Why did Dragon Warrior 2 get so hard?

By the time I reached the Sea Cave, I was already accustomed to clearing dungeons across two or three trips. Resources are scarce and safety nets few in Dragon Warrior 2, so dungeon delving was typically a slow, cautious process. I’d stretch my MP and Herbs as far as I could, always hoping to map out just one more hallway so that I could ignore it on my next run. The eternal question was when to decide I had pushed my luck far enough and make my way back to town.

The Sea Cave usually made that call for me. Most of my visits ended in death, when fortune either killed off poor Prince Cannock (his “Outside” spell my quickest and safest means of egress), wiped out my spellcasters’ MP stores with strange jigs, or simply overwhelmed and destroyed my party. The most structurally complex dungeon yet, the Sea Cave’s hidden basement culminated in a non-Euclidean stairway maze with damaging lava floors. All told, it took me six or seven visits to chart the upper corridors, navigate the magmatic labyrinth below, and claim the Eye of Malroth from the heart of the cavern. I died so many times that by my last visit I could barely afford the cost of reviving my dead comrades after wiping out. The next dungeon, the Cave to Rhone, proved only longer, deadlier, and lousier with mazes, dead ends and guessing games.

This part of the game was really hard, but why? What feeling or experience could Dragon Warrior 2 have been trying to effect by ramping up the difficulty so sharply at this late stage of the game? It felt incongruous at first. Until this point DW2, like Dragon Warrior 1 before it, felt refreshingly transparent and clear-thinking with its design language. DW1 employed RPG staples in ways that struck me as eye-openingly purposeful: its world map, its random encounters, experience points and equipment… And DW2 had so far been no less thoughtful. So what purpose could this difficulty spike have been meant to serve?

There’s nothing unusual about an RPG becoming more difficult as it goes. My fear at this unusually steep jump in difficulty is that it’s an accident, the product of thoughtlessness or “outdated” game design sensibility, and that the best (and maybe even intended) solution is to grind. This worry mounted as I embarked on trek after doomed trek into the Cave to Rhone, growing preemptively resentful of what seemed like an inevitable training detour in my near future. Generally speaking, I don’t mind grinding that much (in fact, I unambiguously enjoyed it in DW1). But the threat of having to upset my journey’s pacing and sink my time into reaching an arbitrary power threshold in order to advance made me feel like I had foolishly misjudged the game, which I felt had demonstrated all game long that grinding was not among its expectations of me. Statistical power requirements for progress had virtually always been satisfied in the natural course of exploring the world; if confronted with danger truly beyond my means to resist, I had been able to find somewhere else to go more suitable to my level (my habit in the open-ended “boat part” of the game). But at this late point in the game, all of the boat part’s many quest threads were converging on the singular path of the Sea Cave, and my current power level wasn’t enough to let me fight my way through my problems like I was used to. After I was able, with some persistence (and more frustration), to squeak through the Sea Cave and the Cave to Rhone, I was rewarded with the still deadlier environment of the Rhone region overworld. Was it time to finally face the inevitable and commit my next couple play sessions to grinding out levels for the final dungeon?

Years of playing RPGs have made grinding an instinctual response when I feel underpowered, but I think to indulge that instinct here would have been to misunderstand DW2’s communication, applying genre logic that the game was not actually operating on. Still hoping to see my trust in the game born out (and to escape unnecessary gruntwork), I began to consider: What if I’m just supposed to run from everything? By making dungeons prohibitively long and costly to win every fight in, maybe DW2 was inviting me to stretch my resources further by escaping from combat. That was, after all, how I got through the final sections of the first game. If my hunch was right, I should then have had a chance of beating DW2 at my current levels by avoiding combat as much as possible, making a mad dash for the boss(es) and preserving as much HP and MP as I can along the way. If I could do this, I could consider the game’s communication with me to have been clear and consistent.

This theory wasn’t born of wishfulness alone; there were two observations that led me to believe running might have been the best option.

First, the difficulty of the Sea Cave shifted my cost-benefit calculus in favor of fleeing. Prior to then, my habit had been to fight each battle I encountered, as long as I thought I could win. In the Sea Cave I could no longer afford to maintain this policy. While I could still survive most individual battles, the collective strain on my resources was just too great (even when I was lucky enough to avoid enemies’ strange jigs). Graver still, individual party members would die more frequently and unpredictably than ever before. With very limited means to revive fallen comrades in the field, they tended to stay dead for the duration of the run. With one or two party members dead, the others were not liable to last much longer. When everyone died, in addition to my progress I would lose half my gold, and since this happened frequently my savings evaporated faster than I could recoup them in battle. Before long I went broke - leaving me with nothing to lose. (Note that I had visited every shop in the world by this point; anything I might have wanted to save up for, I had already bought.)

With my party already half dead, I had no hope of making my way deeper in or safely out of the cavern by force, no means to restore my health or teleport out, and less than ever to lose by dying. In these circumstances, the choice to start running from enemies became obvious, giving me a shot of making it a little farther before perishing completely. Surprising me with its high success rate, running quickly became my most relied upon survival tool, ultimately carrying Prince Midenhall through to the heart of the Sea Cave on his own (albeit just barely). Though I would resume my strategy of fighting every battle once I arrived in the Cave to Rhone, the game had given me several incentives to try running, and now I knew that it worked.

Second: shortly after this, Dragon Warrior 2 started telling me not to grind.

When I finally arrived in the Rhone region overworld, I found it rife with enemies hurling instant death spells at frightening rates. Naturally, I died to them a lot. Even with the local monolith offering free recovery and saving between fights, with death so likely to take one or all of my characters each encounter, grinding seemed like a grim prospect. It’s possible that with some persistence it might have become easier, but with little confidence that higher levels would help me resist instant death, I wasn’t eager to try. And because the game had never asked me to grind before, I was especially hesitant to accept that it was asking me to start now. Instead, noticing that the best way to survive was to spend as little time in combat as possible, I wondered if this wasn’t the latest cue to avoid battle.

