The "How to Enjoy" Thread

video games
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I may be misremembering, but I felt the “questlines” in earlier games were generally more closely embedded in the flow of the game proper and specifically where the player was geographically.

Completing Ranni's storyline had the effect at least for me of heightening the open-world arbitrary task feeling just due to having to bounce around such wide sections of the map, and also sort of giving me the sense that I "beat the game" without having come close to actually doing it. So I found myself losing motivation after getting through it, because I'd already sort completed a whole big thing, and it felt like I'd have to re-motivate myself for another sequence of tasks to do

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@“MDS-02”#p65577 uh oh i hope I haven‘t broken that quest since I just found something that seems like it should be tied to it >!in a chest in the shaded castle… actually the item, guarded by a cleanrot knight off on a side path, seemed way more significant than the rewards for beating the boss of that castle, which were a greatsword version of a magic flying sword I already had, and a big shield. Anyway I will go check out the entrance to the plateau, hope she’s still there even after beating the capital!<

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@“thebryanjzx90”#p65610 I don’t think I broke it, just missed it. Sounds like @“Syzygy”#p65598 is suggesting most things don’t break.

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@“Syzygy”#p65598 Finding this NPC has numerous clues, such as…

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@“Syzygy”#p65598 after the … there is another NPC who will remind you there’s this quest

Yeah in this particular case I think I threaded a bit of a needle: had only gotten the ‘special’ one of those eyes (saw the description of “This person exists and needs this item”), didn’t know who this person was because I had missed the very first location (which I can’t find any in game pointers to), and then got exhausted trying to sort it out before clearing that area to get the tip you suggested (which I don’t know if it would have helped with finding the first step).

One thing that I think is a contributor (but not the actual cause since the actual start point was near a grace point I had for sure frequented before but the person was some ways away in a place I just literally didn’t walk) in this case is losing track of which places I had scoured/thoroughly cleared and which I did not. You can kind of tell from grace completion, but what I think I needed to have been doing is putting markers down whenever I ‘cleared’ or ‘checked’ a section of map. (I only used markers on stuff I visited and wanted to come back to) In a few instances in my play, I had thought I went basically everywhere in that particular region, but had left a gap that ended up having something valuable/quest related. I do appreciate that generally they put up icons when you get near a thing like a cave, but due to the variable density I couldn’t judge from that alone whether I had really been somewhere, so I ought to have better notated where I checked. That would be my suggestion to future players for general annoyance reduction.

A thought that I hope they consider in future releases - maybe some item descriptions gate or vary based on quest state. I really didn’t need the “person x needs this” information at the juncture I got that item. This signaled to me “person x ought to be known by you” (which might be an inappropriate read in all souls games), which set ‘my character’ into motion looking for this person. Something like “this is sought after by those who seek light” if I haven’t encountered the person, and then the more explicit message had I seen the maiden. Idk, honestly trying to troubleshoot without upending the structure.

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I have a phobia of a certain genre because it has dozens of games I‘ve wanted to play but I’ve been so lost in the ones I have attempted that I haven't really made any moves to take a deeper dive…

SRPGs. How do I enjoy SRPGs? My main pain points are usually:

  • -

    The battles each feel so important that I feel like if I don‘t play optimally that I’m going to be punished later on. My perception is that it's a genre that demands to be played well.

  • -

    The time investment in single battles feels sooooo long, and if I end up failing or making a mistake it is daunting to sign up to redo the lengthy encounter. Very distinct from action games, or even turn based RPGs, where you're talking about minutes max for most encounters.

  • -

    I'm worried that I just don't have a tactical mind and that that's always going to make this genre impenetrable for me. I just don't feel like I understand how to think through these encounters in a deeper way than "move strong thing to kill other thing." Ironically this made Fire Emblem Awakening the one of these I have managed to get through because that's literally all you need to do...but I just feel like there's a lot more here that I could potentially enjoy more than that.

    • I know it's a broad genre so there's no one size fits all answer but I would love to just hear about how y'all approach these games, what you feel like is important to enjoying them, which games you feel might be good training wheels for how to enjoy them. Especially if you're someone like me where approaching things in a kinda methodical and calculated way doesn't really come naturally. Thanks :)

    69

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73206 which SRPGs have you tried?

    I personally don't like the fire emblem style too much because the battles feel rigidly schematic.

    70

    @““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p73214

    Back in the day I tried FFT WOTL and FFTA, both of which I remember liking, FFTA moreso. Never finished either of them.

