Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
There are certain words, in a video gaming context, that get my antennas immediately up, and my idiosyncratic saliva glands metaphorically flowing. (Actual drooling is a bad habit to mix with gaming; it tends to short the controllers out.) These topics all speak to my particular obsessions: Words like “time loop,” and “detective game,” and “no swimming, please.” But one of these regular obsessions has dimmed a bit, of late, sullied by a steady tide of lackluster execution. Which leads me to ask: Why is a good job system in video games suddenly so hard to find?
For the uninitiated: Job systems in role-playing games (which date back, roughly, to the Japanese Final Fantasy III, published back in 1990) refer, not to ways of picking up digital part-time work, but to a specific sort of character customization that tends to emphasize on-the-fly flexibility. Once you’ve picked a “job”—knight, wizard, dancer, “homeless guy”—for your character, you switch to its associated costume, build up skills related to its general ethos, and then, typically, swap in a new job in order to mix-and-match these unlocked abilities. (The most basic example would be a black mage who can also cast healing magic after spending some time as a healer class, but a good job system allows you to chain together some frankly crazy shit.) Games that do this well—1997’s Final Fantasy Tactics being at the forefront of that list—deploy these systems in incredibly empowering ways, encouraging players to analyze the abilities at their disposal, and then hunt for synergies and combinations that will crack the games’ challenge curve completely open.
Said balance-breaking joy, though, might also explain why the apex example of this idea dates back 24 long years at this point. (Although Atlus’ Etrian Odyssey games do take at least a token run at the crown.) Because while role-playing games—the most recent Dragon Quests, latter-day Final Fantasys, and Square Enix’s just-sequeled Bravely Default franchise—continue to traffic in these tropes, the resulting employment histories rarely result in exhilaration. Instead, we find developers who have carefully clipped the more excessive elements of even the most interesting jobs, curtailing the ability to create game-destroying combos in favor of that old enemy of fun, “balance.” The worst offender—and not just in the sense that it’s where we pulled “homeless guy” from in the list of examples up above—is the recent Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which teases huge possibilities for setting characters up in modern day jobs like cabaret hostess or construction guy… And then saddles each class with extremely similar skills, and no real way to synergize unlocked abilities. Even Bravely Default 2, building on the legacy of its earlier incarnations, tends to flinch away from letting really stupid stuff happen; after all, if the players can exploit the system to make the game’s difficulty trivial, isn’t that bad design?
Screw that, we say: Give us the Calculators of old. This is a drumbeat I’ve tapped before, but balance—outside of games that are explicitly designed for multiplayer competition—is an idea that should be thoroughly opt-in for players. (Take that, Sid Meier.) Gaming is as pure a dose of self-expression as an artistic medium can get for its consumers. If I want that self-expression to involve dropping 99,999 damage on some poor goblin’s head with a set of abilities I slapped together over hours of careful planning, well: Why the hell not? It’s not like playing these things is my goddamn job.
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This article mentions Final Fantasy Tactics a lot, and I do love that game, but I kind of dislike how it completely overshadows Tactics Ogre. I think a strong argument can be made on how Let’s Us Cling Together (particularly the PSP port) is a better game and has a better job system. Of course it’s a lot less broken than FFT and Calculators and other classes/characters. But it feels so good, and the leveling of classes is such a QoL improvement I’ve never seen copied anywhere else.I hope whatever the sequel is to Like a Dragon improves the job system, since it does seem like a tease and a pretty unecessary grind for the most part.Bravely Default II is a bit disappointing compared to the original. I think getting crazy with classes does open up towards the latter half of the game, but I remember it happening way earlier in the original. It also lacks the QoL stuff like the ability to control random encounters (because there is none)…which really takes away from the game oddly. Plus there’s some classes that are just kinda broken on their own, like Thief and Beastmaster.
I loved how the PSP remake of Let Us Cling Together handled leveling and changing jobs, but in some ways it made the game too easy – since there wasn’t as much need for level grinding, you could win most fights by barrelling towards the enemy leader ASAP. I wish they had rebalanced the fights when they changed the leveling.
Most horrific combos required vast amounts of grinding anyway – there’s your balance if you really feel you must have it devs. Let us build stupid, broken shit if we want to put the time in.
Yeah. I always loved that the classic Final Fantasy games (particularly 5, 6, 7, 8 and 10) would allow you to build characters that could trivialize the final boss fight. And it didn’t require a lot of grinding so much as it required a thorough understanding of the game’s systems and secrets. And, on more than one occasion, a Chocobo-related mini-game.
Yes! The Calculator from FFT required so much effort just to be able to do anything. It didn’t matter that the class made the rest of the game easy; by that point you’d EARNED it.
I mean shit, the game just hands you Orlandu anyway. Let me grind up a more broken character.