What I don’t want to get lost in this description is how much acting on this interpretation felt like an act of trust. I went from being dismayed with Dragon Warrior 2, to suddenly optimistic, and the feeling at the heart of it was “maybe the game is trying to tell me something, and I should listen”. Seeing how far I could progress by running felt less like neutral experimentation than like a sort of give-and-take. “Try it and see,” the game said. “Well, you haven’t steered me wrong yet,” I replied.

And so by fleeing aggressively, I arrived at Hargon’s castle in one piece. I quickly learned that the enemies inside were generally weaker than those on the way to the castle, and less likely to hammer me with death magic. Surprising me further, the part of the dungeon with random encounters was fairly brief: just two or three short floors. The boss battles beyond them, up to and including the two-stage final boss fight, were appropriately hard for endgame boss battles, but with a little persistence each victory was attainable. To be sure, I died many times in the process - maybe a dozen, no more than two. But the several hours I spent throwing myself at the wall of Hargon’s castle felt like a better deal than spending the same amount of time grinding for what would have been a marginal advantage in the same process.

When I finished the game without having made a training detour, it felt like the game was saying “thank you for trusting me.” I felt witnessed and vindicated. It might be silly, but I thought “thank you for honoring that trust”.

So it was possible to finish the game in this way, and whether or not this experience was intended by developers, it arose from what felt to me like an ongoing process of communication with the game. If this experience is my answer to “why was the end of the game so hard?”, then another question arises now: why is this the experience that Dragon Warrior 2 wanted me to have? Even supposing that this experience was an intended one, why would anyone want me to have this one over any other? However unfashionable it is to fixate on authorial intent, I have a personal stake in understanding the motivation for unusual design directions; feeling it could be informative for my own game design practice, the next portion of this essay concerns this question.

My most generous answer is that the endgame’s difficulty had dramatic motivations. On the premise that the end of the game should represent its dramatic climax, there’s cause for difficulty to increase over the course of the game and peak in its final sections. The greatest stakes demand the greatest vulnerability; for this, a qualitative change in the experience of difficulty is more emphatic than a quantitative one. As the game went on, difficulty increased and the survival strategies I adopted early in the game were less and less effective. I squeaked by on thinner margins until finally, in the Sea Cave, those margins shrunk to zero, prompting me to adopt new strategies for the final three dungeons - a qualitative change. I can imagine an alternate version of the game in which the margins of my survival shrank on a different timeline and never reached a zero point; in this version, the final three dungeons are still the hardest part, but if the strategies I’ve been using all game long still work, the vulnerability I take on is pretty minor. What kind of ultimate ordeal is Rhone if I can overcome it the exact same way I have everything else?

If this is DW2’s angle, then its stake in discouraging me from grinding in Rhone becomes clearer: in addition to upsetting the dramatic pacing (particularly since grinding had hitherto been so absent from the rhythm of the game), training to a comfortable level before Hargon’s castle would let me maintain my familiar playstyle, avoid vulnerability, and trick myself into a less pointed dramatic arc.

The request for vulnerability here doesn’t just facilitate a dramatic experience but also serves the game’s vision of heroism. Heroic fantasy has frequently, in my experience, been concerned with the willingness of the hero to overcome situations of great vulnerability. Something important about the strategy of running away, which depends on luck, is that committing to it meant accepting failure, probably multiple failures, as a much more central part of the process than in the strategy of fighting every battle. Running greatly improved my odds in Rhone, but it didn’t guarantee my survival (this is the death magic zone, remember), and it didn’t help me at all when I was fighting the bosses in Hargon’s castle. It was perseverance as much as flight that saw me to the end of the game. The willingness not just to face likely death, but to do so over and over, resolved not to give up until you win despite the odds - that’s heroism! Or at least, that’s the trope. Whatever your own definition, acting out this kind of unshakeable determination certainly paints a more vivid picture of fantasy heroism than toiling for stat gains until you can steamroll the ultimate evil with a stacked deck.

Of course, that's all interpretation. It doesn't prove anything about game's intent, which, despite my speculation, may always be a mystery. This is where I have to admit my limitations: I don't have good language for what I'm trying to do here. I'm not yet comfortable with the language of personal interpretation. Ascribing my own meaning to my experience is one thing, but the sense I need to make is of why the game is like this. It almost isn't even a question of authorial intent, because that only represents the conscious portion of motivation, and there are so many decisions that go into a design process that they can't all be conscious ones. Add to this the chaos of team development and technical limitations and localization (damn it all, the Rhone monolith doesn't even revive you in the Japanese version!) and suddenly the question of intentions starts to feel completely futile. But there's still an object of curiosity underneath all the chaos, and the only way I feel I can get at it is to try to imagine why I might have made the same decisions if I had made the game myself. This is a kind of after-the-fact rationalization that I'm embarrassed to be caught engaging in. (Why am I so desperate for it to all make sense? Can't I just let this old game be a little flawed and inexplicable?) Well, the rationalizations are bound to continue until I can better understand the tension I'm feeling. Even as I'm wrong, I'm learning.

Covering Allies in Final Fantasy Legend 3

In October I replayed Final Fantasy Legend 3 for the first time since childhood. This was mainly driven by a desire to restore the comfort and optimism of the age (10 or 11, maybe) I associate with first exploring the game, and most of what moved me in my replay was rooted in the same nostalgia. As such, my critical apparatus was mostly disabled as I focused on inhabiting the weirdness of its eerily small, waterlogged overworld and casually strange locales. Despite this, a few quirks of the battle system stood out to me. I have some particular words of praise for the game's handling of the "Guard" command.

