The Shrine

So Grandia 2 came out and they added a hard mode and I noticed a whole mess of people put it on hard and complain it was too easy because they just hugged a save point for 5 hours going back and forth and instant killing stuff (save points gives you max MP/SP in Grandia 2). The company even posted when they made Hard it wasn't intended to force you to have to hug a save point after every battle to get anywhere. It's a game that's extremely sensitive to whether you're above/below the intended levels. It's almost like WoW where things above a certain level automatically can hit you harder (or at least used to) and you automatically hit them for less damage. The game's designed such that you don't have to ever backtrack an area to beat it so it's tuned very tightly and never meant to be a challenge if you did backtrack some areas except for the bonus dungeon.

Now I have nothing against people playing a game a certain way, but it makes me wonder who these guys think they're fooling. If you played the Grandia series enough you'll know the game is tuned to require no backtracking, even on the additional hard mode. Somehow I don't think you'll get some gamer cred for impressing a guy who has never heard of Grandia, so it's something that'd only impress a small fringe game and only if you're talking to a guy who knows as little about Grandia as yourself to not notice the level numbers are simply impossible without backtracking. Then again, I guess most people don't even know what a difficult RPG is. In Shining in the Darkness, when Darksol gets low he does 2 Demonblazes each turn and it's pretty much going to take you down to about 100 HP on your whole party and the only way to keep up with that damage is a Heal 4 which uses about a quarter of your MP. I guess people might think that's hard if they somehow didn't know that he's going to do double Demonblazes when he's got less than 4 turns worth of life left for an appropriate level party (and a party below level wouldn't be able to survive 2 Demonblazes to begin with) so that you can always defeat him on time. I think it's kind of an oxymoron for a JRPG to be hard in the first place because they're just not designed to withstand grinding, and that's assuming the game system is absolutely airtight which is rare.

To put it simply, it's skill vs effort. People enjoy getting past a difficult part of the game based on the effort they put into the game. It's not the same instant rush as defeating an incredibly difficult section of the game based on skill, but the satisfaction of the accomplishment is still there. Lots of games include effort = success mechanics, it's a core mechanic in RPGs; in RPGs, players are given the fantasy that through effort their character runs he/she increases skill - and subconsciously it is the player's accomplishment in the game. People complain about the lack of difficulty because intellectually they haven't figured out that they are putting in extra effort to lower the amount of skill required to complete a section.