The Shrine

From looking at games I noticed there's always two conflicting forces at work:

1. You want to make the game such that being good at it takes some kind of commitment.

2. But you still want the game to be accessible.

For example your typical Bullet Hell fits #1 but is not accessible. A game like Mario fits #2 but you're unlikely to find anybody perfecting their Mario skills unless they're making some video for Youtube.

So what games have you played where both applies? That is it's a game where you can suck at it and still enjoy it and see what the game has to offer, but being good still means something? I do not consider any multiplayer aspect as valid simply because it's trivial to argue any multiplayer game can fit both as long as you've some good opponents. You can pick multiplayer game, but its depth and accessibility can't be from the multiplayer aspect.

I can't think of too many such games, but here are my picks:

1. Street Fighter 2. I actually play the single player mode of this quite a bit, and it's obviously quite accessible since on the low star difficulty anybody who can hit some buttons can win. I think you even get an ending on fairly low star dificulty, and with unlimited continues it's usually a matter of patience to beat it on the 8 star setting for the ending + character slideshow thing. Now I was never able to get the best one where you got to beat the game without losing a round or something like that, but I didn't feel I was missing a chunk of the game because I can't get that.

2. Soul Calibur 1. The extra mode can be pretty demanding, but what they ask you to do is not impossible even if you totally suck at this game. I remember the hardest one is probably beating like 6 guys in a row at where Kilik started at, and that can be done with some luck even if all you know is push X X Y like me. I assume people who are actually good at this game can try the challenge stuff but you can basically see everything the game has to offer if you're determined enough. Most of the latter Soul Calibur games continued this, but I felt SC1 had the best mix.

3. Grandia 3. At a rough glance this is a stupidly hard RPG, and if you turn off the hints you're in for a world of hurt. However, since it is a RPG, you can always simply keep on level up if you never understood its battle system until you get to a point where you're strong enough to beat the game. Mastering the Grandia 3 system allows you to beat the game with very low level/stats and while you don't get a medal for that, it gives you a sense of accomplishment, yet the average player's enjoyment of the game is not diminished.

4. House of the Dead. I absolutely suck at light gun shooters but obviously if you got enough quarters you can eventually beat it even if you suck! And certainly I see people who are good at the game that do some pretty impressive stuff.

Many fighters fit in this category. So do strategy games. Not to say that I personally suck at these game, but they are typically hard but interesting. For that matter, Ninja Gaiden (the new series) is definitely in that category, but it's more like a fighter in some aspects, anyway.

Dishwasher.

Katamari Damacy fits #1 and #2 quite nicely.

The Dragon Quest games are forgiving, since "death" doesn't mean game over. Instead, it halves your money, boots you back to the location of your last save, but you still keep all of your experience and items.

Kupek wrote:Katamari Damacy fits #1 and #2 quite nicely.

The Dragon Quest games are forgiving, since "death" doesn't mean game over. Instead, it halves your money, boots you back to the location of your last save, but you still keep all of your experience and items.

I can't think of many RPG where you can meaningfully get *good* at it, though. Grandia 3 is the only one that fits, and that's only if you turn off the hints.

Don wrote:

Kupek wrote:Katamari Damacy fits #1 and #2 quite nicely.

The Dragon Quest games are forgiving, since "death" doesn't mean game over. Instead, it halves your money, boots you back to the location of your last save, but you still keep all of your experience and items.

I can't think of many RPG where you can meaningfully get *good* at it, though. Grandia 3 is the only one that fits, and that's only if you turn off the hints.

I beat FF7 with only two characters above 3000 HP and one (Cloud) needed a materia to get there. To get through a game like that with stats like that, doesn't it require a bit more "skill"?

Zeus wrote:

Don wrote:

Kupek wrote:Katamari Damacy fits #1 and #2 quite nicely.

The Dragon Quest games are forgiving, since "death" doesn't mean game over. Instead, it halves your money, boots you back to the location of your last save, but you still keep all of your experience and items.

I can't think of many RPG where you can meaningfully get *good* at it, though. Grandia 3 is the only one that fits, and that's only if you turn off the hints.

I beat FF7 with only two characters above 3000 HP and one (Cloud) needed a materia to get there. To get through a game like that with stats like that, doesn't it require a bit more "skill"?