Tucked away on the second page of in-battle commands, Guard is similar to Final Fantasy's recurring "Cover" command, allowing the user to protect a chosen ally from harm by interposing their own body and suffering incoming damage on their ward's behalf. There are a few things to note about Guard:

• It's universally available: every character in the game can use it, regardless of their class (Human, Monster, Cyborg, etc.), at any point in the game.
• It has priority in the round, i.e. it takes effect before any attacks are executed in the round, even if the attacker is faster than the Guard user.
• It completely protects the target from multi-target attacks. In fact, the Guard user doesn't even take extra damage in these circumstances—it simply negates damage to the protected ally. (That's not vital to the current discussion, but it's a big, juicy cherry on top.)

The decision to make this ability available to every character is noteworthy on its own. Most turn-based RPGs, in my reckoning, are biased toward offensive play. As often as RPG stories celebrate heroic acts and bonds of friendship and love, seemingly few games offer the ability to directly protect a vulnerable party member from harm. Instead, care between combatants mostly takes the form of after the fact healing. Where Cover-type abilities exist, they're usually a specialization of certain characters or classes (usually knights and paladins, in Final Fantasy). In this light, FFL3's universally available Guard command is, if nothing else, unusual.

Further credit is due for making Guard not only universal but robust. The decisions to give it priority in turn order and make it effective against multi-target attacks ensure its dependability. The first avoids the pitfall of tying its activation to the user's speed, which would render the technique useless against fast enemies; the second ensures that a use of Guard protects its target no matter what attack the enemy uses. Not coincidentally, bosses tend to be fast and use a lot of multi-target spells. The combined result in my playthrough was that Guard virtually always behaved just how I needed it to, no matter who used it. When the need arose to protect a vulnerably ally from damage, Guard served that purpose reliably and effectively enough to spend a turn on it.

The final point is the most important one: the need for targeted protection actually arose enough to take advantage of Guard. Bosses in FFL3 tend toward the difficult side, but by the time I reached Pureland (roughly the second half of the game) they picked up an especially nasty trick: Whereas the pre-Pureland bosses acted at a consistent point in the round as determined by their speed (like any other enemy), the bosses in Pureland had a roughly equal chance of attacking at the very beginning or the very end of each round. This allowed them consecutive actions, potentially striking the same ally twice in a row without a chance to heal their injuries in between. By this point in the adventure, bosses hit single targets hard enough to kill them in two hits, which presented a serious threat in a game where the power to revive fallen allies in battle comes very late.

In these deadly encounters Guard became essential, as its priority in the round allowed me to intervene even when the boss made the first move in the round. Consequently, throughout Pureland, Guarding turned battles where I might otherwise have flailed in frustration against the RNG into tense, thoughtful victories. I survived the encounter with Dahak, who felled two of my party members early in the fight, because the surviving three could enact a mostly stable rotation of covering and healing each other between taking swipes at the boss. The four or five boss battles in which I predicated my victory on judicious Guarding were the most strategically rewarding in the game, standing out as high points in my time with FFL3's mixed bag of a battle system.

Final Fantasy Legend 3's approach to Cover-style protection was fun for me, but it's also kind of a mundane success. To accurately identify the conditions for an interesting ability to see strategic usage and fulfill them isn't brilliance—it's just good fundamentals. But fundamentals are worth appreciating, especially in a genre with a reputation for shallow imitation, and in an era whose design values aren't always understood or agreed with in modern analysis. FFL3's Guard experiment feels especially relevant to me as I contemplate team dynamics in RPG Maker 2000, where the default battle system supports few defensive options besides plain old healing. Isn't it weird that this isn't a more normal part of RPG skillsets? Maybe this is a sign that I should finally switch to a more modern engine. Ah, but I'm not done with my nostalgia quite yet...

an account of space and meaning in dragon quest 1

some feelings of place…

• wandering to see what areas still new to me are safe to travel
• wandering to see what old places i’ve overlooked
• retreading familiar paths to return to the place where i died
• braving an unfamiliar path in hopes of arriving at new opportunities
• puttering around an area looking for fights
• looking for secrets (real or hoped for) hidden in a place
• reaching a new area on a dangerous path and seeing that safety is within sight (the green plains around cantlin)
• crossing an invisible boundary and realizing you've entered the danger zone
• passing through a region where you died a long time ago and comparing your present strength
• reaching a fork in a safe road and wondering where each path leads
• reaching a fork in a dangerous road and wondering which path will waste your time and resources
• realizing your explorations have led you in an unexpected (and perhaps costly) circle
• passing a conspicuous natural feature or formation and wondering if it will take on new meaning later
• seeing a pleasing natural feature or formation and enjoying the look of it
• exploring a new path and realizing you've found a shortcut to a familiar destination
• exploring an old path and wishing you had gone the other way because you know it's faster
• leaving the safety of town in tip-top shape and feeling powerful
• reaching the safety of town in rough shape and feeling relieved
• reaching a new stretch of coastline and spying a familiar area across the water
• hearing about a location and wondering how to get there, when you'll go there, and what it's like
• looking at a nearby location and anticipating danger if you get too close
• looking at an inaccessible area and wondering when you'll go there
• looking at a seemingly inaccessible area and realizing that you've already been there, and that where you are now is someplace you've previously seen but could not reach

  (click here to see the map at its fullest size)

 

meaning on the map

meaning is a relationship with a space, and relationships do not form in an instant but are constructed as we anticipate a space, exist in it, remember it, anticipate it again, and so on. in my view there are 3 pillars supporting meaning-creation in dragon quest’s spaces.

 

 the first pillar: combat...

... including all of its constituent elements: turn-based fighting, random encounters, stats, levels, equipment, experience points. combat charges the map by adding danger. the threat of death costing time and money (concentrated time) allows random encounters to provoke fear and ease, tension and relief. low walking speeds and frequent random encounters make return trips a lengthy setback, and high equipment prices make every hard-earned gold piece lost on death sting. the threat of death varies with enemy strength and colors the world space on a gradient from safe to hopeless. the threat level is felt in your current location when you ask yourself where you need to go and whether your current resources will suffice to get you there. the tone and confidence of your answers continually tinge the tiles and regions of the map.

