SHOULD A GAME BE COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT WITH ITS MECHANIC?

People being mad at Lucky 7 is FF9's Lucky 7 move. Zidane is the only character you can use it if the one's digit of his current HP is 7 it will either do 7, 77, 777, or 7777 damage and one damage otherwise. This is not explained in the game afaik. It's a super situational move that most players won't figure out and even if they do it'll probably be at the point where the move is garbage. Even a segmented speed run where they can reload until they get the RNG they need only use it twice on Hilgigars and Amarant and they manipulate Zidane's max HP at that time to end with 7 and his defense so Amarant's damage is a multiple of 10. Maybe it's more useful in a level one challenge but that sounds like the worst thing ever so I never read up on it.

Making Necron skip Grand Cross is easier to figure out than Lucky 7's (don't have any valid targets on the field by killing your party besides Freya and get her to jump right before Necron executes Grand Cross and he won't/can't use it and move to his Blue Shockwaves which can't kill you)


e: Unlike FF7 All Lucky 7 because that sounds like a hilarious thing that could randomly happen and is the thing Uncle Working at Nintendo stories are made out of and people could try to use it to their advantage. A+++ shit there.

author=Max McGee

"New Damage = Old Damage * (512 - Defense) / Defense

Why the fuck would they go with such a bafflingly obtuse formula?

It's actually just "New Damage = Old Damage * (512 - Defense)", which is way worse.

Most damage formulas are pretty complex. They often have to be in order to create the numbers that the developers want for equipment upgrades, enemy damage, etc. HP and attack and weapon and armor and healing numbers all have to be balanced against each-other, and you need upgrades to matter but also need light armor to be viable, and often you have enemy stats increasing at a vastly different rate than player stats (due partially to the fact that enemies don't get equipment). You can make simple formulas in some games but it's not uncommon for me to end up with a goddamn arctangent or some shit in a damage formula. For example, if you want a level 3 damage skill to be an upgrade over a level 2 damage skill, even for players with no strength, but to be far better for characters with high strength and improve mostly linearly with strength during the time when you're supposed to be using it, and then stop improving in damage beyond a certain amount of strength so that the player has to get the level 4 damage skill later... yeah. Formulas. There's a reason players don't see them.

This particular formula in FF7 is dumb because of how it scales as the game continues, not because of how strange it is. Crystalgate is right: if you have 50 def, gaining 10 def only makes you take 2% less damage, which is totally worthless. But if you have 500 def, gaining 10 def makes you take 83% less damage. What the hell? That is the reverse of how a player expects defense to work. You intuitively expect to need bigger defense upgrades later in the game, since damage and attack power and HP are all increasing exponentially.

I'm not arguing in favor of transparency here. In fact in this case transparency would piss you off because you'd realize how worthless the defense upgrades are. In reality, while playing FF7, you don't notice the problem because the game is so easy that it doesn't matter, and also because each new piece of armor gives you more materia slots which matter way more than the defense. So your experience isn't really diminished much by the shitty formula. If the game were harder you'd probably notice on your own that the armor upgrades had no effect, but as it is, FF7 is so easy you barely even notice that you have stats at all. You're certainly not worried about trying to manage and balance and minmax your stats. Stats only do one thing in FF7, which is make you happy when you see numbers go up in the menu.

For what it's worth, that same idiotic defense formula is used in FF6 and Chrono Trigger, as well as several later FF games. So waving it off as "well, it's all about the materia anyway" is giving them way too much credit.

In Chrono Trigger it's particularly bad because you can easily get all the way up to the max defense value in MDEF. The max is 100 instead of 512 but the formula is otherwise the same. This means that going from 0 def to 50 MDEF halves your damage taken, and going from 98 def to 99 MDEF also halves your damage taken. At the end of the game, most of your characters have between 85 and 99 base MDEF... this difference of 15 points, which was pretty trivial for the first 90% of the game, results in the astronomical difference of Robo taking 15x as much magic damage as Marle in the final dungeon.

Because this is the difference between getting one-shot by the final boss and taking two-digit damage from the final boss, it becomes suddenly very transparent to the player whether they are paying attention or not. It's a stupid as fuck way to handle defensive stats though, and the player should probably not be learning basic gameplay elements like how stats work in the final dungeon of a 40+ hour game.

Final Fantasy VII's defense indeed doesn't hurt the game much. It's gives you an opportunity to screw yourself over by equipping a +10 vitality (or spirit) accessory, but makes that scenario extremely unlikely to happen as raising defense and spirit is very unappealing even if you believe doing so would have a meaningful damage reduction. It's a case where a minor design flaw cancels out a much bigger one.

My principle is that if you give the player an option to increase a certain stat at the cost of increasing another, then increasing the former stat should be useful. More precisely, increasing a stat should be useful in a situation where it's implied that it's useful. For example, increasing attack doesn't have to be useful if you build your character as a mage, but increasing defense should be useful when you get hit by physical attacks.

Actually, I think I just list where RPG maker games often mess that up.

RMXP - Dexterity. Dexterity works in a funny way where it tends to be useful only if there is an extreme difference between the attacker's dexterity and the target's agility. Let's say your dexterity is 50, raising it to 75 will be useful if the target's agility is 5 or 500, but not if it's anywhere close to 50. The exception to that rule is if you make a skill dexterity based. Actually, there's an even better exception, that is you redesigning how your game calculated damage and chance to hit, something I'd recommend since RMXP calculates it in idiotic ways.

RMVX - Spirit. Spirit is normally a useful stat in VX, but the SPI-F values of spells in the samples skills are 30 and many people seem to take that as a recommendation. With a SPI-F value 30, spirit is almost guaranteed to become useless.

ACE - Luck. Every point of difference between the attacker and the target increases or decreases your chance to land a status effect with 1/1000. More often that not the the player is only allowed to affect the stat is quantities that are too low to be useful.

All three of them - Evasion. Often done by simple giving the player too low amount. Defense works so that +2 can be useful at the very beginning while being useless at the end. A lot of game creators (I've seen this happen in commercial games as well) handle evasion the same way. Examples I've seen is the player granted the choice between a shield which gives +3 defense and evasion or a gauntlet which gives +3 defense and attack instead. This doesn't work since evasion doesn't scale as attack and defense does, a low evasion is crap regardless of where in the game you are.