I've played a great
many RPGs throughout the years. In that time, I have seen many design
decisions constantly repeated and reiterated across various different
games. Often it makes sense to reuse these tropes. For example,
leveling up is such a core concept in RPGs that it would be strange
to have no form of character development. However, some of these same
choices come back for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
Recently, I beat
Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, victim to one of the latter design choices.
Taking place in a steampunk/fantasy setting, Type-0 is a war story
following the exploits of Class Zero, a group of cadets at the
military academy in one of the four great nations in the world. There
are 14 members of Class Zero, all playable characters in the game.
The player can have, at most, 3 of the classmates deployed at the
same time, with other members on standby. When an enemy is defeated,
only the 3 deployed classmates gain experience, while every other
character gets nothing. And while Final Fantasy Type-0 is hardly the
first RPG to make this choice, it’s the one I can best use to
explain the problems inherent to it.
Depriving
non-participants of experience discourages players from experimenting
with their party formation and character selection. When Final
Fantasy Type-0 first introduces the player to the full cast, it makes
the recommendation to "try to level every character evenly".
This, as is the case with most games where members on standby don't
gain experience, is a terrible idea. Following this advice will have
one of two possible outcomes: Either the party will be so
under-leveled that playing through main story missions is an exercise
in frustration, or so much time will be spent grinding for experience
that the player will completely forget the main story. Raising a
character by a single-level takes a great many battles. With 14
playable characters, bringing them up to each missions recommended
level would take several hours of tedious grinding. At the same time,
missions at a much higher level pit the player against enemies that
can and will annihilate a single character in one or two attacks. For
this reason, most players will ultimately decided on 3 or 4
characters that they will focus their experience on, and largely
ignore the rest of the them.
Part of the draw of
a large pool of playable characters is that there is a variety in the
archetypes and playstyles. Under the restriction that party members
only level up when they actively partake in battle, this variety is
stifled by practicality. For instance: there might be circumstances
where it would make more sense to use a long-range party of King the
duel-pistol wielder, Cater the magic-gunslinger, and Trey the archer,
like when a mission is packed with flying enemies out of melee range.
However, most people will likely only have one of them leveled enough
to use in that mission. While it may make more sense to use that
particular party against ranged enemies, it makes no sense to use it
in any other circumstance.
Since it's only
sensible to train up about 4 people, most players will have a strong
melee-character, a good ranged character, and a support, with a
possible backup character in the event one of the first three dies.
Any thought of changing up the party to suit a new situation, or
experimenting to find a formation that may work better, is thrown to
the wayside in favor of sticking with the old and familiar.
On top of that,
games with sufficiently large casts nearly always have scenes where
the party has to divide itself into multiple groups, and Final
Fantasy Type-0 is no exception. Several missions have the player form
2 groups of three cadets each. Since the odds are that most players
will only have enough characters leveled up for one full battle
party, this section is significantly worse than it should be.
Practicality, it ensures that one team will be vastly inferior to the
other, or that both teams will have one under-leveled character
dragging them down. In either case, battle ability is severely
reduced because the player has done exactly what the game's systems
have incentivized them to do.
In my playthrough,
during the first of these missions, both of the parties had two
characters that were Level 30, and one trailing far behind at Level
15. Unsurprisingly, the weak one in each party did hardly any damage,
spending most of the mission as a corpse. With two characters left to
pick up the slack of a three-person job, I didn't have as much fun
with these missions as did with the others in the game. I had to
restart this mission several times because, with the addition of my
undue handicap, the enemies were just strong enough that my two level
30s in one team taking much more damage any dying more than they had
in other missions. At one point, I even had to give up, go into a
previous save, and rethink who I sent with which team. Needless to
say, I was fairly unhappy with the game for crippling me like that.
Even though it’s
extremely clear that this one concept hurts the games that use it, it
is unlikely to get phased out anytime soon. As a genre, RPGs are
soaked in tradition, making it difficult to weed out overused design
cliches. Even worse, this is one that appears frequently, even in
many of the greats like Persona 4 and Valkyrie Profile. Knowing this,
I still think it's healthy to evaluate these game design tropes to
see if they're still worth maintaining. Though it's common for the
reserve party to not gain experience, this trope does more harm than
good.
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