I don’t mind grinding if I like the progression.
I’ve tried to get into the Disgaea series but I lose interest due to how grinding works in these games. The spreadsheet systems are all about seeing big numbers. I can see the appeal of getting into a zone and seeing your effort be rewarded. Personally, this style of incremental progression doesn’t hold my attention for very long.
I have a game of War of the Lions on my tablet that I keep grinding away at in spurts because I have yet to unlock the Dark Knight class. Master 2 classes and then get to Level 8/8 in four others. With 20 confirmed kills (stay in battle 3 rounds after you KO an enemy).
I’ve been leaning more to Western RPGs lately- put a bit of time into Pillars of Eternity which I hadn’t played in some time. The story I enjoy, but I feel like I always struggle with Real Time w/Pause systems- because the pacing is completely under your control it’s hard to figure out what’s a good rhythm, when you should let a character keep doing what they’re doing or try to set them on a more efficient path. Also the pathing AI is a little wonky- the wizard character has a good fire attack but it hits everyone in the area of effect, so you want to position him so that he only hits the enemy, but that’s harder than it sounds. I also may just be underleveled, some of the combats are a bit much right now and I may have skipped a thing or two on the way to Defiance Bay. Still, it’s a good story and a nice pleasant experience. I also plowed through all the Mega Picross puzzles in Picross S5 and so help me I was starting to understand it near the end. Still I like the regular version a lot more. Also recently dipped back into Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I finished the big battle of Garreg Mach before so I’m slowly heading towards what might be the end. Edelgard is an unstoppable force.
Some day some day I will finish Pillars of Eternity. And Dragon Age. And Neverwinter 2. And Oblivion. And Ultima IV. And Baldur’s Gate. Either that or the opposite which is : not. Some days I wonder. Thing is, I remember none of their stories except for the fact that… they’re the same ? No, Ultima IV was a bit different. But damn it required you to LOVE random encounters.Pillars of Eternity had been interrupted by the announcement of DLCs, meaning I had to wait a bit before resuming it, in order to not require to restart it all again if I wanted to play the full version. Then I eventually got those DLCs (I think? probably). And decided I’ll… no, didn’t decide anything in fact.So yeah, well done, marketing plan.Also some day I’ll finish Wastelands 2 and Planescape Torment 2, but those were interrupted by those dreaded points of no return. “Watch out, if you leave this area now you’ll never be able to get back so really make sure you’ve found every item and completed every subquest and seen everything there is to see”, okay let’s see, yeah, I’ll check this a bit later. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Wait, is it still installed ?Good games. But this wouldn’t have happened with Fallout or Fallout 2 is what I’m saying.
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I’ve actually been thinking about this myself and can point to only 2 RPGs that I’ve finished: X-Men Legends on the Gamecube and Diablo 3 (and the latter only means I’ve played through the story campaign, and for most players that’s just one run-through on the road to max level.) It’s definitely a genre I tend to take my time on, and sometimes when I hit a wall it feels like a harder problem to solve than just not being able to beat a boss in an action game- usually I can’t just “play better”, my numbers need to be better.
I need to get on writing that blog “How games have taught me to not buy them.”The premise: Games come out unfinished, unpolished, release DLC that starts at the beginning of the game, and then release special editions that have added content. Why the hell would I play halfway through something that I know I’m going to end up starting over, and maybe even paying for again? I can’t safely buy a game until three years have passed! I was done after buying Persona 5 and seeing an announcement for Royal a week later.
Pillars of Eternity had balancing and gameplay issues, so it isn’t necessarily just you. Although it was kind of funny because they worked things over and got a lot of the system kinks figured out for PoE2, where in turn the combat became bafflingly easy as a result.As a little bit of a heads-up, PoE really crunches a lot of its story to the last area, at which point it is thrown at you in a way that causes whiplash. Although it isn’t as massive a failing as the PoE2 story twist turned out to be as that is still for me one of the effing dumbest story twists I’ve encountered in a game.
Real-time systems are such a ballache when you’re controlling a party. An individual hero can be moved around directly, but with multiple PCs you’re either juggling them or controlling one at a time while the others run around.
You might like Pillars 2 and Pathfinder Kingmaker, both of which have the usual RT-Pause, but also turn based combat. This flew a little under the radar as both games added Turn Based later with patches.Kingmaker actually does it the best imo. You can switch in and out of turn based mode at will, which makes tough battles a lot more manageable and fun, without slowing down easier fights. Kingmaker started rocky and buggy, and still doesn’t have a great narrative, with its kingdom simulation elements and an incredibly deep class system, I think it’s now the most mechanically rich CRPG. Sorry Divinity 2. You’re great and all, but not every battle needs to turn into endless element clouds and knock-downs.
