Lockirby2

Member
  • Content count

    87
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    3

Article Comments posted by Lockirby2


  1. I really like the section on Legend of Zelda here.  It gives voice to a lot of the same things I've felt about the series that I haven't heard discussed as much.  Weirdly, I'd give Skyward Sword some points here in comparison to most of the other games (haven't played the Oracle games).  I remember not getting that feeling of "Why do I even need more Rupees" until about 75% of the way through the game, which might not be great, but is definitely better than most of the previous entries in this regard.  BoTW went backwards here IMO, as it was a little too easy to sell a bunch of stuff and break the economy.

    I noticed that you mentioned Beyond Chaos as an example of something that makes FF6 "even more of a mess".  I think it's an interesting case for this litmus test.  When looking at a single seed, it's going to have just as many superfluous mechanics as in vanilla, if not more.  Well, except for the fact that the Esper Allocator can prevent the game from being an Ultima spam-fest, which makes it a little better on average IMO.  But taking a large number of seeds together, there's almost no mechanic that is useless.  I'd bet that if you asked Cecil about any mechanic in the game, he could name a time where he actually made use of it.  So in one sense, BC scores very low, but in another sense, it scores much better than vanilla, though not as well as BNW IMO.

    Octopath Traveler is a JRPG that I think actually scores very well on this litmus test.  I found nearly every mechanic to be useful on some level.  It's probably weakest in terms of equipment; for example, you can get Silent Bandanas fairly early and they invalidate every other piece of evasive headgear.  But out of all the skills (active and passive) in the game, I'd say that there's only a small handful that I'd write off as useless or outclassed.  Most of the debuffs and status effects that the game actually encourages you to apply to enemies are of the variety that only weaken bosses and work on all of them.

    Furthermore, Octopath is arguably the only JRPG I've seen that actually manages to strike a good balance between offense and defense.  In almost all JRPGs, including even the versions of BNW that I've played, "turtle more" is pretty much always the way to solve a problem.  This makes offensive strategies generally not worth using, even though I use them anyways just because they are fun.

    I'm not sure whether a like or an upvote is considered better.  Maybe one of these is superflous? :P