ETHERPENGUIN'S PROFILE

For a long time I always thought the idea of a grindy RPG made after the 80s was just a myth, just something from old games that stuck in people's mind even after the genre continued to grow.

Now that I'm attempting to make an RPG of my own, I wanted to do some 'research' to get an idea of what people in general like and don't like about the genre both by reading various forums and reading a lot of reviews for some modern rpgs, most notably Dragon Quest XI (I never realized how contentious this series was for a lot of people until recently). I've begun thinking maybe I was the one in the wrong, that I just didn't know what people meant by grinding.

I think most people can agree on a definition of "going out of your way for the specific purpose of gaining levels," but people have different views on what counts as going out of your way. For me, it was always the idea of running around in circles to get in random encounters. Not progressing toward in particular place, just screeching to a halt and picking one place to run around in circles because you believe the only way to progress is to get more levels. There aren't many games I've done this in from the SNES era onward so I figured grindy RPGs were dead.

In Dragon Quest VIII the world was massive and gorgeous. I wanted to poke every nook and cranny in it and find all the treasures, as a result I steamrolled most dungeons because I gained so much experiences from just enjoying the world. Was I grinding when I did this even though I wasn't really looking to gain levels when I was doing it? According to some people, yes, I was. To these people, Dragon Quest VIII is every bit a grindy RPG.

I've seen the phrase 'incidental grinding' thrown around to describe this. One reviewer for DQXI called himself a 'golden path' player. He sticks to the story path as he dislikes wasting time. Anything that's not the shortest path between two story points is considered wasting the player's time therefore levels gained via straying from the path are grinding. The phrase 'incidental grinding' is also used a lot to describe the levels you gain on the way to objectives as if everything that's not a story boss is just grinding for the story boss. Encounters can't just be interesting threats in your way. It feels like making a game that's just a boss rush is the only way to please this group.

Interestingly, I never see this mindset thrown at action-driven games despite having boring encounters a lot of the time too. In Zelda games there's tons of normal encounters spread all through the map that aren't worth fighting half the time and yet no one cares about them. I remember a conversation with a friend where he was talking about watching his roommate play Link to the Past and how his roommate just ran through groups of enemies without fighting them like this was baffling to him. My response was "yea, I do that too. They don't give experience so what's the point?" There's those blue knights that take three hits to defeat, but if you hit them once they get knocked back and have a few frames of hitstun before charging at you again. Just hitting them once neutralizes any threat they posed and you can just keep going. A lot of the time, it would put you in more risk to stay and fight them. Getting through a maze-like cave in Dragon Warrior III with random turn based battles feels a lot more threatening and interesting to me, yet so many people say the normal enemies in an action game are interesting threats along the way but are just bags of exp and loot in an RPG. I think any combat system no matter if it's action or menu-driven can get monotonous with a large enough dose of non-threatening encounters, I'm apparently in the minority.

Somehow, when you ditch random encounters for touch encounters, things get even messier. Now you have the problem that people run from everything and then get upset when they can't beat the boss and have to go back to grind. It's frustrating because you know if the game had random encounters instead then these exact same people would complain about how archaic and crusty it is (and yes, I know there's been attempts to make random battles more palatable like threat meters or Wild Arm's exclamation marks - people still complain though). At the same time, I can't blame them for running from all touch encounters. Once you give the player an option to move around something threatening them, of course the natural instinct is to avoid it.

With touch encounters it can feel like trying to read the developers' mind regarding how many encounters you should throw yourself into. I think some people would say "you should fight every touch encounter, the game's probably balanced around it" but that flies in the face of the fact that I can move around the encounter in the first place, and many game don't feel like they're balance around it. Sure, some feel balance for it (Xenosaga, Earthbound, etc.) but then there's Dragon Quest XI and all three Xenoblades which have giant maps with monsters everywhere, there's no way the developers intended for you to kill everything that moves, and if you do, you become grossly over leveled.

And then there are games that allow means to dispatch a threat on the field before entering a battle. Radiant Historia had a melee attack that would put enemies to sleep and then you could easily run passed them. Harder enemies took multiple hits to put to sleep. Then you start to question "should I always strive to do this and just fight the monsters I miss? What if I get good at it and hardly ever fail putting a monster to sleep? Should I still fight one of every new thing that I see?" It feels like the developers playing mind games. There's no industry standard on how touch encounters are balanced. I don't think there should be, but a game's got do something to tell me how it's handling it.