I’ve never been terribly fond of Pathfinder’s rules as a whole, but PoE 2 has its appeal.
Mega Picross is always a mixed bag for me. Sometimes the paired clues make a hard puzzle easier, but more often they make an easy puzzle harder. And I’m totally fine with that for the most part. But every now and then I get a puzzle where I’m stuck for the longest time and ultimately just guess how I’m supposed to proceed. I don’t like when that happens. But more than anything else, I don’t like that Mega Picross puzzles are always a retread of the regular puzzles. I like seeing what puzzle is when I’m done (I’m usually too focused on the numbers to pay attention to the image as I solve it), and seeing the same set of images takes away from my enjoyment. Oh well, the other modes are always fun!
I’m mainly playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake right now. I was put off by the demo because the boss was a pain in the butt. The other bosses so far tend to follow suit, but at least I have some options to play around with. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original, but I’m enjoying Remake so far.
My year-long play through of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is coming to a close in two weeks. My enjoyment waned a few months ago, but I’m not going to stop playing entirely when the year is up. There are a few bugs and fish that I never caught. About half of the art exhibit of the museum is empty. I’m also determined to breed some blue roses. And I still need to get that rocket DIY recipe from Celeste so I can build that giant mech. Aside from a possible new event here or there, this one is strictly going to be a once in a while kind of game.
And there are a pile of games that I played for a bit and never finished. Hades, CrossCode, Super Mario Sunshine, Star Wars Squadrons, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2… probably a couple more.
No, unbalanced single player games are NOT fun. The only reason I dropped Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Cyberpunk 2077 (there’s more, but those are two recent examples that come to mind) before I could finish them was because once you find the secret overpowered combination of skills/abilities, the game has about 10 minutes of fun left in it. You can tell yourself all you want that playing the entire game without challenge is fun, but deep down you know that’s a lie. And it’s not like you can go back either. Purposefully NOT using the thing that makes you win automatically feels just as bad using it
On a personal opinion on the job systems, I get the developer’s point of view as I don’t personally find it that enjoyable to have to worry if I messed up with the job system the degree that my group is hindered in the game. I do like choices in leveling up and am fine with there being better/worse paths, but when you start spreading the options out too much, it almost always gets easier to end up with a bad build than a good build.Although I’ve come to understand that I personally don’t like job systems. For me, I want the character’s class and abilities to connect with who they are, which I feel is often lacking with job systems. Still just an opinion, though.
I think job systems hit rock bottom when we had to get a job as a forklift driver in Shenmue. The gaming universe is still recovering from it.
I genuinely love that part of Shenmue, even if it did slow the story to a crawl.
The problem with super-overpowered options is that it can feel like the game is punishing the player for not using them – especially when side content like super-bosses can only be completed with broken combos/exploits.This weekend is for social gaming – tonight and Sunday I have “session zero” meetings for two new Pathfinder games; and at some point I may get a Civ 5 or Minecraft session in as well.I’ve also got a bunch of prep to do for a DnD game I’ll be running later in the year, so I’ll try and spend some time drawing maps or painting minis. It’ll get me away from my PC, anyways.
Yeah. The trend right now in video game design is “puzzle bosses” that can only be overcome with very specific builds and strategies. Whereas in the 90s and early 2000s, the design philosophy was that a casual player should be able to “brute force” their way through most bosses using a variety of character builds (that’s why the Final Fantasy V “Four Job Fiesta” is possible) and that it was okay for a “perfect strategy” to turn an otherwise tough battle into a cake walk.
Still playing with the (unofficially early access) War on the Sea, which is full of sea. Clunky interface to tame, and several AI shortcomings, both in terms of tactics and strategy. But it’s still varied, letting you toy with surface shipsand submarinesand airplanesand also surface shipsand submarines toobut mostly airplanesbecause both in History and in the game, it quickly renders anything else obsolete.It’s the pre-satellites Pacific, so a lot of hide and seek on the strategic map, and a lot of airstrikes. I’ve had surprisingly few surface battles, maybe because I avoid them too much, being more of a cowardly snipey player in general. Until the game rebalances the (technically null) cost of losing planes, which it should do soon, it’s essentially bombs, rockets and torpedoes. Also, until it redesigns the AI and the interface, surface battles may stay a bit too tedious to be worth it. Damage management, spotting and solution management, ammo management, and above all maneuvers managements (the AI’s collision avoidance is very careful and very dumb, making a chaotic mess of any global formation movement, yet still managing to smash everyone against everyone, overriding manual orders in order to achieve that), all of it makes any victory pyrrhic at best. It’s such an ambitious game, for such a tiny team, that is warrants a lot of forgiveness and encouragement. It tries to do so many things at so many scales, and to give so much freedom, that it’s bound to overcomplexify and oversimplify random aspects. But it’s quite endearing because of that.Its first and most blatant issues got corrected fast. I’m optimistic about the incoming updates.