 

 

the second pillar: lack of clear direction

i spend hours drifting around the map trying to figure out: where am i meant to go? where, in this dangerous world, can i go? and then finally, having hit the point where the way ahead is so deadly my only hope of survival is to run from every enemy and hope for the best, where must i go? i survey the fringes of continents looking for missed caves and other hotspots. no one tells me where the next place to go is. wandering in search of clues is much of, maybe most of the experience.

no place is safe the first time i can access it. crossing into an area for the first time is always dangerous, and the first priority is finding out how dangerous. can i survive there? for how long? how far will i have to stretch my resources to find out what there is there? how much further will i be able to travel after another level or armor upgrade? exploring new terrain for secrets and rewards is a process of actively testing the water, making sure i’m not in over my head yet. discovery happens only inside this process, never at my leisure, always at my peril.

rpgs sometimes signal the intended direction of progress by presenting differentially survivable combat zones. if you can’t survive here, it means you’re not supposed to come here yet. dragon quest 1 muddies the signal by frequently making the way “forward” too forbidding to take on, not without an impractical amount of grinding. it asks me to plunge into danger beyond what i can resist with my powers of violence. none of the options available to me are "safe", but one of them will be a little safer to push through.

but even where i can push through the danger, what does progress look like? victories seldom yield new leads. every dungeon i clear is hard-fought but never provides me any direction. is the silver harp relevant to my quest? did rescuing gwaelin really change anything? what does the fighter's ring even do? (nothing, it turns out.) to identify my next objective, i return to old dead ends. i test waters that were too deadly for me the last time. and, if i don’t have any better ideas, i grind for another level or the next armor and see what that changes.

grinding, then, feels more like a passport than a key. i grind a lot, but except for at the very end of the game, the goal is not usually to facilitate meeting a specific goal (beat this dungeon, make it to this location); usually i have a couple dead ends on my radar, and grinding answers the open-ended question of which might open up to me with one more level or the next armor upgrade. sometimes the answer isn’t even on my radar. this experience comes on top of the feeling that i never know just what i’m "supposed" to do, so whenever i set about grinding, it feels like maybe it isn’t actually necessary? maybe i've missed something? but it's my own choice to do it. this is how i choose to continue exploring the world, rather than the price i pay to progress along a clear path.

 

 

the third pillar: the structure of the world map itself

the structure of the world map ensures i visit most places multiple times. the map is two-dimensional but its functional shape is largely linear, two main paths leading away from the town, west toward cantlin and east toward rimuldar. i walk these paths many times to revisit old areas (rimuldar is like a secondary base of operations) but i also walk them to visit new ones, because new areas are often farther down the old path, or off a different branch. revisiting areas offers a chance to reflect on how the present circumstances compare to the last time i was there, reinforcing old layers of meaning, or else adding new ones as circumstances change. as i grow in power, the land across the bridge cools from suicidal to cautious to carefree. when that territory loses its threat, each trifling monster that approaches me just to run away is a reminder of how vulnerable i once was. the uncertain direction of progress ensures that i have many chances to reflect on old spaces as i wander them at length in search of clues.

the real story of dragon quest is here on its world map, in the small-scale stories of survival on the expanse, and in the larger-scale stories of evolving relationships to space. crucially, the end state of these relationships doesn’t always look like violent domination: much of the map, as well as the interior of the dragonlord’s castle, remained beyond my ability to conquer with force. the oldest, gentlest areas are pacified with the encounter prevention magic that becomes necessary to cut the tedium of repeated travel. this prevents all the space-relationships from converging on the same end state with time. while i lament that the relationships i form with map spaces are defined in all cases by the violence i commit within them, they nevertheless feel personal, rooted in my own experience, arising organically from the interactions i take with dragon quest’s systems inside these spaces as i return to each one at different points in my journey.

 

conclusions 

one important function of these layered relationships is memory. fantasy worlds want to draw us in, but how do we draw them into us? how do they resist getting their juice sucked out like an orange wedge and discarded when we’re done with them? their ability to resist disposability is their richness: richness of lore, richness of thematic meaning... dragon quest 1 draws another kind of richness from intimacy, found in the multi-textured, evolving relationships i formed with its spaces. in this way it withstands the pull of oblivion, like double and triple knotting a shoelace: time tugs at the memories but they remain fast. it took me three months to find these words and the physical geometry of the map is still vivid in my mind, its emotional landscape still charged.

dragon quest counts on this richness to carry its ending, in which we’re invited to roam the world now completely free of random encounters. what may seem like a waste of time, retreading the map with nothing new to see, is, in another light, an important opportunity. all through dragon quest its spaces are inhabited, reinhabited, revisited - never left behind and forgotten. but the game has to end eventually. if we didn't have a chance to take stock of our relationship to the world map at the point of the relationship’s closure and to reflect on all the ways in which it's evolved, we really would be sucking out the juice out of the orange and throwing it away. the best proof of thoughtful, empathetic, and coherent design in dragon quest 1 is that when it's over, it understands what we need to say goodbye to.

forgive me, forget you: villnoire in review

caution: this review contains just about every spoiler in villnoire.

villnoire's moralizing about forgiveness denies that victims of racist violence (or even just personal wrongdoing) have a legitimate right to their feelings about it. the wisest survivors sympathize with the complex situation of their offender, and excuse his actions without reservation or resentment. 

when villnoire does allow survivors to show pain, it's in the form of anger, which the game condemns as a deathtrap, devoid of any value, destined to consume them unless they purge it by forgiving the perpetrator. 

moreover, villnoire shows us time and again, anger is dangerous. it's a slippery slope to murderous retribution. and, as the party's moral authority and sole female voice insists, murder is always wrong.

when it comes time to face the big bad, the genocidal fascist king vorian, villnoire stresses the need to extend that principle of forgiveness to him, but this practice is absent from the ending. it's of the utmost importance that we forgive vorian, but somehow not quite important enough to show. forgiveness is only worth depicting when it's for the protagonists. why?

