The question of difficulty came to mind while playing Metaphor. It was pretty challenging early on when resources were very limited and I was also learning the gameplay systems, but I’m starting to feel powerful now mid-game (while still being challenged a bit). That’s where I like to end up, typically. It has a nice ludonarrative feel for the games that typically have you killing god.
What do you like?
I always felt the best ones were the ones that had visible fights on screen, like Chrono Trigger, and if you actually just did all those you’d be perfectly leveled the entire way through the game.
Final Fantasy is in weird place here because it has random battles, but also had plenty of non random battles and if you just did all the non random ones and avoided as much random fighting, as you possibly could, you’d also be pretty balanced against the bosses when you made it to them.
But things like Dragon Quest and even Secret of Mana, which I loved, relied heavily on staying in one area and just grinding to get to the appropriate power level to reasonably fight the next boss. I hate this. Once I’ve explored a zone, I want to move on. It should have been balanced that once I poke around in every nook and cranny, I should be ready to move on.
There’s nothing worse than fully exploring everywhere you can, doing all side attractions and what not then moving to the boss to open up more of the game only to be slapped with doing marginal damage and dying to a single attack because you didn’t complete 17,000 fights against the same 4 enemies yet.
Great response. There’s definitely been a lot of change to streamline the experience in this way. Chrono Trigger’s a big part of what started that in JRPGs, too. Its move away from random encounters sometimes overshadows discussions about how tightly tuned that game’s encounters were.
Echoing Chrono Trigger again - you could skip all grinding, and then rely more heavily on item usage in the final battle (megaelixers and the like) or better yet, not, and it became much more fun, and either way you see and therefore expect battles, rather than them feeling like an interruption to exploration.
And if you really got bored, either on the first playthrough or a later one, there are so very many ways to mix up the teams, with new skills to “discover”, or try out if you read them from a guide.
It has its downsides (gfx, length I guess if you ignore the New Game+), but damn no wonder it is widely regarded as hands-down the single best JRPG of all time.