I can’t be the only one who read “War on the sea” as war against the sea.
Unfortunately, that would be a pretty accurate interpretation too.
Still, can’t pretend the AI isn’t acting rationally when it spots torpedoes in the water.
I actually managed to finish a fame this week! Granted it was only Batman: The Telltale Series – The Enemy Within but that’s officially two down in 2021!Anyway, it turns out my suspicions about “John Doe” getting a canon alias were well-founded. Who would have guess that the white-faced, green-haired former Arkham Asylum patient prone to laughing fits and associated with Harley Quinn would turn out to be The Joker?Well, literally everyone. What I didn’t see coming is that Joker would start out as a vigilante ally of Batman and help take down the Pact and Agency goons working for Amanda Waller (A proto-Suicide Squad consisting of Bane, Harley Quinn, Mister Freeze, and Catwoman.) Naturally, Joker takes it too far and has to be stopped. There was also a revelation on who really killed The Riddler and it was neither Joker nor Waller. I assume that if Telltale had remained solvent that would have been a big part of season 3 instead of a last minute sub-plot.Oh, and at the end, my version of Bruce retired the cape and cowl for Alfred’s sake and had sold Catwoman up the river.The two other games I played this week were both technically in the same series with each other but feel very, very different. First up I played a little bit more of Final Fantasy I in the form of the Restored ROM on my RetroPie. I’ve been sailing around in my ship and found both Elfland and the Northwest Castle. In the latter location, the king wants me to find his crown somewhere in the Marsh Cave. From pop-culture osmosis, I know this is considered one of the bigger difficulty spikes in the game, so I’m currently doing a bunch of grinding in the overworld. Not so much for leveling up, but to earn as much gil as possible so I can buy level 2 and 3 spells in Pravoka and Elfland for my White & Black mages. The Restored ROM has supposedly fixed most of the bugged spells, so I’m not quite sure what I need, except that they have to be good vs. Undead.The final game I’ve been playing this week, and the one that’s the biggest time suck has been the free trial of Final Fantasy XIV. I’m still fairly low level and playing through the 2.0 A Realm Reborn content. My Roegadyn Lancer was engaged in the class quest “Spear of the Fearless” last week, which meant stabbing riverbank Yarzons in the face, confronting tree low level creatures by collapsed pillars, and finally ignoring an angry dude at the Lancer’s Guild.That done, it was back to the (tutorial-ish) sections of the main scenario quests. This one was a Duty one investigating Lifemend Stump in the Shroud near Gridania. It contained the first major cut scene, where my character had some kind of vision of Hydaelyn referring to me as a Crystal Bearer. It was also eventually revealed that the NPCs accompanying me on that quest were Yda and Papalymo.That done, I hit my first roadblock, I ended up with two quests involving fighting velociraptors anoles at Naked Rock, one a class quest, and one a story quest. After much stabbing of dinosaurs in the face with a spear, I kept dying far too quickly. This might have led to a day or two of rage quitting, before I remembered that this MMORPG is a JRPG and needs more level grinding than mot Western RPGs. So, after spending some time impaling squirrels, I was a few levels higher, and also taking a more cautious, stealthy approach. I was able to both steal the dino eggs for the soldiers to complete the story quest and discover that the Stone of Courage I sought at the top of the mountain had been moved by a rogue Lancer in the class quest.This conveniently meant that both my major questlines converged at the Spirithold dungeon. Whilst there, I managed to rescue Conjurers and Wood Wailers, recover the true Stone of Courage, stab some Trickster Imps, take down a Clay Golem, and rescue a Hearer. This did mean another cut scene. This time involving a mysterious masked mage who animated the Golem. Something mysterious is afoot in the Twelveswood…I returned the Stone of Courage to the Lancer’s Guild, and then headed to the Bentbranch region of the Shroud to continue the main quest. I also need to head East to find out more about the prickly renegade Lancer…
I too am plying FFxiv from the beginning. I’m tanking this time. I’m at like LV 19 in the Main quest though because of the experience bonus I’m Level 40 and I’ve unlocked some of the level 30 dungeons. I wasn’t getting it at first but I watched the WeskAlber videos on each job and role. And it finally clicked. I’m a slow tank. I can’t run through dungeons pulling and finish in 15 minutes. But as long as someone explains any mechanics to me before a boss, we get through.
I, too, have started my first play-through of Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve got a lvl. 25 Pugilist and a lvl. 9 Rogue. But now I’m sort of at a loss as to where I’m supposed to go next. I think I’m about to finish this ambassador quest that will lead me to the next chunk of story. If I can stop getting lost/distracted. The map UI is dismal. But even then, I’m having a blast. It’s a beautiful game. The writing is head-and-shoulders above any other MMO that I’ve played, and I hear it only gets better? For now, I want to get finish the Pugilist/Monk storyline before I level my Rogue further, but like I said, I keep getting distracted.