Most RPG are very shallow. If the boss can't kill you in one hit you can usually beat it eventually anyway. I saw someone beating FF6 at level 5 and while I'm not sure how he got 4 Economizers and a Gem Box at level 5, it sure wasn't very hard when you just put Life 3 on a guy, phoenix down any guy that died, and chain cast Ultima. I remember doing Ultima Weapon (the story part) with like 1800 HP and his Ultima Beam did 1700 HP damage to everyone and it wasn't even hard beating him like that.

The only example I can think of is Grandia 3, where if you turn off the hints the fights basically become way harder because now you don't have a way to automatically determine when is the latest you can move to still interrupt something that will almost certainly kill you.

That FF6 one is a hack. I'm talking about someone who actually went through the game.

All JRPGs are about resource management, so there is some skill involved there. Sure you can "eventually" beat anyone, but if you play a game like Earthbound, you have a very limited inventory so it becomes a lot more strategic than the infinite inventory system in most JRPGs. And even if you have unlimited inventory, if you're someone who doesn't like to grind levels and get infinite coin, it's much more than a numbers game.

Zeus wrote:That FF6 one is a hack. I'm talking about someone who actually went through the game.

All JRPGs are about resource management, so there is some skill involved there. Sure you can "eventually" beat anyone, but if you play a game like Earthbound, you have a very limited inventory so it becomes a lot more strategic than the infinite inventory system in most JRPGs. And even if you have unlimited inventory, if you're someone who doesn't like to grind levels and get infinite coin, it's much more than a numbers game.

Most JRPG can be summed up as:

IF HP remaining > boss's strongest attack THEN attack
ELSE heal

And it's not exactly that hard to do this. Most recent games don't even have some kind of offense resource management. For example in Shining in the Darkness, your most potent offense is Bolt 4 but you can't start casting that from beginning to end, so on Darksol you have to conserve enough MP left when he goes into the double Demonblazes. Having a limited inventory just means you might actually run out of your resources, but it doesn't make it any harder.

In Earthbound you still heal up whenever a boss brings your HP low enough that you could die the next hit. In fact due to the 'delayed death' effect you can actually play with not enough HP to survive but just count on casting it quick enough. I suppose there's at least some offensive resource management involved, since as I recall it's not something you can just start with PSI (Favorite) Omega or Starstorm Omega (or whatever the super strong special attack is called). Still, it's hardly something that'd take a meaningful amount of commitment to get good at.

FFT would be a good example of where there's actually many ways to approach the same encounter so you could get better at figuring out what combo works, though there are way too many cheap combination it's hard to say it's something you get *good* at. Once you have say a Split Damage + Yell infinite loop going, nothing can ever beat you anyway. Or you can just use Orlandu.

I remember seeing another video of someone beating Zeromus at level 50 or so, which is a level where Rydia gets instant killed by Big Bang and Rosa barely has enough HP to survive it at full (think it depends on whether Big Bang hits for high or low end of its range). And yet beating it still wasn't hard. The hardest part was probably figuring out when to Jump so Kain always avoids the Big Bang, and not having Big Bang do enough damage to kill Rosa in one shot.

I assume this was done with the aid of an emulator and you just keep on load until the one time where all the random rolls went your way. I believe each time Rydia cast Flare on Zeromus he always countered it on the wrong person (Rydia, who can never survive a Big Bang anyway) and again that's just load/save magic. You can be the best RPG player in the world and I'd bet you that you can't actually pull this off reliably, because if you get a Big Bang that kills Rosa + Rydia at the same time then you have no shot at winning.

Chrono Cross had decent offensive resource mgmt, but it was typically a game of "play the best skill, now the 2nd best skill, 3rd best, etc."

SineSwiper wrote:Chrono Cross had decent offensive resource mgmt, but it was typically a game of "play the best skill, now the 2nd best skill, 3rd best, etc."

Well Cross you can easily just wimp out and take 10 Healing Winds and be pretty sure that nothing can ever kill you. Also bosses tends have to exactly the same damage throughout the whole fight so there's no advantage to saving big attacks for the end. One of the guy had a very small elemental grid (Guile? Arf?) but all his attacks did very high damage, and that was a good example of some variety. There isn't much strategy involved but at least you had enough variety to mix it up to experiment things. There's also a good deal of grid management like loading up the right kind of element stuff in anticipation of what your enemy uses. For example the best healing item is black elemental so you don't really want to use it on a boss that's also black elemental if you can avoid it due to the field effects. It's not enough to make the game challenging, but it's at least a good start.