one of the most important observations villnoire makes is that the ultimate cause of racist violence isn't the individuals that perpetuate it, but the conditions that create them. vivian argues that this is why assassinating vorian isn't just wrong (another can of worms), it would be an ineffective solution.

so when, at the end of the game, the party enacts a coup d'etat, incarcerating the racist king so his kindhearted and non-racist brother takes the throne, the story betrays its own arguments.

the game's understanding of systemic racism is proven totally immaterial. to replace an evil autocrat with a benevolent one and call it a day suggests that the oppression of druids was the product of one man's cruelty after all - a point the game text denies repeatedly.

instead of meaningfully challenging the hereditary monarchy or societal attitudes that created and entrenched vorian, villnoire mostly uses the notion of systemic violence to absolve the protagonist of culpability for his participation in genocide.

in the end, the game only commits to its ideals of forgiveness when it means people stop being mad at lukas. he's a good person deep down. the only moral option is to forgive him. to villnoire, anger is a kind of harm - it's almost murder, after all - and good people don't deserve that.

what do bad ones deserve? if villnoire believed forgiveness was meant to for the worst of the worst, it would show it. the opportunity to have second chances, to learn and grow and do better, the right to prove your deep-down goodness is available on-screen only for those we already know to be fundamentally good. the fate of bad people doesn't matter enough to warrant concern or camera, as long as there's compassion for the good. that isn't forgiveness. that isn't justice, love, or revolution. that's just solipsism.

the hollowness of villnoire's theming is disappointing because the foundation of a better story is there. the first half of the game sets up a lot of interesting relationships and tensions between characters. it almost tells an affecting (if simplistic) story of found family among those harmed by fascism across all levels of the social hierarchy, and from start to finish it feels like a complete rpg narrative without ever dragging or becoming tedious. it even teases the possibility of a more radical politics of forgiveness and transformation. but the second half can't deliver on those promises in a satisfying way because the because story cares more about vindicating lukas than about empathizing with the victims of the atrocity committed through him.

there's much more worth critiquing in villnoire. i've hardly touched on its untenable stance on violence (revolutionary violence is necessary and good, as long as you don't kill anyone), or its subtle but pervasive sexism, or the many other ways it misunderstands systemic racism. despite these issues, i enjoyed my time with villnoire. i wanted it to resonate more than it did. that means i saw something good in it - so i have to forgive its faults, right? it didn't materialize in this game, but maybe it will in the next one. i look forward to seeing what little wing guy makes next.

you can download villnoire for free at itch.io or rpgmaker.net.

for more thoughts on the game, read dari's review at indie hell zone.

the bad fight

so i've spent the past 6 months working on and off on rpgmaker games. mostly on, to my credit, and a lot of the off was spent writing. but in my mental task list, the rpg i started formally working on in december is my main endeavor, and everything else has been a side project. through all of this i've been holding onto this idea of making short rpgmaker games, really simple, straightforward ones i could complete in a week or two, that are just series of battles without story or context, just playing with different mechanical ideas within the confines of rm2k's default battle system. party dynamics, enemy balance questions, feelings of battle. ironically these supposedly lightweight, non-blocking rpg experiments have been blocked in my mental task queue behind the main rpg i'm working on - which was supposed to be short and lightweight itself, before i stepped into the whirlpool of adding a "simple" framing story. but they've remained on the horizon as something to do after, even if i find myself too busy with work to pursue larger projects. (actually, i think this idea came about whenever it was i played 50 short games)

well, finding myself with some free time yesterday evening, too late in the day for a more concerted work effort, i started sketching out ideas for some of these simple 'battle series' games. trying to lay out an interesting 2-person party dynamic i encountered some familiar tensions.

there's a notable difference between designing encounters to be completed in a specific order by a fixed party, and making random encounters to be fought in arbitrary order and number. the first invites question: why this fight, this way, at this time? why are the fights in this order? what makes this experience, which has been individually curated, worthwhile? there's a pressure to make it internally satisfying; it invites a kind of puzzle-designing approach. what is the solution? random encounters on the other hand have an answer handy to all these questions: it was chance. you weren't "meant" to have this specific fight at this specific time, under these specific conditions. the rules were written to define a possibility space, and this specific cadence of fights emerged from that space by the forces of randomness. it's essentially generative, in a simple way. the goal in writing this isn't to put internal meaning on individual fights, but on their sum total. to overdesign random encounters with narrow paths to victory creates formal repetition, which can feel like a waste of time. to leave them loosely designed creates only incidental repetition, which can be filtered out. it's easy to be angry at a scripted series of fights for being one fight too long, failing to end at the perfect moment and becoming a chore. it's harder to be angry at a random sequence for the same. the rng doesn't know better. the designer does.

it's scary to underdesign a fixed sequence of fights because if the purpose of an individual fight isn't clear, it feels like filler. it has no point, it's just there to artificially extend the game. it's harder to trust that it has a long-term purpose. even if it whittles you down, why wasn't it at least fun? why curate individual challenges if you're not going to make them good? this is the logic that spins in my head. i don't necessarily agree with it, but it's hard not to be give into it, consciously or not. i'm doing level design, which is like game design for levels, and it is right to make your game design good game design. prescriptive notions of quality haunt every step of the process, largely because i don't have any other logic available to turn to when it comes time to create something from nothing. i've seen "good game design", so i can attempt to imitate it inside the constraints i've created for myself through the decisions i could make on my own.