I know Telltale went belly up, but I also know they said they were making The Wolf Among Us 2. I know I haven’t heard a thing from them in over a year, so in the end, I don’t know what’s going on
https://regt.eu/rabbit-web-apk-indir/
You can totally break the Bravely games over your knee (well okay, I don’t know BD2, but I’m getting it this weekend) with some insane combos. (Hint: if you use Bravely Second to freeze the fight, it removes the damage cap, and that’s when things get nuts)
Give us the Calculators of oldIIRC, the downside to Calculators was their crushingly slow speed, so it could take quite a long time to accumulate enough job points to make their abilities useful. Of course, I can just keep cast speed buffs on the Calculator-in-training (while forestalling the end of the encounter by leaving at least one enemy alive) to make the process quicker, but, honestly, if I’m at the point of the game that I’m determined to just break the game with a fully-levelled Calculator skillset, then I’ll just use the Infinite JP glitch (in the PS1 version…don’t know if other ports fixed it) to just get it done quickly.There is a larger point to your job system entreaty: the paucity of cheat codes in console games ever since achievements/trophies became a thing. It used to be fairly common—even just a simple debug menu left in the finished product—but now it seems even unintentional beneficial glitches get patched out at the earliest opportunity. I understand that the worry is that players will use cheats to easily acquire difficult achievements, but I’m not sure why they couldn’t just have the game shut off achievements for any time a cheat is active. It seems like a good compromise. Just let us have our damn fun, developers!
Of course, with the prevalence of mods these days, developers have now effectively delegated cheat-making to the community.
Per the header image, I’m playing a lot of Bravely Default 2. It’s incredible. Much better than I was anticipating, actually, and I love the first two series entries (awful pacing issues aside). I’m in Chapter 3 but have sidelined the plot in favor of the game’s best-kept secret: a collectible card game in the vein of Tetra Master or Triple Triad. I have to play Breath of the Wild for my show – and that’s one of the best games ever made – but it remains really tough to extract myself from this goofy little chibi landscape and its lovely job system.
About 3/4ths of the way through Bravely Default II and I’ve flipped from “hey, this is a fun challenge, I don’t know what you babies are complaining about” to “no, okay, this is just sadistic.” One of the things I do appreciate about BD2’s job system is that it’s a job system and not a career system—it encourages you to be constantly swapping out jobs and abilities instead of sticking with a few favorite roles and steamrolling through…except for the late-stage boss fights when, uh, no, you pretty much need the same jobs. You need someone to master Spiritmaster, not because it’s a fun job but because it has a powerful constant-heal ability and it allows you to cling on for dear life while the boss randomly and erratically dishes out massive amounts of damage. Likewise, you need someone to have one or more of the tank classes equipped at all times so they can soak up hits that would otherwise one-shot your magic casters. And, let’s say you take on a boss, and they obliterate you, but in the process you figure out they’re weak to earth magic. So, you have one or more of your characters equip Red Mage and you come back and try to pummel him with Stonegas…except it turns out this boss automatically counters earth magic with AoE damage and inflicts, I don’t know, poison and silence on everybody for good measure. That’s right, the game punishes you for attempting to exploit a weakness. There are bosses who counter all magic attacks, bosses who counter all physical attacks, bosses who punish you for healing and buffing, bosses who punish you for debuffing, bosses who punish you for…literally doing anything. “Have Monk equipped? Well, ha ha, unbeknownst to you I get 1 BP for every Monk ability used, so next turn I get 4 actions in a row and I’ll just casually obliterate you.” None of these counters are knowable until you run into them and they can’t be gleaned from “investigate” abilities—they’re just arbitrarily imposed sanctions for attempting to experiment. So instead of fumbling around for a clever solution and getting your ass kicked, you just end up searching online for how to beat them. Challenging is one thing, forcing players to grind and mix it up a bit is one thing, but this game seems to be deliberately trying to get you to play with one tab of the GameFAQs open at all times.
Oof, that’s pretty damning.
I’m at Chapter 4 right now and I would disagree. I’m playing on the hard difficulty and don’t find these “rules” about party composition to be set in stone. I’ve beaten bosses with nonstandard party compositions just fine. It takes one or two failed attempts, but I’ve never felt like I couldn’t make it work with some adjustments to sub-jobs and equipment.I can understand if people are turned off by the difficulty, but I like digging deep into these kinds of systems.
ah k, thanks for chiming in. It’s good to see that peoples experiences varied. Can the difficulty be changed mid-game?