    More recentish I've tried Devil Survivor Overclocked, FE Awakening, FE Fates, and FE Three Houses. I finished Awakening and one of the routes in Fates. Those are both okay but I wouldn't count them as games I loved or anything. Got to the big story moment in Three Houses but got really bored with it.

    71

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73206 If you haven‘t played it I feel like Final Fantasy Tactics is a great starting point. It was my first strategy RPG and it’s still my favorite. It can be challenging at times, but that can be upended easily like in most FF titles by grinding, gearing up and most importantly discovering skill combinations that are straight abusive to the enemy. There are perma-deaths but the game gives you three turn orders to save your allies, so there's generally not much of the anxiety of potentially losing allies like in Fire Emblem.

    Plus, it's just a total package of looks, sound and story.

    edit: mb didn't see your follow up. Maybe give Jeanne D'Arc a try? It's my second favorite. I don't remember it being overly difficult, but it's been years.

    72

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73220 ok so I think your main issue appears to be that you've played mostly bad games in this genre.

    _Tactics Ogre_ is fantastic and the psp version has a nice rewind feature and more generous leveling at the expense of some of the granularity of the SFC version.

    and if you don't mind foregoing the JRPG stuff, _XCOM_, _Jagged Alliance 2_, and _Silent Storm_ (listed in order of user-friendliness) are all great, and the battles have more of a free form dynamic that allows for things to go wrong while letting you improvise. They're all dirt cheap too.

    some dated broken-english VO in the latter 2 unfortunately

    73

    Tactics Ogre rules

    74

    @““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p73230 Tactics Ogre has been top of the list for a long time so I went ahead and ordered a PSP copy. I know there‘s some weirdness around that version being Impossibly Big(thank you @Syzygy for all the posts) but it’s the one I most want to play.

    Jagged Alliance 2 looks really cool too, going to pick it up as well. Thank man!

    76

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73206

    I often consider myself a person who likes SRPGs, but recently I looked at what I had actually played all the way through and it was basically a bunch of Nippon Ichi games, FFT and FFTA, and Fire Emblem 7. So, I'm currently revisiting the genre in a big way.

    Relevant to you, I just played through Tactics Ogre (PSP) for the first time. No question about it, it is a great game. That said, I personally struggled with that exact feeling you mentioned of constantly feeling like I was screwing myself over. Now, I made it through the main game and that was good enough for me. A few rough spots for me would be

  • 1. I found the game to be kind of stingy with exp, money, skill level ups, etc.

  • 2. Many of the story maps start you off at low elevation relative to your enemy. This means they can pelt you with crap while you spend turns getting up to them. It's absolutely possible to work around this and you will find ways to win these battles, but the game does pull this same trick a lot.
  • 3. As you probably already know, in this game you level up classes, not characters. This annoyed me, so I mostly just stuck with the base classes from the beginning of the game. I know there are good things about this system, it's definitely not all bad, but it just killed me when I'd get a new character with a unique class and they were 20 levels below my main party.

    • In spite of all that, I still had an awesome time with the game, which should tell you how fun the combat is. The game is tough in spots, but there's always a way, it always gives you a few cards to put up your sleeves, and the freedom you have for your character builds really lets you get into some fun combinations. Plus the aesthetic and story were top-notch. And as other people have mentioned, the rewind feature really takes some of the sting off of this one. So, I could see this being the one that turns you into a genre-lover for life.

    One other "tip" that I'd offer (both for TO: LUCT and other SRPGs). I find that support skills matter more in SRPGS than in many other games. For one, if you can give your characters buff and debuff skills, that's something they can do even on turns when they're not attacking or healing, which in some games determines how fast they level up. Moreover, yeah, sometimes buffs/debuffs are pretty granular in giving you an edge, but other times they make a huge difference. In FFT, for example, having a time mage haste a couple of your units and slow a couple of the enemies will give you an enormous advantage in the Action Economy (a term I admit I just learned from @"Syzygy"#p73257). In TO: LUCT, my mage's main purpose was just to petrify enemies (especially dragons and other big, deadly things) because that spell has a weirdly high probability of working and it wastes TONS of enemy turns. I say this, as Syzygy said, at the risk of sounding obvious, but I find my own play habits tend to lean toward just wanting to bash everything to death, even though I know these buffs and debuffs often make or break me in these kinds of games. So, who knows, maybe that will help.

    Games with lots of squares and lots of things on those squares, for life.

    77

    If I may make a mostly useless contribution I would implore you sabertoothalex NOT to write off Fire Emblem entirely. I think the ones you've played are all of a piece, different in significant ways from the one rearnakedwindow mentioned (and which itself may be seen as a Game Boy Advancification of what was established in Fire Emblems 1-5). On the other hand, you may feel these older Emblems compel you to a certain amount of looking stuff up on the Internet, which idea may not be appealing to you.

