Does Not Obey the Laws of Physics

Context: I was reading an article on tabletop RPG design philosophy regarding crunch (aka number crunching, a short hand for "complex rules" in the TTRPG space) when I ran across some examples being given and suddenly have to headdesk as I realized the person is missing the point in terms of the literary difference between all the "Chinese kung-fu movies." Ok, let me explain a little more.

In the section titled "Different Rules for the Same Fictional Activity can be Completely Different" (scroll down or use Ctrl+F to find the section), the article uses three different games to illustrate how martial arts is mechanically different in three different games. The three examples are:

1. Rivers & Lakes, a game that focuses on using mechanics to generate tactical decisions during a fight that encourages learning the opponent's moves and devise a tactical move that leverages your strengths against an opponent's weakness.

2. Wushu, a game that rewards players mechanical benefits to encourage narrating complex choreography of fight scenes by handing out more dice for each detail the player includes in their "attack".

3. Hearts of Wulin, a narrative game that resolves fights in a single roll because it's more concerned with the narrative drama/consequence of the fight than the technical aspects of the fight itself.

Now, the article sums up this discussion with this:

Personally, I take a bit of issue with this (to me this combat system would be ideal for something like samurai fiction, westerns, gangster and crime fiction, etc. but is terrible for most forms of wuxia)... A Knight at the Opera

So my problems with this pointless aside is many. At the forefront, it speaks to a lack of understanding about Chinese martial arts movies. specifically a lack of nuanced understanding of the Wuxia genre. In fact, the three games listed as examples actually captures the three core engagements of the sub-genres of Chinese martial arts movies.

Allow me to get into the weeds a bit:

Chinese martial arts movies can be largely categorized into three sub-genre's:

1. Wushu (武术): in this genre, the movie's main theme is to communicate, ostensibly, anti-war messages. For you see, one of the unifying philosophy in Chinese martial arts schools is to stop war by improving one's self-defense strength. The belief is that military/martial strength is in service of defense and only defense. Expect some lesson about "self improvement to ward off bullies" to show up at some point. And if they fail on the philosophical aspect, the movie at least hopes to educate the audience a little bit on the actual design philosophy of a school of martial art, such as how Taiji was invented.

2. Kung-fu (功夫): this genre of movies is less concerned with the philosophy and more interested in showcasing awesome technical ability. Kung-fu (功夫) literally translates into "effort". In other words, the goal is to showcase the actor's ability to pull off stunts that took decades of training to perfect. This is the main type of "martial arts movies" that makes it into the West.

3. Wuxia (武侠): movies in this genre are less interested in the martial arts itself and more interested in the heroism and the interpersonal/political drama. The martial arts is more of a framing device to focus on the character rather than any interest in the actual fighting. And the books that inspired these movies often handwave away the nitty gritty details of the actual martial arts stuff.

So this is my very long winded way of explaining no, actually choosing the narrative focused resolution system when mimicking Wuxia is actually very appropriate. The game Wushu is inaccurately named and should have been called Kung-fu (or Gong Fu if you want to be culturally sensitive). Finally, Rivers & Lakes is more of a "Wushu"-esque game because it intends to use actual martial arts philosophy in the game design.

Aaand... yeah. That's my rant over.

So, since I was sick (again) recently, I watched a lot of Heart of Elynthi campaign (*shillWatchItHereshill*) and it got me thinking about how a lot of RPG (tabletop or computer/console) tend to focus on the character growth part of the game. Which, don't get me wrong, is great and all — and I understand that a core game loop in RPGs is gain XP → learn new skills → cakewalk previous difficulty → repeat — but a part of me can't help but really enjoy the idea of maxing out character levels after a certain amount of time and just having all the tools available to take on the challenges that the world will throw at you.

It's a bit like how in Guild Wars (not the second one, the OG Guild Wars) your character leaves the "starter island" aka tutorial at level 20 with all of the class' core abilities and with a full skill kit. Of course, you can vary that a lot and tweak it as you progress through the rest of the story, but the growth is far slower and more incremental than the initial loop of practically exponential power growth. It feels like there's basically 10% tutorial and 90% endgame. Of course, there were also plenty of frustrating bits to the game and I do think there are parts that were tuned in such a way that was needlessly challenging, but the overall ratio of "tutorial" vs "end-game" I think satisfies a part of me that really liked playing around with all the levers to figure out how I liked to approach problem solving.

(To be sure, I am still annoyed with Guild Wars over all for having poor class balance, it really shouldn't be the case that certain classes have a severe case of the feels-bad-man. And seeing how little respect GW2 treated the original GW lore and plot points and story, and the fact that the writers in GW2 all seem to be stuck in their own little modules without paying attention to the bigger picture, plus their horrible character writing puts me off of the game. But at its core, I think Guild Wars' original design concept of having most of the game be end-game is actually kind of refreshing and I wish more games took the time to really polish that concept.)