The difficulty can be changed at any time. The main difference is the speed stats for enemies. The speed stat determines how often they can take actions. These settings do not change how much damage enemies can dish out.
Do not underestimate how much the speed stat can influence battles because the Brave/Default system is all about timing. On the casual difficulty, you have a lot more time to recover from setbacks and mistakes. On the hard difficulty, bosses are a bigger threat because they do things more often. Unless you are a veteran of the series, even normal difficulty is going to be a challenge.
It looks great and the battle system, overall, is really fun. And I don’t mind throwing some unexpected counters in to mix things up—it’s just when you can only defeat a boss using a very specific job combination and gear loadout that the job system stops feeling like a fun encouragement to experiment and more like a tedious chore.
I am glad that I’m choosing to pass on this game. This is the type of game design that I hate.
I was loving Final Fantasy Tactics Advance right up to the point where having to engage with the tedious and annoying administrative work of the job system drove me away. Boo, hiss.
On the tabletop, our Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Rime Of The Frostmaiden campaign continues apace. I haven’t been mentioning it much so as not to spoil anything from a relatively recent Wizards Of The Coast campaign module, but I’m pretty sure last night’s session was invented whole cloth by our DM, and it ended up being just one massive combat encounter (which is fairly unusual for our group)
First up, our party is all 4th level and consists of:
* Stor, Male Variant Human Barbarian – Path of The Storm Herald (Tundra)
* Xavierius, Female Half-Elf Paladin – Oath of Devotion
* Nim, Male Gnome Wizard – Illusionist
* Lyger – Male Half-Elf Ranger – Beast Master (Tasha’s Cauldron version)
We’re accompanied by a grieving dwarf artificier NPC whom we had rescued from Zhentarim captivity last session.
The session starts with us trapped in a cabin and recovering after activating an orb of Control Weather to blast the immediate area with sunlight for reasons.
The light has attracted the attention of a hunting group in the area that the party knows includes at least a Verbeeg Giant, and which appears to have some kind of unnatural thunderstorm associated with it.
The party decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and saddle up our Axe Beaks to sneak off back to the town of Lonelywood.
Unfortunately, we’re ambushed by a group of 5 worgs in the gorge immediately in front of the cabin.
Whilst they don’t represent much of a threat and are quickly dealt with (including my barbarian ripping the spine out of one worg and beating another one to death with it), the noise does attract the attention of the hunters.
Fortunately, it’s only the Verbeeg. Unfortunately, he’s riding on this thing:A mammoth sized woolly rhinoceros. He was also wielding a warhammer that did additional thunder damage.
Oh, and as the combat started, a Giant Eagle swooped down and attacked our Ranger.
Highlights: A clutch Hideous Laughter from the gnomekept the Verbeeg himself out of the fight for three rounds.
To avoid the rhino’s supercharge attack, my raging Barbarian charged the rhino and kept beating it down with his own warhammer..
The Ranger used an ice axe to convert the eagle into a mount and crash landed it into the rhino.
Thanks to rage resistance and danger senses, the barbarian took two full charges from the rhino and barely took any damage.
The fight got dangerously close to a TPK, with the barbarian having hammered the rhino to death being the only one left standing, even after the dwarf NPC overcame his panic to administer first aid to the other three party members. Those other three were in the land of death saves whilst the barbarian had a hammer duel with the Verbeeg. At one point, the barbarian completely resisted a grapple shove by the Verbeeg with a clutch natural 20.
The Barbarian’s Storm Aura gave the Paladin just enough temporary hit points to return her to consciousness, and thanks to her Charger feat, she was able to rush the Verbeeg, swing her longsword at him, and Divine Smite the Verbeeg to his doom.
We’re now about to level up to 5…
What I’d say about YLAD is that the problem isn’t so much that the jobs system doesn’t allow you to synergize or that the jobs are all too similar — if anything the game is really good at combining character-specific advancement with different jobs by making some skills permanent across jobs once you unlock them — the problem is that it takes a lot of grinding to attain that kind of flexibility. If you’re not switching jobs around and seeking out powerful enemies, you’re never going to get to a place where you can steamroll boss fights.I’m still making my way through Persona 5 Strikers, and I’m finally on the road, running an investigation in Sendai to figure out my next move. So far, I’m enjoying the game, though I find the story considerably less compelling that Persona 5’s; there’s a lot less urgency, and while there does seem to be an overarching story, the game is a little too slow to reveal it. Anyway, I can’t wait to dip back into it this afternoon and see what else it has in store for me.
