Challenge Accepted: Difficulty patterns
Giving the player ultimate control over the curve has both benefits and drawbacks, starting with the fact that players have the right to just opt out of much challenge there.
One of my favorite things to say about a game is that it has a difficulty curve bordering on a flat line. It’s a remarkably elegant way of pointing out that a game doesn’t really change its difficulty over time, that if you can clear the first level without too much trouble the next dozen won’t give you much more or less challenge. It’s not necessarily something that you want to be the case with a game, but it does happen.
It also presupposes that difficulty in most games is at least roughly a curve, but it can really be in lots of different shapes. If you want to get super technical, the shape can even vary from player to player, but that’s not the road I want to walk down today. No, today I want to take a look at how it works when you start tracking the challenge of a game over time, how the ebb and flow affects the game as a whole. Sure, we’ve played games where the curve resembles a flat line (or a vertical one), but even the idea of a difficulty curve means that there’s a different rate of change over time.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Once you’ve cleared the first of the tales, the game opens up a bit – there are six more tales available right away, each covering a different character who ties back into Final Fantasy IV. Curiously, Ceodore is the only new party member to get billed as having his own tale, as all of the others feature characters from the first game, although Rydia, Palom, and Porom have all grown up quite a bit since their initial appearances.
And yes, there are more than seven altogether, but the point is that these events happen in a similar timeframe and don’t overlap with other characters in the same way that Ceodore’s tale does. But let’s put that to one side for a moment; we’re still going to take these on in the order they’re presented and the order of their release. I did think it was neat that the option for skipping between them existed, though, especially knowing that more unlock as you continue.
Demo Driver 8: Lumines
Elegant and simple sometimes leaves a distressing amount of space wherein you’d like to say something without much to say.
I am not very good at Lumines. I would like to be, certainly, but I’m not. And I don’t think I quite have the patience to get good at it, probably because some stupid part of my monkey brain looks at the amount of time I’d need to unlearn my stupid habits to get good and asks if I could be spending this time on killing enemies and earning experience in something else. But that’s not a failing of the game.
Lumines is a port of one of the early titles on the PSP, and despite the airs it puts on it’s a pure puzzler. Like any good pure puzzle, it’s remarkably simple in its execution, allowing nearly all of the complications to emerge purely through game states. It looks a lot like Tetris at a glance, but the demo makes it clear that trying to play it like Tetris will just result in you not being very good at the game and getting a game over screen repeatedly.
Guess who keeps doing that despite himself?
Duration metrics
If discs had anything to do with quality, Vagrant Story would be a worse game than Legend of Dragoon. The mere suggestion is kind of offensive.
I remember the exact moment when I decided that bragging about how many discs your game was on was a pile of crap. It was when I paid money for Legend of Dragoon.
There’s no way around the fact that Legend of Dragoon is a bad game, and at its best moments it’s just Final Fantasy by way of Power Rangers, a line I am reluctant to write because it sounds potentially awesome and I don’t want Legend of Dragoon to sound awesome. But that isn’t the point; the point is that I remember playing the game, looking at the back of the box, and thinking, “Did I just buy this because it was an RPG with four discs?”
My defense would come down to the fact that I was seventeen and dumb as hell. Still, though, it makes you think about how duration is a selling point for games, not just for crap games that Sony desperately wants people to buy but for all sorts of games. Hours of gameplay. Number of levels. Number of classes, companions, combination attacks, areas, and so forth. And that’s kind of nonsense.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
As much as it surprises me to say so – and it does surprise me quite a bit, let me tell you – I’ve been enjoying The After Years up to this point. Sure, Ceodore’s only got the thinnest sketch of character motivation, but he’s not exactly alone in this fact, and the general feel is of events cascading quickly out of control while at the same time not feeling forced. He’s lost a lot, possibly everything, but he still has the will to push through.
Of course, will doesn’t make monsters not attack you, and not too long after his dying order from his commander, he’s being accosted by beasts. The first two are barely even relevant, but the third one has him on the ropes until someone mysteriously jumps into battle. Someone with narrow features and a portrait that makes strong eye contact. Someone with long blonde hair and a penchant for appearing dramatically. Someone who is referred to as only “the Hooded Man,” despite the fact that his identity is immediately obvious to anyone familiar with the original game.
Do we have to pretend we don’t know him? We… we do, don’t we.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 