esper How do you balance player progression with game difficulty? (38:37)
@exodus Unless this was something from one of the Crystal Chronicles games I never played, I’m pretty sure Tim was right and you were talking about Final Fantasy VIII. The reason it’s like that is because there’s a very unconventional character growth system in which you increase stats by “junctioning” magic to them. Magic is a consumable item in FFVIII, so if you possess 5 Fire spells, you can cast Fire 5 times. But rather than actually expend them, you’re encouraged to hoard them and “Junction” those spells to each of your stats in order to increase them or give your weapons different elemental affinities or make them inflict different status ailments. So you do gain some stat boosts from leveling up, but it’s fairly minor compared to the boosts from the Junction system they want you to engage with, so grinding exp mostly just serves to make the game harder. I’m guessing they did that because none of the ways you obtain magic in that game require that you actually defeat enemies, so there’s no way to make them get stronger at a fixed rate throughout the game and ensure that you’re also progressing enough to be able to beat them? But it also means you can become vastly overpowered by exploiting systems to obtain late-game spells early and by defeating as few enemies as possible, lol.
Not sure the approach totally justifies itself but it at least isn’t a case where player and enemies level at exactly the same pace, that would be pretty pointless
EDIT: lol I paused the podcast to respond to this and didn’t realize you actually did remember what game you were thinking of at the end. I’m keeping this post though because FFVIII happens to be a good answer to the question anyway
