As a kid, a little bit of homework was the only thing in the way of free time. Hours spent in front of the computer trying to level up my Adventure Quest character enough to enter Darkovia Forest meant nothing. Isn’t becoming a werewolf at the top of every 10-year-old’s priority list?
The fun of RPGslies in your role as a strategist. In every battle, you need to consider all kinds of factors. You need to take a look at everything in your character’s arsenal. Which armor and weapon should you use, based on the stats of each that you own? Do you have enough potions or cures? What attacks and how much mana are you working with? And that doesn’t begin to cover more complex elements often included in combat gameplay, such as weapon durability or weight. Many turn-based RPGs offer you several characters from which you build a party, each with their own stat builds. A lot of the time, this goes hand-in-hand with combat classes.
Each RPG requires its players to learn its unique rules, mechanics, and gimmicks. This can be a lot of fun at the start of a game, but it’s become almost inevitable for the rest of the game to become a pattern of a long time spent grinding for levels followed by a single boss battle. At best, it’s time-consuming, and at its worst, it’s boring.
I spent the pandemic becoming obsessed once more withFire Emblem: Three Houses. The crazy events of 2020 gave me time to play with all kinds of character builds and consider each of my party’s placements and movements on the map carefully. God forbid I lost a favorite character, the game’s permadeath feature meant I’d lose them for good.
The next game I played wasBravely Default II. I was excited about the interesting class system, where once an “asterisk” was obtained, any character’s class — called “job” in Bravely Default II — could be changed with nothing more than the click of a button, and then changed back just as easily. With the class changes, the stats of each character changed, too. Every battle unlocked a new class for your characters, encouraging you to switch up the combat style for your party. This made for plenty of creative ways to tackle upcoming bosses and was extremely enjoyable.
However, unlocking all the abilities ofeach job in Bravely Default IIrequires leveling up the job, which is an individual process for each of the four characters in your party. Having two dragoons might be useful. But if it doesn’t work out, that’s time wasted leveling up the job for two different characters. There’s also a separate level-up mechanic for the overall level of the character that influences the individual character’s build. This system inevitably leads to plenty of grinding. With a full-time job, completing the game became far too much of a chore for me. Battling the same enemies over and over again didn’t feel rewarding, especially in maze-like dungeons. I’d often reach a boss only to find my party wasn’t strong enough to face it.
That issue isn’t unique to Bravely Default II. RPGs often force players to repeat fights against low-level enemies in order to level up characters to be strong enough for boss fights. Far more time becomes spent mindlessly slaughtering hordes of monsters than thinking about the best way to utilize the tools at your disposal to take down a challenging foe.
Darkest Dungeon, an indie game developed by Red Hook Studios and released in 2015, takes away the need for grinding for levels, called “resolve” levels in the game. At the start of the game, you have two units in your barracks. Your barracks are the roster from which you select four party members to embark on a quest on each of the game’s “weeks.” You can add more units to your selection at the beginning of each of the game’s “weeks,” provided there is room in your roster.
Both the quest preparation phase and the quests themselves are strategic challenges. There’s no way to tell what classes of characters the stagecoach will offer. Characters also come with and develop “quirks,” which are personality traits that can negatively or positively affect their combat prowess through different effects on stats. Characters also have stress levels. A character who gets too stressed out during battle will have a heart attack and die permanently. That means making sure to put highly stressed characters in a stress relief activity for the week. Stress meters are something to consider when putting together your party of four, as are quest levels.
Quests have three levels of both length and difficulty. The longer and more difficult a quest is the more experience a character gains. Quests will earn your units experience towards resolve levels. A unit at a low level will get easily stressed, but may still embark on, a “veteran” level quest. However, a level-3 unit will refuse to go on a level-1 quest. After you’ve done a number of quests in one region, the boss will appear as a quest in that particular region.
Each region of the game is home to different types of monsters, which you will quickly come to familiarize yourself with.Each of this RPG’s classeshave seven moves, which can buff, heal, attack, and/or have other effects. you’re able to select four to use during combat for quests.
Initially, the stagecoach will only offer you Level 0s. As you progress, you may upgrade the stagecoach to expand both the size of your roster and the number of available heroes in the stagecoach. This is done through the spending of family heirlooms, which are items that can always be found throughout quests. They can also be used to upgrade other facilities, which will allow you to upgrade weapons, armor, move sets, and more. Upgrades also require gold, which is found on quests.
A short quest can be completed in about 5-10 minutes, and a long quest can be completed in about 15-20. For a quest that’s well-suited to the resolve level of a character, it shouldn’t take more than three quests to level them up.
Setting clear difficulty levelsgives you a good gauge of which quests you may and can’t take your units on, minimizing the chance of going in unprepared. The difficulty levels paired with resolve levels of units also keeps the game challenging. Although you’ll often face the same types of monsters, their level of strength will always be parallel to your team’s. The only penalty for abandoning a quest is added stress for your characters. After that, it’s right back to prepare for another quest. The game is constantly giving the player the strategic challenge that all fans of RPGs love.
In Darkest Dungeon, Red Hook Studios was able to make the process of preparing for a quest as engaging as the quests themselves. Through its level system in both characters and quests, it’s able to keep the game challenging and avoid being a grind fest.
