The second post of two where I think hard about what bothers me so much in a lot of RPGs, and why I think I might be in a niche
Reading the first article might help contextualize a few things, but it’s not required.
It was a revelation to play a SaGa game for the first time last year. I know I’m a few decades late to the party, and I’m happy that SaGa: Emerald Beyond got so much attention that it put the franchise back on the map, at least in the West, where not many people are familiar with it.
Last year, though, I found SaGa by pure luck: looking around for gacha games that played more like proper console RPGs – like Another Eden and Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent (wow, that’s a pretty long name) – I found Romancing SaGa Re;univerSe.
Although the name “Romancing SaGa” was familiar, I’ve never played any of the games. Looking around the gacha, I was intrigued by the glimmer system and by how the attributes were raised. Then I started digging and reading about the older “proper” SaGa games, and was a quote like this, from Wikipedia, that grabbed my attention:
The SaGa series emphasizes nonlinear gameplay and open-world exploration, with its open-ended branching plot and free style of character development separating it from the more linear Final Fantasy series, which was ahead of its time.
Nonlinear gameplay and open-world exploration? Sign me right up. Luckily, the games were at a huge discount at the time, probably because Square Enix was getting ready to announce Emerald Beyond. I think I paid 1 or 2 euros for Romancing SaGa 2 and 3, and around 5 euros for Scarlet Grace, all for the iOS, since I don’t have a handheld console and didn’t want to play them on the PC.
So, what does this have to do with not liking combat in RPGs? I don’t see the fun in crunching numbers to create good character sheets, managing inventory to carry enough healing and support items, dealing with random encounters while trying to explore a dungeon, relying on meta-knowledge to prepare for challenges you can’t know are coming otherwise, or possibly softlocking yourself because you can’t overcome a mandatory battle to progress the story. I feel like most RPGs, be they Western or Japanese, usually fall prey to one of these things, and it sucks the fun out of the game for me.
This is a preference thing, not a rule dictating what’s good or bad. I know people who enjoy crunching numbers, or restarting a game from scratch if they softlock themselves. Not me, though.
Finding SaGa was like a breath of fresh air, because it subverts most of what I listed. The game can be incredibly frustrating, but it is frustrating in ways that I enjoy, like having to explore every nook and cranny of the map and talk to every NPC to find out what to do next. I know people who would prefer to do advanced math to calculate attack damage than to deal with this. I prefer this.
In any case, I felt at home.
I tend to gravitate toward RPGs that either don’t have combat – like Disco Elysium – or that have the minimum amount of combat possible – like Planescape: Torment – or that allow you to escape most combat situations using character smarts – like Fallout 1 and 2. I was surprised to enjoy the SaGa combat, and I think it boils down mostly to one thing: all the characters fully recover their HP after each battle, removing much of the attrition other RPGs impose. It also allows the party to flee from almost any encounter, which is awesome when you get into a battle that’s just too much. Also, you can see and avoid enemies, which is good, as there is no reason to farm XP since the game doesn’t have any XP to begin with.
And it’s like, I do like good-designed combat, and I do enjoy being challenged, I just feel that much of the challenge in most games also involve things outside combat – like inventory or item management or perfect attribute distribution – that doesn’t seem to connect that well with the combat itself and other roleplaying elements. But again, this is just a feel/preference thing.
Anyway, in Scarlet Grace, the combat was revamped and became much more challenging – and unusual. It infuriates me, but I also like it, and the system in Emerald Beyond feels like it was further polished, playing much better and allowing for higher control of the flow, in my opinion. These are games that put the boring stuff (in my opinion) away and let you focus on what’s important: story (although SaGa isn’t that great on this front, but I digress) and the act of combat itself, with nothing in between.
Now, by reading the list a few paragraphs above, it should be clear that dungeon crawler – which is, I don’t know, a subgenre of RPG? – is another genre I don’t get on with. I wish I did, because there are tons of games that seem very neat, but I was never able to get into that mindstate to enjoy it, as I feel I’m constantly fighting the game rules, not the enemies.
However, a few months after finding out about SaGa, two games crossed my timeline on cohost: Quester and Dungeon Encounters. Both games are turn-based dungeon crawlers, but they subvert the formula a bit, fitting better with my own preferences.
Quester is the one I played the most so far. I find it interesting how the combat seems to have a lot of conditionals, and given that the player doesn’t choose a target to attack, it becomes this sort of dance of trying to counter-play the enemies’ attacks. HP and battle resources used by stronger skills regenerate after each battle, and outside of that, there isn’t much to manage. It’s perfect.
Dungeon Encounters, on the other hand, is a lot more minimalistic – even the dungeon is nothing more than squares that the character walks over. The combat is so straightforward it’s almost scary, but despite its simplicity, there’s some depth I’ve yet to fully explore. And just like Quester, the party’s HP regenerates after combat – although, here, status effects like petrification are kept until cured. It’s an interesting mix.
So, while I do enjoy my Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests and Pillars of Eternities and Wastelands and so on, most of the time I have to power through the battles to find that enjoyment. In modern games with “story mode”, battles are still so prevalent, in a bad way, that even just trying to enjoy the story requires powering through dozens of confrontations to read just a few lines of dialogue before being thrown into combat again. And although there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t find it an enjoyable experience.
Having a penchant for exploration, I wish there were more games following the SaGa formula. If combat is a requirement, I wish there were more RPGs removing the punishing attrition that exists outside of combat and influences it, like managing an inventory with healing items if you want to survive despite not having a proper managing system for items, or allowing the player to distribute attribute points but punishing them if the distribution wasn’t optimized enough.
As stated before, these aren’t rules to make a “good” game, but different approaches that might serve a not-so-popular niche of people who still enjoy RPGs, just not the current formula they tend to follow.
In the end, it’s not that I don’t like combat in RPGs, I just don’t like how it is usually implemented.