Perhaps the most balanced method is Mystic Quest and Chrono Trigger's way of set encounters on places in the map that are difficult or impossible to move beyond. This might be the easiest way to sell normal encounters as worthwhile threats on their own to a general audience. I find myself not enjoying this very much though. I don't like the idea of nearly every battle being mandatory. There's a part of me that does like how DQXI and Xenoblade are basically giant playgrounds to enjoy the battle system at my own leisure with monsters scattered everywhere. I like fighting monsters for the fun of it, and I like having a mix of non-hostile monsters where the attack is entirely on my part.

There's also this weird thing where players who don't enjoy the game very much are the ones who will stick to the 'golden path' and end up struggling through boss fights are also the one's who haven't had the patience to understand the systems well enough to fight stuff underleveled because they don't enjoy the game. It puts them in a weird loop where their lack of enjoyment in the game up fronts snowballs into situations that keeps them from liking the game. They walk away saying it was grindy and required no real thinking or strategy regardless of that being true. You try to show them videos or offer tips on how to handle a particular fight underleveled and they don't want to hear it. They've already made up their mind that gaining levels is the only strategy.

On the other side, players who enjoy the game are more likely to seek out optional content and get overleveled despite also being the ones who are more patient about learning the game's systems. These players would delight in the under leveled challenge that the hypothetical players in the above paragraph found themselves in. These players walk away saying they liked the game overall but it was just too easy and tell people there's no grinding required. I'm this type of player. It's like your punished for enjoying the game too much by gaining levels too quickly from optional content in addition to understanding the systems and your punished for not enjoying the game enough by being both underleveled and not understanding the systems.

Then you've got players who just like to grind. Grinding can be cathartic and they enjoy watching their characters slowly accrue power and the numbers go up from performing a relaxing activity. I can't blame them either. The gradual progression of power is a major hook to the genre and I've enjoyed fighting for the sake of it and watching numbers go up as well many times even when I didn't need it. There's a good video on the defense of grinding here that does a good job explaining this perspective (edited out the video - I hadn't watched in a couple months and realized the guy made a very distasteful joke in it, but trust me there's people who really like grinding).

So, how do you balance all of this? I know you can't please everyone but at the same time it seems wrong to shut out all dissenting views to your preferred style. You might miss out on learning something that way. But is it even possible to make a game that appeals to all these views to some extent? Most importantly how do you convince people they don't have to grind (especially when people can't agree on what exactly grinding is)?

On Halloween, the creator of the 2015 indie game, Undertale, released a free demo for what appears to be a spiritual successor. It's labeled as chapter 1 and presumably, Toby Fox has plans to develop a full game out of this. To me, what's been released feels like a complete experience in and of itself. The scope is very small, there's only three areas (plains, forest, castle), and a tease at the end for things to come, but there's also a final boss, a post-game secret boss, a complete character arc, a sense of ending, and it feels like we experience the culmination of the mechanics introduced. So I'd really like to talk about what's been released as its own standalone thing as I've really enjoyed it.

Undertale received a lot of fanfare, and I could see where it was coming from. It had a lot of charm and a unique feeling. That's all still here. I'd say Fox has been very successful in creating an identity for the Undertale branding. If someone can look at an aesthetic and say "that looks like Undertale!" then you've succeeded at that. My feelings on it were the same as my thoughts on Earthbound - the game that inspired it: as an experience, it's wonderful, as an actual game... not so much. The big thing was the mercy mechanic and how you didn't have to fight but could pacify enemies to end encounters instead. This got a lot of praise, but it didn't really change much under the hood. Typically, you would receive some encounter-specific commands under the ACT menu and would use these to pacify foes. Usually, only one of these was effective at convincing the foe not to fight. So if you had two ACT commands in a battle, you either picked the right one and pacified the foe on the next turn or you picked the wrong one and the battle took more turns to complete. This wasn't at all different than having two elemental spells and ending battles sooner if you chose the enemy's weakness. The game mechanics as a set of abstract functions and rules were no different than the most banal menu based combat systems, Undertale just changed the representation of the abstractions. In short, I never got as into the game as others did. Charming experience, mediocre game.

