CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Those explanations looks good to me. The problem is that I have played tons of RPGs where things don't really make any sense and events are happening because the author wants them to happen, not because there's a good explanation for them. You game looked like it had that kind of problems. I'm glad that's not the case, but you need to somehow communicate the fact that you have thought things trough to the player. I understand that can be tricky, you don't want to drop a large load of infodump on the player to early. Here's my suggestion though:

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-The 'stuck boss' phenomenon. People dislike games that are too easy, and they dislike games that are too unforgiving, so what is it about a game that that has that one boss that suddenly stonewalls your progress? I've noticed that many people will quit right away at the sign of a game being really, really hard from jump street, but almost no one quits a game when a boss suddenly comes outta nowhere and puts your balls in a vice. I think some of the most memorable 'can't get past this boss' bosses are when; the player has already invested a significant amount of time into the game (I'VE ALREADY BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME FOR LIKE 20 HOURS I AIN'T QUITTIN' NAW SON FUCK DAT"), or right in the middle/before an important plot twist, and you're pretty much emotionally blackmailed into beating it. And you do! And you enjoy it! Interesting, yeah? Legend of Legaia is a great example of this.

I do not enjoy bosses that are way to hard. I put up with it because the rest of the game has been enjoyable and I assume the enjoyment will return as soon as I beat that boss, meaning beating said boss is a form of investment. I accept some boredom in return of a lot of enjoyment later. That said, if a boss is a plot important character that is supposed to be powerful, then I will approve of it being harder than both previous and later boss fights, but there is a limit to it. If a boss is much harder than other bosses, then either that boss is to hard or the previous ones were to easy.

I do often quit if I notice the game is to hard from the get go. In this case there's only the pain and no promise of something good coming if I put up with it. Also, chance is the challenge is for the wrong reason. In games where I control my character directly instead of giving them orders, I can counter enemies doing more damage by dodging/blocking/whatever better and that way get hit less. When it comes to RPGs, there's often mandatory damage. Alternatively, there's damage that can be avoided, but doing so relies on the RNG being in a good mood making the damage luck based. If the difficulty in an RPG comes from the mandatory damage being jacked up to unmanageable levels, then there's no way to deal with it except to grind. If the mandatory damage can be manageable, but the mandatory damage plus the maximum luck based damage isn't, then getting by means either grinding or relying on luck. As far as I'm concerned, any challenge that you can't get past by just playing the game better is challenging for the wrong reason.

At the beginning of the game, almost all damage is mandatory or luck based. Few RPGs give you the skills needed to avoid or mitigate damage from the get go. You take the least amount of damage by using the most powerful skills and choosing the right target. Any damage you still take cannot be avoided by using better tactics. If a game is hard under those condition, I see it as a bad sign.

This wasn't maybe what the topic is about, but the point is, I don't see and mind trick here. The decision to quit if an RPG is to hard from the get go, but stick to it if later an uncomfortable hard boss emerges, seems rather rational to me.

-'Gameplay which is compelling but not'. So I was playing Romancing Saga the other day, right? And I was doing a bunch of miscellaneous side quests, just getting gold, equipment, and dicking around. One day I played for about five hours straight, and sometime into I realized I wasn't even really paying attention to what I was doing half the time. I spend most of the random battles browsing the internet or listening to music, I half paid attention to wandering around the towns, and I meandered from dungeon to dungeon. I kinda realized that I spent the last few hours doing nothing but investing in getting pimp ass equipment and class level ups for my characters, simply for the sake of doing the exact same thing for another five hours. And I did. I know I basically described 'grinding', but it's something that people love to hate! Grinding is boring when its boring, but when its not, I like to call it 'spending hours upon hours pimping out my party members'.

I define grinding as overdosing on one activity until you can do the activity you want to do. So, if getting the cool armor in the optional dungeon is what you want to do, then that's not grinding as far as I'm concerned. However, if what you really want is to progress the plot, but you need to armor to get an edge over the upcoming boss, then that's grinding. Also, if you want the get the armor, but doing so requires you to first level up a bit to tackle the dungeon, then leveling up is grinding.

Now, I don't think that's your definition of grinding. However, if you don't use a definition for grinding that necessities grinding being boring then there's no surprise if you do find a situation where grinding isn't so bad.

As far as making you definition of grinding enjoyable, I think others have already covered it, grant the player small goals that are reachable within a reasonable time frame, but make reaching all of them taking a long time. More players will put up with 10 half hour grind sessions that each grants a small boost than a 5 hour grind session that by the end of it grants the same boost, but you get nothing prior to that.

-The entire phenomenon of an RPG being about putting virtual stuff on a virtual dude to make numbers go up, to produce bigger numbers to make sure that other guys numbers don't reduce your numbers to 0. This is the beauty of it all.

We play to be stimulated and I assume that most RPG players find figuring out ways to improve the numbers stimulating. The methods to improve out numbers which we view as stimulating varies from player to player. There is as we noticed the whole grinding business which we have a lot of disagreement about. Here's however a trick I think works for stimulating the majority of the players; give the player a choice of how to improve the numbers. I believe that more people find improving the numbers stimulating if there's multiple methods to choose between than if there's only one method available, even if the available method is the one they would have chosen anyway.

Two things:

1) Wolves don't roar, they growl.

2) The house to the right looks like it was cut into two.

I am saying that the 'graphics/story/music' very much influences the gameplay, depending on the game. It's hard to place all this in tier lists when they're very much connected. Graphics can make some battle systems more intuitive simply because they're informative enough to reduce the amount of button presses to simply check something for example.

This makes me wonder what someone who says "gameplay is the only thing that matters" mean. If gameplay is assumed to be separate from graphics/story/music then I'd go and flat out call that statement wrong. If graphics/story/music are considered part of the gameplay since they influence gameplay, then that statement becomes equal to "everything is the only thing that matters". I'd guess whoever says gameplay is the only thing that matters is going for something in-between, i.e. graphics have to be good enough for you to know what the heck is going on, but making them prettier looking isn't important. Or something like that.

One of the goals I have is to finish the game. This usually means beating the last boss, but a few games don't have a last boss. That's perfectly fine for me though, I rarely feel much anticipation for facing the final boss anyway. What I really want is a sense of closure. I want to feel like the story is over.

Another goal I strive for is good phasing, usually between story and gameplay. Having either to long dungeons or to long cutscenes bores me and if possible i try to speed things up. If the dungeon is to long I may start running from battles and if cutscenes are to long I may fast forward trough non essential dialogs.

It doesn't have to be between story and gameplay trough, if the gameplay is varied enough I may switch between the various gameplay elements there are.