While I agree there’s been few great job system games since Final Fantasy Tactics (and the Advance sequels), I don’t know if balance is the problem.Take a game like Fire Emblem: Three Houses; Wyvern Riders are so overpowered that by the end 75% of your team are best off as them. Go too much away from balance and the game starts to incentivise uniformity.I really liked the Fire Emblem GBA approach to job systems; a branch system and you get a couple of each specific branch. And if you have a choice between a Beserker or a Pirate, you’ll probably have one character whose stats are more appropriate for a Beserker and another who’s more appropriate for Pirate so you get the fun of a job system but still have the variety of using most, if not all of them.
Started Tales of Zesiria the other day. It’s my first Tales game but I’m not feeling it so far. The game keeps throwing info dumps about the combat system that aren’t really helping. So far it just feels like a lot of mashing O with the occasional X thrown in. Hopefully it’ll click and make more sense.
Been playing Yakuza Like a Dragon and I’ve been loving it so far. I’m only on chapter 5 so I feel like I’m barely into the meat of the game, but it’s been a great ride so far. The turn based combat is so good.
One of my pet peeves as to how modern single-player RPGs seek to impose a challenge on the player is by arbitrarily limiting the amount of healing they can do. A lot of games won’t let you simply stock up on 99 x-potions; they’ll only let you carry 9 potions at once, and then have a 2-minute cooldown between each one.
That’s something I noticed during boss fights in FF7 Remake. The ATB gauge fills really slowly unless you’re controlling the character making them attack. And you need a filled bar to use any ability, spell, or item. If your team gets hit with a devastating attack and they don’t have a bar filled, surviving can get pretty dicey.
Yeah. It’s a weird contradiction when an action-RPG purposefully limits your healing options in order to force you to learn how to avoid damage (usually through dodging and/or guarding) and then gives the boss monster some huge unavoidable attack.
I thought Yakuza 7 showed a lot of promise, particularly as a first effort from a studio that was retrofitting the mechanics onto a project that was already well underway as a beat ‘em up.Assuming Yakuza 8 is a JRPG as well, I’d expect the job system will receive a good deal of expansion and refinement. (And, hopefully, experience scaling and environmental interactions during combat, too.)That said, I still found it to be the overall most exciting turn-based JRPG I’ve played in years, potential included. (Hell, between Final Fantasy VII Remake setting the bar for ARPGs and Yakuza: Like A Dragon doing the same for more traditional efforts, 2020 stands as the year my waning interest the genre was revitalized to something approaching 5th or 6th gen levels.)As far as what I’m playing goes, I platinum’d and one hundred percented Assassin’s Creed Origins a couple of weeks ago and have been in palate cleansing mode ever since. Origins is solid game that I wound up enjoying way, way more than I expected to, but after an undertaking like that, a substantial departure was necessary. Been playing Devil May Cry 2 lately. Was revisiting Final Fantasy VII Remake a bit before that and will likely drop back in again soon.Still need to grind my way through the final, final, final dungeon in Yakuza 7, too. Been eyeing my unopened copies of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, too.
I haven’t had any shortage of games to scratch my job itch lately, but looking over my most recent RPG playthroughs, they’ve largely included Dragon Warrior/Quest games and Steam remakes of Final Fantasy games, with Final Fantasy XIII being next up on my slow project to re-100% the series and Disgaea 1 waiting in the wings. Maybe I’m just in my haze of game nostalgia from 15-30 years ago, with my recent-ish playthrough of FF12 Zodiac Age serving as a shining example of a game that turned a system with samey characters into a far more interesting job system. Maybe that’s why my first reaction to the headline was, “What? Good job systems are everywhere!”(in Ivalice)Last weekend I finished cleaning out the achievement list for Toe Jam & Earl: Back in the Groove, and it feels like a game I could easily pick up for a casual 1-hour playthrough once a week, or I could treat it like the original and play a few binge sessions every Christmas season (because presents). It’s a great game. It did exactly what it wanted to do, and exactly what I wanted it to do.Since then, I’ve been plugging back through Super Mario Sunshine by way of Super Mario 3D All-Stars. The game apparently has never been worth the “Oh come on, the game wasn’t that bad” defenses I’ve been giving it for the past several years. There are plenty of sections that feel like what vintage 3D Mario platforming should feel like, there are plenty of sections that offer fun ways to use the new mechanics they introduced for the game, but then there are the most obvious offenders that people talk about all the time: the sand bird, the pachinko machine, the lack of a means to track blue coins.And a lot of blue coins are just dumb. Like, you’re just expected to spray nondescript surfaces until one of them starts reacting, and then you spray it until it spits out a coin. You spray one of a dozen lamps in a hotel. You kill one of several dozen enemies in a level. You spray the top of a hill that would otherwise not be helpful to interact with at all.It’s like that one star in Super Mario 64, where you have to hop in a cannon and fire Mario at a wall, and it’s stupid, and I don’t even remember whether I found it by accident or had to look it up on RadGameTips or whatever existed on the late 90s Internet, but it’s easy to overlook because it’s just one star out of 120, and the name of the star is a quick reminder that, “Oh, it’s this shit again.”Except there are 240 blue coins in the game, and none of them have names that you can references when you’re scouring for your last 5 in a level, so if you’re missing one… suddenly we’re playing Viscera Cleanup Detail: Mario Edition and scrubbing every surface in the game until one of them vomits out a blue coin for absolutely no reason.So I’m hovering around 100 shines, doing the last 3 in each level, exploring the hub world, and using a guide to spoil the blue coins, because if I didn’t find them naturally on my first pass through the game, I just don’t care to hunt for them. I may replay the game for its bare minimum of 50 shines at some point in the distant future, hitting up the one on the airstrip and 7 for each the main levels, but I’m thinking this might be the last time I do a deep cleaning of Sunshine’s content. It’s no Super Mario 64. 120-shine is not a relaxing weekend.And this weekend, now that I’ve had a few weeks to shake the feeling of, “Didn’t I just play through this level?,” I think it’s time to pick Pikmin 3 back up and finish Olimar’s Return. I think I’d done 3-4 out of 10 when I last played it? We’ll see if I pick right back up where I left off or if I need to start back with the first mission to remediate myself on the basic gameplay. It should be a lot of fun, either way!