i feel unsatisfied as i do this because i know that it's limiting. in practice it reduces individual battles to math puzzles with optimal solutions built in. i fell asleep last night thinking about possibilities for a single-character battle series. i wanted fighting to be fast and impress a feeling of power despite being alone, but i didn't want battles to be trivial or repetitive. in order to stand up against superior forces, i'll give the main character a multi-target stun. ah, but why wouldn't i use that EVERY battle, trivializing any decision making process? well, maybe it doesn't work against everything, now i'll introduce a second enemy, one that necessitates a different response. maybe it's a hawk and it needs to be bound with gravity magic to neutralize it. now when you face a mixed group of enemies there's a meaningful decision to be made: do i disable the hawk with gravity magic, or stun the rest of its allies? that's "good game design" baby. but these meaningful decisions add up to something i think is boring. the end product for the player is a sort of internal algorithm, a mental decision tree for arriving at the right strategy for a given circumstance. i've written about this already - this is the ethos of lufia and the fortress of doom, and of my current rpgmaker project, which is concerned with the same concept. i'm not knocking this approach - it has important advantages over the even more repetitive model where enemy groups offer no resistance and the party's "algorithm" is exceedingly simple, or fails to make use of the whole breadth of their skillset. but i think it leads to me feeling like i'm making the same game over and over again. i don't want to just make better and better algorithm-builders. i want to go beyond the feeling of having one core approach and stretching it into new situations. as many good experiences as i've had from the angle of "if this fight is a puzzle, how do i solve it?" (lufia 1, into the breach, radiant historia...), it's a design ethos that i think leads to the same set of experiences. what other experiences are possible with the language of turn-based rpg combat? i like rpg combat systems so much - but what does it give me, what can it give me, beyond the satisfaction of using a fun toolkit to great effect?

so i think i have two options for where to go from here. one is to keep leaning into the algorithmic strategy angle. i still haven't done it with non-fixed encounters, and i think it might work better there because without the fixed order i can see it feeling less like grasping for the right key for a lock. i would like to one day take on the challenge of designing combat for a longer game, with mix-and-match party selection, and more complex mechanics than rpgmaker 2000 supports, where i can play more with larger, more complex character designs and where every ability feels like it plays a role in the grand strategy. in this context the spectre of "good game design" will surface in other ways, but at least it won't result in the exhaustion pressure to curate every minor encounter to perfection.

the other option is to stick with fixed battle series but let go of the pressure to overdesign. what possibilities open up if i let battles not be fun or individually challenging? are there other core activities available besides optimization, or can rpg killing/survival mechanics only build experiences about killing and survival? many other feelings come up in playing an rpg that are just taken as chaff, a byproduct of bad design or else the cost of admission, swallow it and forget about it. but the feeling of (say) another unwanted battle getting in the way of what you wanted to do is almost universal in rpgs. the action of rpgs is all about clearing obstacles, which can be fun but is often a chore. much of rpg design has become about maximizing the fun of clearing obstacles through interesting systems, customization, etc... on the assumption that the fun part is good, and the choreful part is bad. good rpgs are good because of the fun parts, which design should maximize, and in spite of the choreful parts, which should be minimized by design and ignored by players inasmuch as possible. is there room for something else? where? this is where i'm held back by not being a greater consumer/imaginer/understander of art, i don't have much of a basis on which to envision other possibilities. all i know is that when i'm submitting to the dictums of game design i feel like i'm painting myself into a corner.

**************

afterthought 1: one place i can look for inspiration is 7th saga, a game that rarely let me feel powerful. when it did, it was only empowering me enough to feel safe, or to get by reliably. there was hardly one easy win in the entire game. the battles were about survival, it really leaned into that, and the non-combat elements of the game's design reinforced it. here mundane encounters felt weighty because they all really were existential threats that could wipe the party if things went wrong (and they so easily could), and your best defense was to take them very seriously. exhausting to play, but full of intention. but that was a much more fully developed context to explore these fights in. it would be hard to convey any of this in a context-free series of fixed encounters.

afterthought 2: these question apply particularly to mundane encounters. optimization isn't usually a concern in boss battles. these ARE meant to be highly curated, and have more room to make for memorable and rightly challenging puzzles than mundane encounters. i'm less interested in designing these. i feel like boss battles are well understood. as a matter of game design they tend to have clear goals, they're the highest stakes, highest tension test of the player's ability to speak the rpg's mechanical language. a lot of memorable rpg boss fights have been made already. if i have any interest in boss fights it's in making them exciting without using gimmicks or new mechanics, grounding them in the fundamental rules of the game. i love a good gimmick boss, and i think it's good and great to break the formal constraints of a system to reach higher emotional peaks and unexpected experiences, but at the same time it often feels like a lack of confidence in the game's basic toolset.

how to never miss in lufia and the fortress of doom

lufia and the fortress of doom has no random miss chance for weapon attacks and damage spells. aside from the odd cursed sword, offensive moves land with 100% accuracy. it's an enormous mercy for a game with long meandering dungeons, full of dead ends, worthless treasures, and encounter rates that are simply insensitive.

this is not to say that attacks always land. one of the most common complaints about the game is its handling of targeting. fortress of doom joins enemies of the same species into "groups"; you can choose which group to throw a single-target attack at, but who it hits within that group is up to chance. a little strange, but you can still plan around it, especially with smaller enemy groups. the real point of frustration is the possibility of wasting turns by overcommitting to attacking one group. if two or more characters target the same group, and all the monsters in that group have died by the time the last character executes their attack, the attacker will swing at the empty space where an enemy used to stand. reviewers didn't understand why characters wouldn't redirect their attack to a living target, like most turn-based games allow - or at least default then to defending, like golden sun. instead, carelessly assigning all characters to attack the same target often means watching a parade of futile slashes play out one at a time.

i can't blame anyone for having a bad time with lufia. there are lots of valid issues to take with it, like its truly miserable dungeon design, its multiplying fetch quests, and its low opinion of women. but its targeting system, and specifically its "committed" targeting, is actually one of its smartest features. far from a sentence to unavoidably burn turns whiffing, my experience of lufia's battle system was of encounters that began and ended quickly, in which my mindfulness was rewarded with the satisfaction of watching my plans play out just as i intended and without waste, despite the uncertainty faced. i would estimate the rate at i lost attacks to overcommitment to be less than 1 in 50 - fewer than i'd lose to random chance in most games - and this low rate was easily attainable without memorizing enemy health values, tracking damage inflicted, or going out of my way to learn how enemies work. even if my experience isn't representative, it's still possible, without exerting undue effort or relying on luck.

