Re:Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement
by derefr on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @01:22AM
(#960745)
Indeed, the (early) Final Fantasy series actually becomes quite tactically complex if you limit yourself such that you'll never take an unneeded step except to move toward the plot, use various amenities (inn/shop/etc) or take treasure. Doing so also means you don't end up with a glut of money, disabling you from getting better equipment at every opportunity (but usually often enough that it never becomes a serious problem in-and-of-itself.) Most bosses can be "brute-forced", but they usually also have a strategic weakness that most players might have never even discovered due to their higher-than-required level upon reaching them.
I've never quite experienced this exact ideal, but I've come close. And I've also been beaten, which makes the next time even sweeter when my adjusted strategies carry the day.
This turns the game into a bit of a puzzle. Despite your mentioning them, Final Fantasies have typically been very good at this, if you take the minimal/"easy" game path. Which does mean not doing all the extras, but as FF games get bigger and bigger via copy&paste questing I'm finding this is less of an issue than it used to be. (You can still do the "postgame" stuff if you're that into it.)
The Persona series also involve some skill and some luck; sometimes I find it hard to believe how one error can be the difference between wiping my party out without me touching the enemy and my wiping out the enemy without them touching me. It doesn't seem like it should work that way, but it has happened to me numerous times, where even a well-leveled party for where they are gets themselves wiped out because I had a momentary brain fart and hit the wrong command in the first round. It's a very mathematically unstable system, vs. FF's very stable/predictable one, but great fun.