Comment on Have JRPG battles become a sub-system?
De_Narm@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
From my point of view, you’ve got it wrong, but so do many developers. A good JRPG is all about resource management. Your HP, MP, items, money and the balance between these and your EXP and equipment. Combat is simply a drain on your resources up until the final boss, which should require more strategy. This needs something akin to a dungeon without constant healing and money being a thight resource. Once you’re in a dungeon, you should either be prepped or doomed.
You mostly see this done in dungeon crawlers, think any Etrian Odyssey game for example. Persona 5 goes for the same thing, as do most Shin Megami Tensei games.
Most modern games, however, are overly lenient with either money or healing. Often times, combat is even easy enough to not even drain your resources. Once you’ve destroyed this balance, you need something else to keep attention and that’s where I think your observation comes in.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Is this a modern/old dichotomy? Playing through Metaphor right now, I agree that they go with the old-school dungeon crawler approach, but Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII are definitely not modern, and I don’t think they’d fall into the same bucket.
De_Narm@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Not entirely, however, I feel as though proper resource management got less common over time. While the ideas are still present in modern games, they tend to be easy enough that most resources can just be horded. Most people don’t even use consumables nowadays.