FoD's solution to overcommitment is in establishing implicit rules for ascertaining enemy durability. these rules are broad and have exceptions, but are generally maintained. they are especially pronounced in the game's second act; they stabilize after elfrea, once you have a full party and jerin has artea's bow; and they destabilize in the third act for reasons we'll explore later. the rules allowed me to parse battle scenarios quickly and determine the quickest and least wasteful way of distributing my attacks. because the rules were consistent, i could make these judgments even when fighting unfamiliar monsters. instead of having to figure out how each new enemy worked from scratch, i only had to learn the exceptions to the rules. this approach didn't just let me leverage my knowledge of the rules to assess enemy health and allocate attacks efficiently, it created an environment of exploitable normalcy where experience and intuition translated into mastery. as long as the rules applied, i was in control.

*

FoD's enemy evaluation rules are the player-facing effects of choices in the game's numerical balance. a precise and consistent relationship exists between the damage you deal as a player and the amount of health an enemy has. the nature of this relationship is to make it easy to gauge which, and how many, attacks should be committed to each enemy. it supports an understanding of enemy health in qualitative terms rather than quantitative ones. that is, decision-making happens less often on the level of "how many points of damage?" than the level of "what combination of specific actions?". although this is not a unique space for an rpg battle system to exist in, the move away from mental math and value tracking is essential for making overcommitment avoidable.

i identify 4 design choices that empowered me to make quick, clean judgments about targeting commitments, either by generating rules, broadening the applicability of rules, or limiting the amount of content to be learned and understood:

1. low upper health bound. mundane enemies (i.e. non-bosses) have low HP relative to the player's damage. any given monster will die to some combination of, at most, 2 character's standard attacks. most will even die in one, if it's the right one. fortress of doom's tight adherence to this upper bound teaches you over time that it's wasteful to commit any combination of 3 attacks, and certain combinations of 2 attacks, to one enemy up front. the rare exception exists - the trap harps near bakku come to mind, but because they're also huge, weird, and unfamiliar, it reads as a measured irregularity to factor into your strategy of rather than a contradiction of the whole paradigm. in general, two hits were the most it took to kill anything. (footnote one)

2. close lower health bound. as low as enemy health is, it's still high enough that weaker moves, such as jerin and lufia's weapon attacks, will almost never one-shot. this is a subtler decision, but it limits the number of situations in which a weak attack can substitute for a strong one, emphasizing the difference between them in strength and purpose. in fortress of doom, two characters' attacks are never interchangeable - it always matters who is attacking whom. (footnote 2)

3: consistent attack outcomes. a given attack tends to have the same qualitative outcome against all current targets, regardless of damage and health values. the proximity of the upper and lower health bounds means that this consistency will hold within an area, and continue to hold upon progressing to a new area, as enemy stats are balanced around maintaining these bounds. consistency means that a given attack will map reliably onto a qualitative outcome: aguro's basic attack is a one-hit kill, it will one-hit kill most enemies in an area, and although it may drift into two-hit kill territory for some enemies, you can rely on it dealing damage in one-shot range throughout the current area and into the next one. the same consistency can be expected of the hero's attack, which falls in the upper end of the 2-hit kill range for all current targets. the major exceptions lie in elemental damage spells, where weakness and resistance can be tricky to learn and exploit (the main caster's elements are lightning, water, and explosions, so...), and in weapon attacks against enemies like will-o-wisps with physical resistance. 

4: low number of relevant attacks. "hero" and aguro only have physical attacks. jerin has two sets of multi-target attack spells, but they're overshadowed by her faster, cheaper, and often stronger bow. it's lufia who has the widest range of spells to worry about, although her single-target lightning spells provide the clearest benchmark for comparison. the other three party members are strongly identified with their weapon attacks. the low number of attacks on hand means fewer outcome mappings to learn and remember. 

the cumulative result of these features was that i came to understood attacks in relation to each other. if every enemy can die in some combination of two attacks, then what should i pair each attack with in order to kill? thus did FoD let me avoid numerical logic in strategic play by learning what attacks pair with each other. the function, the identity of lufia's "bolt" spell is not in the value of the damage it does but the fact that, whatever the damage, it will finish off an enemy weakened by jerin's bow or the hero's sword. the function and identity of aguro's attack is that it needs no complement; that of lufia's weapon attack is that the only complement so strong that it could kill on its own. consistency of outcome means that established pairings remain lethal as you deploy them in new contexts; you could call each pairing a rule in itself.

these rules form the body of exploitable knowledge that transfers between areas; they simplify the process of getting acquainted with new enemies and limit learning to the exceptions. whatever comes next, experience shows, won't be so strong that it can survive jerin and the hero working together. when i go to a new area, the numbers go up a little bit, the rules remain true. i can still count on it to provide an upper limit for how much it'll take for me to kill an enemy. where rules fail to apply, it's never for long, and it errs on the side of enemies being stronger than expected (i have the "old cave" in mind here). never does lufia surprise you with an enemy that dies too quickly. these strong bounds on enemy health and consistent outcomes from attacks, in terms of qualitative actions, are what kept overcommitment from ever becoming an issue.

the carefully established and maintained rules formed the basis for engaging turn-based combat. at its best, fortress of doom uses limited exceptions to the rules, in combination with elemental weakness/resistance and random enemy group composition, to keep encounters varied. for my tastes, it strikes a good balance between keeping encounters varied enough to avoid feeling repetitive, but straightforward enough to resist fatigue of constant strategizing. it asks just enough to keep me mindful through the high volume of battles and rewards that mindfulness by ending battles faster. unfortunately, FoD is not always at its best, and neglects to push back hard or regularly enough, falling into tedium and repetition only exacerbated by its ever creeping encounter rate and compounding fetch quests. but its high points are high and many enough to illuminate the role of player knowledge in rpg combat experiences, and to demonstrate the value of centering knowledge in enemy and encounter design through rules and exceptions. i hope that by describing the logic of FoD's combat design in detail i can show how many ideas it boasted worthy of new adoption and further exploration.

