the game thinks it's funny.

In an ATB system you can work it so two heroes get their actions almost simultaneously. Revival and healing happen right away. Comebacks are possible. I can't count how many times I've snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in pretty much every ATB-based game I've played. It almost never happens in turn-based games, though -- FF1 included.

The other innovation is the ability to run whenever you want. You can try to run as you're queuing up other actions. There's no cost. FF1 was already pretty good about this, since your dudes could run individually; you get four chances every round. In DQ, though? The RUN command might as well say "give the monsters a free round". (Breath of Fire, I'm looking at you, too.)

When it comes to risk vs. reward, FF2 is a freaking golden god. The choices you make are actually important. Much, much less of the game is based around the idea of "I'll try this and hope it works." FF3 expands on this metric by giving you meters that show what order your characters will act in, and by letting you "hold" a critical hero's turn.

Instead of stacking dice against you, these games increase your range of action instead. That does far more for the element of strategy than "you can cast Upper and this boss is weak to Sleep."

... except for the first one: Fire, Heal, Bye, Wind, Tele, Help, Trap... hard to get clearer about what you mean with a 4 character limit than those.

Although even the later games at least have some logic going. Res restores HP, Gires restores a giant amount.

Wild ARMs and Koudelka did it. It's on the depressingly long list of great ideas from RPGs everyone else forgot to steal.

Preach on, brother, preach on. Random is not fun. Making intelligent decisions and being rewarded for them, while not being punished excessively for when your actions don't work out, is fun. It's satisfying to see a plan come together and everything work out, and horribly disheartening when you do everything as best as you can and end up losing simply because the dice roll was out of your favor. This is why challenge runs of late-era FF games are far more interesting than DQ ones. Actual skill is involved there, whereas a challenge run in DQ pretty much adds up to "cross your fingers and hope for tons of lucky randomizer rolls so bosses always use their turn-wasters instead of their actually effective attacks".

The worst part about the random chance to fail on helpful spells is that DQ is one of those RPGs where MP is pretty heavily rationed. And I really don't like using magic at all in games like that. I wouldn't be SO upset with the way DQ handles spells if, for example, you could passively recover MP like in say Golden Sun (walk around a bit) or Magical Starsign (passive regen each turn).

I just really hate spending so much MP for nothing, and then having those resources just be lost and you need to return to town to recover it.

Since when do people actually use the attack magic in Golden Sun?

I use it all the time, because some of them are awesome. Like Ragnarok.

Also because MP is easy and generally free to recover.

Ragnarok gets outdamaged by a physical attack after like one Impact (you know, the spell your fastest character naturally learns). It's due to the really shitty way Golden Sun determines spell damage.

I'm not sure where I stand on the DQ series. I loved the first when it was new, and still appreciate it for what it is. And DQ8 is my third favorite post-16-bit console RPG, behind the most recent two Persona games. But the other seven? I just give them varying degrees of shoulder shrugs. I don't look forward to new games in the series, but I still pick up and play every one of them. It's just one of my weirder video game relationships, I guess.

I don't tend to use stat modifying spells in RPGs, though. It's really a cost/reward thing: If one cast of Gaia would end the battle on the first turn, but needing to use Impact means it ends on the second, then does it matter if my physical attack hits harder? Or, is that gain in physical damage outweighed by the damage that character could have done instead?

For example, if Ragnarok does 500 a hit on average, and an Impacted physical swing does 600 a hit on average, and Impact lasts 3 turns, then if the person who casts Impact does less then 300 on average in the turn it casts Impact, then casting Impact is actually not gaining you anything.


But really, in the end, I don't bother with statistical models. I just want my guys to be attacking or healing; stat buffs tend to just be wasted turns in most RPGs I play, so my normal strategy is to just plain not use them. And it works out well for me overall.

The RNG is the reason I never played more than five minutes of Quest 64*.

In that game, you can actually attempt to use an item on yourself and miss.



*That, and the fact that it sucked a lot.

I'll not stand for this slander!

