BACKWARDS_COWBOY'S PROFILE

I think Shin Megami Tensei IV handled plot twists pretty well. You start in a medieval-esque realm with castles and swords and stuff. Early in the game, you can find relics which are little trinkets that get appraised for money. A few hours into the game, you start to notice some relics being kind of weird. You start finding things like CDs, kitchen utensils and appliances, etc. You travel deeper into a dungeon, and you end up in the ruins of a skyscraper in modern-day Tokyo overrun by demons. At first, the characters are told that it's a dark underworld of sorts, but then there's the plot twist...



It gets confusing, but sorts itself out as you learn more throughout the game. It was essential to the story line and executed pretty well and gradually, so it works out great. But then you have some plot twists like in Hexyz Force, where they consist of...



And that plot twist can only be discovered by balancing Creation/Destruction action ratings. It's also only relevant if you've been bothering to pay attention to the lore of the world.

Those are some examples of good and bad plot twists. If you're going to do a plot twist, try to make it story-relevant and able to be followed by most, if not all, players. Don't have one of the first bosses suddenly return and become the main villain, unless they've had participation in the plot since then. A lot of modern games try too hard, as well as modern movies. I figured out the plot fifteen minutes into Captain America: The Winter Soldier using only the title using the following thought process:



Avoid obvious and/or unnecessary plot twists.

author=Darkflamewolf

author=LockeZ
FF7 had a really deep ability system that allowed for a ton of strategic customization... which you can totally ignore because the enemy design is so simplistic that you can beat all but like three battles in the game game just using the strategy "don't run from battles, attack each enemy with normal attacks until it does, and heal when your HP goes below 75% or you get hit with an ailment." So that's probably a situation where making the really hard stuff optional makes sense, I guess. It'd be a waste of a really good gameplay system for there to not be any hard bosses, after all, but you can't make the rest of the game that easy and then make the final boss require the player to master the system.

Arc Rise Fantasia was similar to this where pretty much any non-boss fight encounter was a simple matter of not running away and simply attacking the enemy until it dies. Any boss battles (especially those from the midpoint of the game onwards) required you to have intimate knowledge of how all battle systems worked up to that point. The final boss alone was a true test of system knowledge and how best to exploit all the advantages the developers gave you. But you got no incentive to actually test those skills in theory on simple enemy battles where there simple was no real threat.

I gave up on Arc Rise Fantasia around 14 hours in because there was a boss that kept one-hit KO-ing the characters. That, and the English voice acting was atrocious. It sounded like they picked whichever employees were willing to work extra hours for free and handed them the script.

I like the way that Etrian Odyssey II handled its final boss. It had two forms, and after beating the first form, it made an offer to grant you immortality if you just stopped. Selecting yes would give you Game Over. If you managed to pass that stupidity test, you got to fight the second form. If you had a high-level Hex-casting character, you could just cast Fear with a pretty reliable success rate. "OVERLORD is too scared to move!" or whatever it said was a pretty ridiculous thing to see during the final battle. There were dozens of skills which, if you bothered to level them up, made the final battle a simple matter of stun & attack, healing if Overlord actually manages to get a hit in. The post-story content was harder, though. This was an old-school RPG though, so if you tried to avoid battles to get through it faster, you'd be pretty screwed towards the top of the labyrinth.

Another option to work around it would be to have:

• Basic Fire Spell
  
• Better Fire Spell
  
• Fire Spell That Is Only As Strong As Basic Fire Spell But Ignores Resistance
  

Against weaker enemies, the third spell would barely be any better than the Basic spell, but against stronger enemies with high resistance, it could end up being more powerful than the Better spell. While it still gives you multiple spell levels, it at least makes them different and do something besides "be a stronger Fire spell". Of course, one of the issues with Final Fantasy was having stronger versions of useless skills. Nobody used Blind or Poison, but some of the later games gave us the gloriously awful stronger versions of Blind and Poison for no reason.

In summary, as long as the next tier of a spell is either more useful or has a decent side effect, then I don't really think it's that much of an issue. After all, it's hard to scale a spell without making the game cater to the class or character that uses that spell. Making it based off of the character's magic stat can only help it for so long, until it eventually becomes useless. The higher base power of later-game spells is what makes them necessary.

I'll take F2 and G2 if they're still open. I have some ideas for them.

Edit: Here they are. I hope I didn't mess anybody up.

author=CashmereCat
Why is there a tree on the footpath...

Maybe it's a deep environmental message, like "the power of nature overcomes all man-made progress" or something. It looks worse in one of the other screenshots where four trees appear to be growing out of what looks like a stone path.