DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

For what it's worth, I definitely appreciate the work you put into scripting the scenes, and I've been really happy to see you turning them into something much better than a flat recitation of the dialogue. Maybe you don't consider that part of the process your forte, but as someone who approaches games primarily from a story perspective, I think it's adding a lot to the game.

I got super stuck in Lufia 2 a bunch of times back when I first played it. Of course, I was a kid, and way worse at puzzles then than I am now. But the last time I replayed it, as a late teen if I remember correctly, some of them were still frustrating enough to make me resort to a guide (although I suppose I've been rather spoiled by having the option.)

I've always felt the final dungeon of Brave Fencer Musashi was really well put together. There are plenty of points in the game that demand puzzle-solving approaches which usually keep you lingering in one spot for a while while you figure them out, but the final dungeon, while not actually timed,unlike a couple other points in the game, is one of few points in the game which cultivates a sense of desperate urgency. Rather than keeping you pinned to one spot for any extended period, the final dungeon throws a barrage of obstacles which would be totally impassable without the complete complement of in-game abilities you've recently acquired, and wave upon wave of formidable enemies, which your character should by now be equipped to mow through with more or less constant momentum. It's well calibrated to make the player feel like the antagonists are throwing everything they've got at the protagonist, but he's become too much of a one-man-army for them to hold him off. Since the protagonist receives his abilities in a very piecemeal fashion over the course of the game, and most of them are only useful in very particular circumstances, but the final dungeon requires you to make full use of everything, it makes for a really satisfying conclusion.

Although none of its dungeons really featured significant puzzle content, or were particularly challenging to my recollection, I still remember the impression some of Final Fantasy VII's dungeons made on me for their atmospheric quality, especially the City of the Ancients.

The final dungeon of Dark Cloud (the Corridor of Time) also had a great atmosphere, and I thought it did a really good job integrating the exposition leading up to the final confrontation with the gameplay mechanics which had, previously in the game, been used for town-building.

I guess even though I like some good puzzles or challenging battles, it's the dungeons with exceptional atmosphere that really stick with me.

I've seen some games that did this particularly well. Kamidori Alchemy Meister had particularly engaging strategy gameplay with very transparent and predictable mechanics, but it's also an eroge (or a game with explicit sexual content,) so be aware that that's what you're in for if you decide to check it out.

Ogre Battle actually drove me kind of crazy when I played it when I was younger. It probably would have still driven me crazy if I hadn't used a guide when I played it later. So much of the game hinges on stuff it doesn't tell you about. It's interesting that the narrative is so open (particularly for a game that came out on a console with such limitations on its memory space,) but I felt like it really didn't make it easy to either predict or explore the consequences of your choices.

For me, the top is example is probably Suikoden III. It's not generally considered the best of the Suikoden games, but it deviates from the typical RPG in a lot of ways that the other games in the series don't, and it's a source for a lot of interesting ideas I don't think I've seen anywhere else.

I talked about the character customization system in one of my earliest posts on this site, and the use of treasure chests in another post on that topic. But here's another thing it did which I found interesting. Fast turn-based boss battles. Rather than turning boss fights into a war of attrition, most of the plot-based boss battles in the game are decided one way or the other over a few turns.

Applying to the series more generally, I like the idea of having a large party of characters where a lot of the people you recruit serve purposes other than combat. It makes the protagonists' struggle seem less one-dimensional when they have to call on a bunch of people with widely different skill sets.

I can confirm that after all the shit I went through to get that scene, the whole thing was so inconsequential that it was basically over before I even realized it was happening. I am not about to forget that feeling of being ripped off.

There are two games I've played which made extensive use of bad endings where I felt like it really improved the tone of the game. In Fate/Stay Night, there are about twenty bad endings for every good ending in the game, but the endings follow quickly upon making the relevant choices, so you don't have to worry constantly about whether you screwed yourself over in the past and are just waiting to find out. It adds a sense of tension to the choices, and reinforces the idea that the protagonists are walking a razor's edge. As a visual novel choices are the only interactivity it has, so you'd think that this style would be a major feature of the medium, but in fact, the only other game I've played which carried off the same effect was Radiant Historia, a JRPG. The story hinged on a time travel/timeline hopping mechanic, with countless different points where the protagonist has to make decisions which may lead to disaster and may only be resolvable with knowledge or resources from other timelines, and as a result, all the "bad ends" actually do occur over the course of the game in the protagonist's personal timeline. The whole story is built around the idea that only an extremely narrow line through time leads to the desired result.

Not all games are as mechanically suited to it, but I really like the idea of using bad ends this way. Having bad endings which are more numerous than the good endings (but without giving the player the chance to get locked into them) helps cultivate the sense that the odds are stacked against the protagonists, and they have to be really careful about their choices.