You don't use buff or debuff magic in random battles in Dragon Quest. You use status magic. Put the lot of 'em to sleep so fewer of them attack you so that you save MP on healing spells. Debuffs, like attack magic, are for specific enemies that are meant to be gimmicky. Buffs are for bosses; because their duration is very temporary, you've got to be juggling them as you fight, balancing the need to heal, defend, attack, or renew buffs (though they definitely use Disruptive Wave too much). Even against weak fodder, saying that the strategy is to just keep attacking is oversimplifying it, because at the very least it's an optimization puzzle to decide which ones to kill first so that you don't have to spend as much MP on healing so that you've got more resources to use against the boss at the end of the dungeon.

The practical effect of Zing having a 50% fail rate is so that you only use it in battle if you're incredibly desperate, and you avoid dying in the first place because you don't know how much it will cost to resurrect them. Dying isn't just a slap on the wrist like in Final Fantasy!

For that matter, aren't SMT spell names basically just Sanskrit?

Also, Golden Sun has attack spells that use your strength stat to determine damage, and those tend to be the most efficient and flashy sources of damage in the game.

I was mostly talking about boss fights, since Golden Sun's random encounters are really freaking easy. Anyways, GS is pretty poorly coded when it comes to buffs; eventually your characters will reach a point where they can't be buffed further, but if you continue to buff them the buff will never wear off.

And let's face it; you're never going to get Ivan/Sheba/Karis/whoever knows High Impact to do anything better in boss fights.

Also, attack magic deals damage based off elemental power. You want to know the only ways to raise that? Djinn distribution (maxes out at 9), equipment (usually pointless since critical boost armor is much better), and summons (requires using djinn). Meanwhile, basic attacks just go off your Attack stat, which risess as you level up/set djinn/get better equipment/buff.

EDIT: And the attack spells (there's what? Quick Strike and... um... shit, I don't even know, I never use them) are usually worthless compared to what you can get with weapon unleashes.

That's exactly my point, though. To make a comeback in DW, you have to be incredibly lucky. The actions you need to take to get your party back in fighting shape happen in a sequence, and not only do you not have any control over that sequence in a turn-based game, you're also dealing with purely random elements such as how the boss chooses its attacks and whether your Revive spell works.

In FF2 (and every FF thereafter) you have much greater control over that sequence of actions. You can be certain that your Life potion comes out before your Cure2 potion, and you can time those actions to have them resolve at a point in the fight where you aren't likely to be attacked. The knowledge that you're in the game right up to the very last HP makes for much more exciting battles.

As evidence of this in play, I offer my current Dragon Warrior 4 LP on YouTube. I die twice to the end boss not because I wasn't prepared, or because my strategy wasn't sound, or because I wasn't strong enough -- but because the boss landed too many crits on my healer (whose AI is too dumb to know when to heal itself). And with the healer dead, there is no comeback. Reset and try again.

That right there sums up the key flaw in how DQ games handle turn-based combat: it's extraordinarily random to make up for the fact that it would be incredibly dull if the game played fair. I have used the Sands of Time in various DQ games to redo the first round of fights many times, and seen just how utterly ridiculous this can get. One fight in DQ5, the opening round varied from every enemy physically attacking and doing a cumulative 50 damage to my party, to every enemy using their most powerful attacks and doing a minimum of 250 damage to everybody. Quite the extreme case, yes, but it illustrates just how much of a horrible horrible crapshoot Dragon Quest battles can be when your damage taken in a battle with sound opening tactics can vary from 50 to 1,000 cumulative damage.

Except when it is, and it only costs you gold when you Party Wipe.

Nope, Zing in DQ is just a pain in the ass for no good reason.

Word has it that all of the pointlessly random elements in DQ games and ridiculously huge penalties incurred from getting a bad roll on said elements is the result of Yujii Horii being a notorious gambler. Apparently he likes being punished arbitrarily, and thinks it's a selling point that his games do this.

Maybe he's trying to recreate the feeling of playing D&D, by replacing dice with an RNG.

Or, at least, he understands the psychological appeal.

