Game Difficulty

I once participated in an online discussion where several old-school gamers were complaining about how easy console RPGs are, especially nowadays. (There was also some mention of game difficulty in general, but the focus was on console RPGs.) I ended up writing a short rant defending easy games. Essentially, I dislike tedium, and I have a much lower threshold for it than, well, almost everyone else in the discussion. (I frequently end up several levels behind those suggested in walkthroughs for killing various bosses in CRPGs, just because I get tired of levelling.)

On a somewhat related note, I came across two interesting articles recently: Speed Kills, and Inappropriate Feedback Mechanism. The first article suggests that the best difficulty adjustment for action games is to adjust speed, since the hard part of action games is processing and determining the correct response to the situation in-game within a short time. The second article is a minor rant about the way that games punish players who are not as skilled as the hardcore gamers. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (a PS1 game) has a really good example of this. The beginning is a prologue section where you play through the final boss fight of the previous Castlevania game. Depending on how well you do, your character for the rest of the game will start out with different stats. The problem is that the prologue level acts as an inverse difficulty selector - the better you do, the better your starting stats, and the easier the rest of the game will be. I don't play sidescrollers much, so I got whomped on the prologue level. An NPC had to pop in and heal me back to full health before I managed to defeat the boss, he was just that hard. When a friend (who plays those kinds of games much more often) took a look at my savegame, he remarked "Wow! Those are the lowest stats I've ever seen for Alucard!"

I recently finished Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance on the GBA. My total logged play time was 11 hours; that doesn't count backtracking from saves after dying. However, I finished the game, and the castle was 199% complete. (Out of 200%, if you're not familiar with the series.) Harmony of Dissonance has a very similar feel to SotN; it was the same team. However, HoD is significantly easier. I can't put my finger on the reasons, since I don't play many sidescrollers/platformers (most of them are too hard for me). One review I read claimed that in HoD, the enemies aren't very hard to dodge, take few hits to kill, and give a lot of experience. The reviewer also complained that the HoD boss behaviour is not complicated enough; he bragged that he got through many of them without taking a single point of damage. However, I had a lot of fun with HoD. It was a sidescroller that was actually within my skill level. I'd have been happier with more plot, but it held my interest long enough that it can be added to the rather short list of "Games I've Actually Finished."
Around the same time I started HoD, I tried out Metroid Fusion. One of my friends has been trying to get me to play Super Metroid on a SNES emulator for a long time; I've played a bit (much of it with him walking me through areas of the game), but it didn't really grab me. Metroid Fusion has a stronger plot, and there's a mission system that eliminates the "wander around aimlessly for no apparent reason" feeling I got from Super Metroid. (I got this feeling from HoD as well, but other game elements made up for it.) So I stuck with Metroid Fusion for a while, and then it got much too hard for me, so I quit. The two game series are somewhat similar; they both involve a fair amount of exploration, and progressing through the game involves finding and using various power-ups correctly. The main difference (at least in the SotN-like Castlevanias) as I see it is that the Castlevania characters have levels. In Metroid (by which I mean "the Metroid games I've played"), Samus gets minor bonuses in the form of more missiles somewhat frequently, and more health less frequently. There are finite numbers of these missile and health bonuses, and you have to explore to discover them. In Castlevania, you can get minor bonuses by leveling up, and to a lesser extent by finding equipment. The difference is that leveling up requires less skill on the part of the player than exploration does. It also gives me a greater sense of progress. In Metroid, an extra couple of missiles doesn't mean anything to me, because I still can't use them effectively. I still miss more than half the time, and it's only the health bonus that let me kill enemies I couldn't kill before, simply because I can stand there taking damage just long enough to kill them before they kill me. (Without the health bonus, it would be the other way around.) In Castlevania, a level up means that enemies do less damage to you, and you do more damage to them, and you can withstand more punishment. Leveling requires time rather than great skill; you can level up on the easy monsters you can already kill in order to become powerful enough for the harder ones. Exploration requires both skill and time, but it requires a great deal more skill. I've been blocked out of areas because I couldn't manage a difficult jump, or because the enemies in the preceding room just kept slaughtering me. Essentially, levels give a player who falls somewhat short of the targeted skill level a way to succeed, if they're willing to put in the time. Without them, or any similar compensating factor, the game is less forgiving, and much less fun. In Metroid, I felt like I was never improving in any significant way, because my character wasn't improving that much, and neither were my skills. I doubt I'm ever going to get the hang of moves that require two or more buttons (such as charging, jumping, then shooting, or jumping and shooting while using a shoulder button to aim diagonally), and that means that the game is going to be really, really hard for me.

This is a little more rant-y than I'd have liked, but it's something I wanted to write. :)

I'd meant to get more into game difficulty in CRPGs, but maybe I'll save that for next time. I don't think there's one relatively simple answer to adjusting CRPG difficulty the way the author of the "Speed Kills" article claims there is for action games, but there's obviously a difference.

As a side note, it feels like it's been a while since I played a CRPG that I was happy with. HoD is actually the closest I've come to being satisfied recently, but it needed a great deal more in terms of plot and characterization. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is getting tedious; simple battles that I pretty much can't lose still take 20 minutes to go through, and I'm not even cheesing for levels anymore! Star Ocean just wasn't working for me, even with the skills and crafting; Suikoden II was closer, but the slow movement speed and lack of a viewable world map were driving me crazy every time I needed to go somewhere.