Deltrune, on the other hand, is a good game on top of having all the charm and atmosphere of its predecessor. The shift is like going from Dragon Warrior to Dragon Warrior II. There's party members now! There's also spells and a resource gauge that you build up through various actions. Each of the three characters have their own set of commands and serve a unique function. Your main character has the ACT command and offers context sensitive actions to pacify opponents just like the original game, and then there's a wizard character who has access to support magic that consumes tension points on use. There's a new mechanic in place so that enemies can become tired through certain actions. The wizard's first spell spares tired enemies. Now at first, this doesn't look any different then pacifying enemies normally, but it offers another method to peacefully remove foes from battle that can be quicker but also costs a resource that you have to manage. That's the first thing I noticed that makes Deltrarune different - you actually have interesting stuff and there's different solutions. In Undertale, you either killed the foe or spared them by doing the one specific action to pacify them, Deltarune gives you a few more options to achieve one goal. Sparing tired foes didn't happen to often during my playthrough, but it's a step up.

Now, let's talk about the third party member. At first you don't control her, instead you have to work around her. She's blood thirsty, ignores your commands, and always attacks enemies. Not good if you're doing a pacifist run, however, you can warn enemies about her! At the start of certain battles, you'll need to take a round to warn the opponents and then they'll be able to dodge her attacks while the other two work on pacifying them. I was impressed but after a few battles I began to feel tired of having to warn on the first turn of every battle and then - what do you know - she gets tired herself of hanging around us heroes and leaves. I'm back to two party members for a good stretch and then, once I'm starting to get tired of the way they work together, I get that third party member back with a new outlook as a full playable character that I can now issue commands to.

This is the thing that made see Deltarune as not just good compared to Undertale, but a good RPG in general. It consistently changes up the combat situations so that nothing overstays its welcome. Just when you start getting tired of something - the situation changes and you have to get a grip on new strategies to deal with whatever comes your way.

This applies to enemy encounters as well. There aren't many and they go by quickly. In Undertale, you might find the ACT command that pacifies the enemy and then keep doing that each turn until their name turns yellow and then take another turn to spare them. In Deltarune, if you use the correct ACT command, then that's enough. You only need to do the action once per enemy to get its name to turn yellow and all your party members can spare foes so basically you'll usually be able to pacify and spare an opponent in a single round. Enemy formations and choosing which enemy to target is nice as well. There are support enemies who are easily identified by heart-themed clothing and staffs. There attacks are easier to avoid then others so try pacifying more fearsome stuff first and save support enemies for last. Nothing too complex, but a nice touch and I like using an enemy's look to telegraph something like that to the player.

Then there are Chrono Trigger inspired duel techs and surprisingly, they work better than Chrono Trigger. Yes, CT is one of my all time favorites but its cracks have shown over the years. My biggest gripe with CT is how duel techs to the same amount of damage as just having the characters attack individually. The first boss, Yakra, teaches you the utility of this. It counterattacks everything so it's necessary to dish out the same amount of damage in the least amount of hits to avoid the counterattacks. But after the Yakra battle, this rarely ever comes up again. Deltrarune's duel techs aren't about damage but rather access to more effective context-sensitive ACT commands. These are typically versions of the commands that will target all enemies instead of just one. Very useful to warn all enemies at once that your berserker is about to dish out some damage.

A lot of little things come together to make Deltrarune feel like a full game to me in a way that Undertale never did. It offers multiple solutions to spare enemies, a varied toolbox of status effects and non-damaging commands that all feel useful and I never feel like I'm wasting turns, an element of resource management (and if you suck at the bullet hell segments like I do, managing TP for healing becomes super important), and nothing overstays its welcome, once you figure out a solution, you've already proven to the game that you've solved the problem and it gives you new stuff instead of making you solve the same puzzle a million more times. There's a decent number of ways to interact with enemies and work both with and around your own party members so that it never feels like I'm just mashing the same command over and over. It's a massive step up from Undertale and I'm excited to see where it goes. I thoroughly enjoyed Deltarune, not just as a spin off to Undertale, or as a demo of an eventual game, but as a good game in its own right. I would high recommend it.

Is anyone on here playing it or interested in doing so? Please, share your thoughts!