LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

Giving bosses the ability to cast Esuna is a nice excuse to make them vulnerable to statuses. It still doesn't solve the problem of, say, paralyze or sleep, though. You pretty much have to make the boss be at least heavily resistant to that kind of thing, if not immune.

To say nothing of instant death spells. If you think that statuses should be usable in every battle, what do you think about instant death spells? What about fire spells, should those be usable in every battle?

Really, there's no good reason for every skill to be equally useful in every battle. We have elements for a reason. The player is given a variety of abilities. Making enemies have different vulnerabilities gives the player reasons to use different strategies in different battles. If the player can do the same thing in every battle, the game quickly gets old. It is useful to lock players out of certain things to add challenge. Though this can certainly go too far and make battles be ultra-boring if you lock them out of too much.

I think such a choice still feels like it's what you're supposed to do.

When you get an option at the beginning of the game regarding your difficulty level, they're clearly both different options for gameplay. But when the game gives you the Ultima spell, you're... supposed to use it. The game is not telling you that you have a new difficulty option, it's just making you more powerful. That is how it feels. It feels like not using it would make any perceived difficulty be my own stupid fault, instead of the game actually providing difficulty.

Oddly, I think that if you simply add an achievement for not using the overpowered ability, then I would consider it to be a real challenge that's being provided by the game, instead of me just being stupid on purpose to give myself a challenge. Hmm.

Game updated! Some changes were made to early parts of the game to make it less tedious, including a slightly scarcer encounter rate, and a shop inside the first dungeon if you're not playing on hard mode.

Also, the font patch has been added to the main installer - it should no longer be necessary to download, but I'm leaving it up in case anyone has problems.

post=140911
Sure, but when I was referring to difficulty, I was meaning how difficult it is for the average player to progress through a vanilla game, without finding the game breaking Blue Magic or advanced strategies. Hell, almost every game I know of has an eclectic way of vaporizing the difficulty, so I don't consider that when thinking of how challenging a game is.

If a game has an eclectic way of vaporizing the difficulty, then that is how easy it is. Playing it suboptimally and saying it's hard should not count. If you want to consider it in any way hard, you have to be playing optimally and have it still be hard.

The fact that you're good at RPGs doesn't make the game's easiness less authentic. It makes the game easy to people who are good at RPGs. Which is really the same thing as being easy in general, since RPGs are dreadfully simple to be good at.

On the other hand, if a game is easy to people who are bad at it, then it doesn't even qualify as a game. To be a game, the player has to be able to win or lose. If you pretty much can't lose, it's pretty much not a game.

On-topic: games which have eclectic ways of vaporizing the difficulty are one of my pet peeves. Though, I realize that getting rid of all such ways requires an amount of testing that RPG Maker games cannot afford to undertake.

The thing about status effects is that a lot of them are inherently "instant win". If you paralyze an enemy, it can no longer do anything at all. If you make it do half damage, or take double damage, you can easily overpower it. If you poison it, you win 10 rounds later even if you do nothing but heal and defend for the rest of the battle. Minor debuffs to enemy stats do not give you an "instant win" mechanic, and therefore should be no problem to use against bosses - they are therefore outside the scope of this debate.

This is fine in a normal battle. When you're fighting 2-6 enemies of similar power, and you can win the battle in only a few rounds, then a 50% chance to hit with one of these effects for a 4 round duration is fair. Anything weaker would be quite useless, in fact.

In a boss battle, with one strong enemy that takes 10+ rounds to kill, that same chance becomes ridiculously overpowered. If you can get the status off, then the entire challenge of the boss disappears. Alternately, if the boss is still difficult after using the status, then it's probably impossible to beat without the status. A 50% chance to stun the boss for four rounds? Man, okay, I'll just have two of my party members cast that status. It'll almost certainly hit. Then the boss can't do anything the whole fight! Woo!

To compensate, there are a few things you can do:

1) Make statuses have much lower hit rates, or much lower durations. However, this makes them become useless against anything except bosses.
2) Make statuses have much lower hit rates or durations, but only against bosses. Essentially, your bosses will resist status effects, similar to the way monsters resist elements. This lowers the chance of easymode-vaporizing the boss, but still lets it happen rarely. So someone who is lucky (or who reloads the game until they get lucky) can get around having to use the proper tactics or being the proper level for your bosses, and thus avoid having to deal with the challenges you intended for them to face.
3) Make statuses not work at all against bosses. This makes statuses rather more boring, especially if your normal enemies aren't difficult enough to merit using statuses on.
4) Make statuses work, but give bosses ways to continue being a challenge even through them. For instance, a boss could be able to be put to sleep, but if you do so then allies will appear to aid it. This is rather hard to do well, and can often feel like a cheap gimmick to the player.

As you can see, none of these options are perfect - they all have significant problems, which is why there isn't any one option that games have all decided to use.