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    @“sabertoothalex”#p73206 The time investment in single battles feels sooooo long, and if I end up failing or making a mistake it is daunting to sign up to redo the lengthy encounter.

    I do on some level enjoy planning ahead, although I think the reason I enjoy the SRPGs I've played amounts to the form allowing me to really take my time when considering what to do. I don't know if long battles will ever not feel overwhelming to you—making those killer mistakes (or having plain bad luck) can be monumentally frustrating—but I often enjoy putting the game down/suspending in the middle of a level (if your chosen game should allow it) and coming back to it later, mind fresh and able to perceive new wrinkles in enemy formations and the map, able to conceive new strategies to advance.

    78

    FFT, FFTA were both made contrary to most tactical rpgs, very accessible to non tactical rpg players. FFTA was made to give the feeling of infiltrating a base and fighting your way out with a smaller party. Swashbuckling vibration

    79

    Maybe this is a curveball, but what about Into The Breach? Not an RPG, but a repeatable set of the kinds of puzzles that are putting you off? Maybe a way to get into it.

    That, or a pure distillation of exactly what you don’t want, I’ll see myself out

    80

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73206 At the risk of overloading you with recommendations, I‘m going to mention Shining Force II, which I’m halfway through playing right now (never played it before or anything) and I'm adoring this game.

    It's definitely a great game and it's probably a good place to start if you're nervous about dipping into the SRPG genre because:

  • 1.

    Battle is simple yet meaty. You have to be tactical and use good timing and spacing, but you don‘t have to memorize tons of charts or class types or worry about weather, altitude, etc. I think it does a lot of what’s best about the Fire Emblem series, but…

  • 2.

    There's no permadeath, so you never have to sweat it if a unit dies in combat.

  • 3.

    Shining Force II gives you options but not too many options in terms of character- and party-building. For the first half of the game, you are simply fighting with every character you have, so you don't have to choose who sits on the bench and who gets exp. The characters can't really multiclass and you aren't buying skills for them, so you can't really make a bad build. It's basically just a matter of buying them the newest weapons and choosing when to promote them to their upgraded class. Some people might not like the streamlining, but after playing Tactics Ogre, I have some serious decision fatigue, so it's nice to play a game that just says "here's what you get, use it well."

  • 4.

    It has some overworld exploration and towns, so if you're coming from traditional JRPGs, you're still getting some of that.

  • 5.

    The pacing. This is no joke one of the best paced games I've ever played. The battles are substantial but never overly long, probably because each character's turn only takes a couple of seconds. Plus, you're always getting something new. Some of my characters level up every battle; I get a new character every ~2-4 battles. It's always giving me that little taste of progress and I enjoy it. Story events are nice and quick.

    • I'm still not done with the game, so if it has a brutalizing back half, somebody correct me. But from where I'm sitting right now, this seems to be one of the best of its genre and a great place to start for newer players.

    81

    Thanks for all the suggestions everyone! I decided to go with Jeanne D’Arc as I was able to find a copy at a store near me lol, I’ve only played a little bit of it so far but I’m finding it SUPER charming and accessible.

    Shining Force II is on the Switch Online thing if I’m not mistaken so I will definitely give that a go too. Then I think I’ll move onto FFT if I feel like I’m picking up steam.

    I’m basically viewing Tactics Ogre as the final boss on this journey LOL

    82

    @“sabertoothalex”#p73820

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn93Q6Toz28

    83

    i keep thinking maybe i'll enjoy a Kotaro Uchikoshi visual novel, because a lot of people seem to do exactly that.

    today that new AI Somnium Files joint dropped, and Pavlovian instincts have my brain telling me i should download it from the eShop, because even though i didn't play the first one, reviews for this second one say that shouldn't matter.

    i like the idea of a murder mystery to solve, with weird sci-fi elements and a bit of absurd humour. i am a big fan of Severance and Kobo Abe novels, for example. but Uchikoshi's games seem to always feature a lot of objectification of women, and humour that maybe misses the mark unless you're a very _particular kind of individual_.

    i've also bounced _**hard**_ off of 999 as well as the demo for the first AI game.

    what am i missing?

    84

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    @“whatsarobot”#p75264 Kobo Abe novels

    you will get exactly zero Kobo Abe atmosphere, themes, vibe etc from this game

    85

    I think you just don‘t like his games honestly. Especially AI where the stuff you’re talking about is real amped up. Zero Escape has less of it. They're just fun roller coasters with good characters.