*

as long as the rules applied, i was in control. what happened when they didn't apply anymore?

toward the end of the game, the rules cease to apply. during the introduction to the game, you play as maxim and the heroes of the first doom island war, navigating a dungeon full of encounters against hydras and towering efreeti that look dangerous, but are trivial for your party of level 75+ veterans. at the start of the third act, when the new generation of heroes arrives on the epro continent after uncovering dual blade, many of the enemies seen in the introduction begin to appear again. symbolically this represents the return of doom island in full force: you're fighting the sinistrals for real now, just like maxim did.

the increase in stakes is accompanied by a difficulty spike. not only do you face largely unfamiliar enemies, none of whom carry over from previous areas or even, really, resemble monsters you've seen before, but also the the low hp rule suddenly falters: enemy health jumps up and previously trusted lethal pairings are no longer sufficient to kill. the relationships between party members are further upset by the arrival of "high defense" enemies like mega turtles that take drastically less damage from jerin, preventing her from "complementing" the hero or even aguro's attacks. this gets worse and never gets better. enemies hit harder and harder and by the final dungeon represent a random encounter can represent an existential threat even at full health. and right before the final dungeon, lufia departs from your party, leaving you to face these hardest fights without her, plus three of the sinistrals, returning only for the final final battle against guard daos. (hope you remembered to equip the thunder ring before nazeby!) (footnote 3)

the cumulative effect here is that the vanishing rules (footnote 4) erase the ability you spent act 2 mastering to judge enemies, allocate attacks efficiently, and control the flow of battle. instead you spend the endgame grappling with vulnerability in increasingly hostile circumstances. fortress of doom isn't interested in the experience of powerlessness per se (like, say, live-a-live), but it does use these feelings to underscore the emotions of the whole ending. lufia sees there's something powerful in pitting the player against the final boss when they're at their most desperate, rather than when they're feeling their strongest (like they might after a series of ultimate weapon sidequests). the conflict of lufia 1's ending extends past the the final battle as (spoilers again) lufia demands the hero kill her to stop the sinistrals' cycle of resurrection. dual blade rids her of erim's spirit, but as she lays wounded from the schism, the floor crumbles beneath her and she disappears into the abyss. the game lets us wallow in the hero's shock at his best friend and beloved's abrupt disappearance, and when the party finally escapes, he leaves alone without celebrating or saying goodbye. it's genuinely a very affecting sequence. it denies you an opportunity to celebrate a hard-earned victory after a harrowing final dungeon (with no save points, incidentally). the precarity of the final dungeon is instrumental in setting the tone that drives home the tragedy of the ensuing events. i worked so hard to get here, and now, for what? i was already at my limit.

hence the careful balancing and disruption of enemy health and player damage doesn't just create appropriate difficulty in line with the escalation of challenge as the game progresses, but informs the emotional arc of the whole third act as well. fortress of doom reminds us that simple systems are perfectly capable of supporting mindful and rewarding rpg combat, that they're perfectly capable of coloring and augmenting a story, and that rpg developers have been thinking about the connection between gameplay and narrative for a very long time. as certain experiences and aesthetics have been codified as "good game design" in the years since lufia, it's easy to misunderstand the values that consciously informed fortress of doom's conscious design (footnote 5). but all the signs point to its core design being thoughtful, deliberate, and effective in delivering a specific emotional experience.

----------------------

footnote 1: this upper bound assumes you're current on levels and equipment and fighting current enemies, although when the encounter rate is so high and sweet waters cost 8 gold apiece, i wonder which level is ever "current". for my part, i never intentionally grinded, but i also i rarely ran from battles or used sweet waters to lower the encounter rate, because i liked fighting them. anyway, the same assumptions are in place for all my generalizations

footnote 2: when we're dealing with enemies at full health, anyway. naturally, if an enemy is on its last hit point, it doesn't matter who swings their sword.

footnote 3: writing about rpg mechanics is hard because it's hard to tell whether your experience was the norm, or relegated to your particular way of playing the game. it was during the third act that i stopped fighting every battle and started chugging sweet waters and lobbing smoke balls. did the difficulty surge because i fell behind in levels? or was this my return to baseline after 30 hours spent overleveled?

footnote 4: i suppose another rule in the norm could put an upper limit on how much damage enemies do to you. for instance, i never saw an enemy who could deal as much as half my health in a single attack. the biggest dangers were groups of red magi and other enemies who could hit my whole party for a quarter to a third of their health, multiple times in a row - and even those felt like outliers. i think they all vanished by elfrea

footnote 5: even lufia 2, published less than 2 years later, discarded much of fortress of doom's innovation in favor of ideas that were visibly more "final fantasy" or "zelda". incidentally, of the two titles, it's the one more widely celebrated by retro rpg fans

new decade, new name

gay greetings and happy 2020! to mark the new decade, i'm trying on a name that better reflects my evolving relationship to gender and my ambiguous position in racial space. in 2019 i published some writing under the name "Sraëka Lillian". i've been trialing it in limited slices of my personal life too, and having sat with it a few months now, i'm ready to debut it for public usage. old names remain viable: you don't have to avoid calling me clayton or any other name we have history under. but in the spirit of the new decade, i invite you to try using Sraëka as your primary address for me instead, online and off.

pronunciation: SRAH-eh-ka. three syllables, emphasis on the first. the two dots on the ë are a diaeresis and indicate that a vowel is pronounced separately from the one before it. i'm happy to help if you ask. in a pinch, Lillian is fine too. it's less a surname than a backup.

pronouns remain the same as ever: inconclusive. none of the popular options are wrong, but none is quite right, either. follow your intuitions! be playful! alternatively, neutral language is a safe bet.