Pulling off a Zing in the middle of a battle is like scoring a critical hit. You can't rely on it because you're not supposed to rely on it. It's there because it's better than not being able to do anything at all if you fuck up in a fight, without actually making it so that fucking up has no consequences. It's a deliberate choice to shift the balance of battles: there's the Final Fantasy style where the strategy is "resurrect yourself quickly when it's safe," and then there's the Dragon Quest style where the strategy is "don't die." By the time random effects make this difficult, you have Kazing.

AI-controlled teammates make this impossible, of course, but that's why they don't use those any more.

See my earlier comment about how enemy attacks in DQ games are too much of a crapshoot for that to be considered "strategy". It's really not very fun when a battle is over in 2 rounds because the boss decided to instakill your healer on the first round, then use both of his turns to breathe super-cold breath the second round and do more than your tank's max HP in damage to everybody in the process.

It's even less fun when some variation of the above happens many, many, many times in a row thanks to the fact that Horii apparently doesn't get the concept of "moderation" or "limiting enemy actions" or "giving the player a goddamn fighting chance".

The FF series solved the problem of bosses spamming their best moves by having their monsters work off of AI scripts rather than just pulling from a random list. You'd never beat ASTOS if he were able to spam FIR2 every round, but the game doesn't allow him to do that.

ATB was the best innovation in regards to reducing the luck factor in combat, but it wasn't the first. FF has been smarter about this since the beginning.

And that, I believe, is why Final Fantasy has completely dominated the market as a whole. Fun is not granted at random based entirely on something the player has no control over, it's a guaranteed result of playing well. Even if DQ had the kind of good marketing that Final Fantasy has gotten, it wouldn't do as well outside of Japan. DQ8 proved that nicely; they really pushed that sucker hard, and it barely managed to sell on par with Chrono Cross in the US.

And 20 years later, Ouroboros in Strange Journey can and will cast Wave of Death six times in a row.

She doesn't need your "AI script" shenanigans!

... which beginning are we talking about? FF1 would totally hand you a completely unavoidable TPK here and there through BS like getting into a fight against 8 magical leopards that all decide to cast FIR2.

Corrected, because biiiiiiiiig %@$#ing difference there. Also, which DQ game is it that you're being a total wimp about specifically?

Judging from the last few pages, DQ8.

I don't think I need to reiterate this, but I have the Anti-Luck. I see situations in video games that are often believed to only be theoretically possible due to the low odds of anything going that insanely wrong. As such, I have seen the absolute worst that almost every Dragon Quest has to offer. To wit:

Dragon Quest 1 - Murdered by an axe knight who cast Sleep. My hero never woke up in the dozen rounds it took the axe knight to wear his HP down from full to 0.

Dragon Quest 2 - 3 Archdemon fight, all three cast Explodet. Full party K.O.

Dragon Quest 3 - Two Balrogs, each casts DefeatMax. First DefeatMax breaks entire party's LifeStones, second one kills each and every one of them.

Dragon Quest 4 - Last boss uses Frigid Breath both turns on round 2 of the battle after slaughtering the healer on round one, kills the entire party dead.

Dragon Quest 5 - Enemy party spams Kaboom, forces me to reset the fight with Sands of Time no less than 15 times before a first round transpires that the party is not knocked down to half or less HP.

Dragon Quest 6 - Actually, this one never gave me problems...

Dragon Quest 7 - Another one that never gave me problems...

Dragon Quest 8 - Where do I begin?

1. At least 3 different occasions when Jargons or Chimera groups have opted to use Flame Breath twice in a row or more, resulting in total party K.O. from starting at full HP.

2. Zing/Staff of Resurrection failure 15 times in a row in a single battle.

3. Mid-game super-boss using super ice breath two rounds in a row. Twice in the same fight, no less; I only survived to see him do it again thanks to a well-timed Yggdrasil Dew.

4. Absolutely no respect for turn order and/or agility resulting in most battles where the enemy party always gets the first strike every round. Still not as bad as DQ3's notorious "agility roulette" where every player character is slowed down to the speed of whomever the game chooses to go "first", but annoying as hell nonetheless.

Sky Render, be honest. Did you ever anger a Gypsy?

Alternative punchline: never play Fire Emblem.