I enjoy job systems (FFT is my favorite game), but the fact that they’re only fun when broken is not a great sign.The only alternative isn’t the mentioned dry ‘balanced’ progression of a typical modern rpg. RPGs with job systems are trying to cater to too many nostalgic urges: lots of jobs, a linear labor-based experience system with large stat increases, a big story with a linear progression of bosses. All of this stuff together basically makes it impossible to introduce a system with vast customizations without it either being broken or incredibly dull.What I think needs to happen is a grounding of the job system by grounding the games themselves. In Monster Hunter and Souls-likes, single stat increases are meaningful because there is constant tension in the gameplay, every inch matters, all the time. Monster Hunter arguably already has a job system in the form of different weapons, and those ‘jobs’ are more meaningful than jobs in BD because the speed of a weapon swing is the difference between life and death, whereas in BD it’s all just a mush of numbers that’s either easy or easier (or capriciously difficult) because you just can’t craft a consistently compelling game with a traditional experience system that also delivers 20+ completely disparate jobs…. I might also just argue that traditional experience systems and ‘attack-dominated’ turn-based combat systems should just go away.
Arguably, job systems date back to 1988’s Dragon Quest III, where you were able to change the class of your party members and they would retain their spells (and is even a game that we actually got on the NES as Dragon Warrior III in 1991). If a non-tactical, non-action JRPG does it, Dragon Quest probably did it first (although not necessarily better).
I haven’t played Bravely Default II yet, but Bravely Default and Bravely Second do have crazy OP shit you can set up. Especially once you get the skills to have one party member essentially gift their BP to other party members.
Give us the Calculators of old.Why bother with the Calculator when dual wield Monks were there to kill the map in three turns?Or hell, standing back and letting Orlandu handle it? Now that guy was the epitome of broken.
Based on how Rockstar is going, including the meticulous details in Red Dead Redemption 2, I fully expect job systems in GTA 6.I returned to The Last of Us Part II for the Platinum- which was surprisingly easy, and I appreciate that 😋. ***Full Spoilers to follow*** My opinion of the game remains the same, though. The Ellie half is fantastic, and her birthday chapter is the closest it gets to feeling like the first game, and it’s amazing. The Abby half is a little more problematic because halting the momentum to start all over, no matter how you slice it, sucks. It doesn’t help that I never care about her or her already-dead friends, but at least Abby’s half offers some great moments, including facing an abomination known as the “rat king,” and a boss fight in a theater against Ellie herself. I’m mixed on Part II because for every good thing, (I love the little guitar mechanic) there would be a bad thing (judging you for killing- including dogs- when sometimes it’s literally the only way to advance). It’s as polished and as technically beautiful a game as I’ve ever seen, but the story is inelegant, filled with character decisions that make less sense than in the original, and a lot of dating/pregnancy melodrama I find to be beneath this series. As someone who never thought a sequel was a good idea, I’m amused that TLOU2 sort of confirms I was right. Both inside and outside the game (I won’t even get into the controversies) The Last of Us legacy is worse off than it was had this not been made. And yet, it’s still easily the best game I played in 2020.
Thank you so much. It’s one of my favorite Title. I like it very much.
Octopath Traveler had a really good Job system
Worst offender of this nowadays is definitely Destiny 2. Enemies that are scaled differently based on how many people are in your group, equipment and weapons that are constantly being nerfed, buffed, then nerfed again, and of course a character level that gets reset every season because the devs are too lazy to figure out how to scale new content…