Here's the thing: while most players might argue the "end-game" starts when you've acquired everything there is to acquire and all that's left is super hard challenging bosses and no more room for improvement for your characters, I don't really see it that way. In my conceptualization of end-game, it starts when there are no more stat bonuses to gain. You can't hit harder, defend better, etc. anymore and what improvement is left is fiddling around to look for better and better optimization and synergy with the pieces you've got. And challenges in the game play come no longer from being able to survive, but rather from figuring out the puzzle of the boss, try to understand what you're supposed to do, which skill you need to use, or what plot point to push forward in order to resolve the conflict. The point of end-game is that it doesn't get harder anymore, it simply challenges you differently.

Of course, this design concept is a bit harder for video games due to its vastly larger decision matrix and limited programming power. However, in a tabletop game, where a huge part of the enjoyment is from socialization and exploration and the DM can spin a new location out of nothing by using theater of the mind stuff, this idea of reaching "max level" (by which I mean getting most of the class mechanics early in the campaign, so this applies to level-less systems, too) has a lot of room to explore. Especially since in tabletop gaming, most players are actually very familiar with their class mechanics and would probably enjoy carrying their character through many different worlds that share the same lore. Being able to travel to a new place to find new items that synergize well with the character's build (which is easier to do with a human DM who knows which mechanical holes exist in your character's repertoire and thus can throw an item that can do the cool thing you want to do when you get to a new town) can be really fun. Having the core style of your character's combat remain the same while at the same time being able to augment it for each new challenge can keep the game fresh while not having to abandon the character just to try something new.

In short, I think what I'm saying is that focusing on tweaking optimization as character progression can be really fun, but rarely do I see games design for that and the only instance I can think of didn't really do the design concept justice.

I'm still not over how annoying FF16 is, so I'm going to drill down to a really tiny, specific issue that sort of illustrates the bigger picture of why FF16 is such a failed single player RPG.

( Cut-tagged for length. )

Conclusion:

FF16 uses narrative choices of MMOs that stem not from storytelling deliberation, but are the unintended results of technical limitations specific to MMOs. In a single player game without an MMO's limitation (persistent world, shared assets, millions of players all at different levels of progression), the narrative could and should have used traditional RPG storytelling tools to convey pertinent world building information without having to resort to stuffing the lore into a free-floating appendix.

At this point, I am reminded of the criticisms toward FF13 for having a lore log. But the difference here is that FF13 is an easily understandable story without ever having to open the lore log. You can find out more about the world, the gods' war, the formation of Cocoon, but it's not important to understanding Lightning's frustrations at being thrust into the role of a guardian before she was ready. Meanwhile, FF16 stumbles awkwardly through a story of Medieval White Europeans coming to grips with "slavery is bad" for the very first time. And the protagonist learns all this through a series of unconnected fetch quests that asks the player to go kill X many killer bees then get berated by those mean, mean slave owners.

Cringe doesn't even being to cover it.

Newest Another Eden Road Map, current as of v3.0.500.

Tried the dungeon for the newest Tales collab (Dreaming Flower) and...ugh. Do not remember the first Tales collab dungeon being this difficult.

I already have a poor impression of the second Tales collab due to the fact that the story was kind of WTF. But now, as I'm playing around with the characters, I'm a bit annoyed that the second collab is so fire-focused. Unlike the first collab, where the free units technically came in four different elements (even if Milla was more of a neutral element than water), this second collab is super focused on fire damage. I can sort of understand, given that one of the units gives Fire Stance, thus it makes sense to promote a mono-fire team, but it also means that these new characters are locked into mono-fire and there's already a lot of competition from free units in the mono-fire position. Especially since there is already an existing free Fire Stance unit, so this just makes things even more monotonous.

All in all, I would say the second Tales collab was far less satisfying than the first collab. The later non-collab units are also far more useful to spreading out from the initial slash-heavy teams. I know that meta-wise mono-elements are far more effective, but I like having the flexibility of playing around with more than one element, especially since going through story dungeons requires more flexibility in the team composition.

Finally, having to grind more reward track points is annoying. I think I'll focus on on bringing in Lloyd and Colette for now, not because it makes sense, but because I actually like those characters and have no emotional attachment to Alphen and Shionne. Actually, I kind of resent that Tales of Arise got the collab instead of better Tales games, like Abyss or Eternia or Destiny.

So, crafting on the free trial is a PITA. Mostly because you have to gather all the items yourself and level all the craft jobs simultaneously, since crafting higher level stuff requires items from other jobs. On a paid account, you can just buy the materials off other players, but for a free account with no way to trade, you're stuck crafting everything yourself.

I'm far from completing the thing, but here are some quick tips:

• You can unlock Ixali tribe quests once you hit MSQ level 41. Ixali tribe quests is a crafting quest and gives a ton of XP. Use the daily reset to level up your jobs really fast.

• There are 8 crafts (disciples of the hand aka DoH) and 3 gather (disciples of the land aka DoL) jobs. Of the DoH jobs, cooking is the only one that doesn't seem to be integrated with the other jobs, i.e. cooked things aren't used to craft other materials in the other seven jobs. Of the DoL jobs, fishing doesn't seem to be involved with anything. So I recommend leaving out fishing and cooking for later.

• Definitely level crafts and gathering simultaneously. Make/collect a little extra when turning in stuff for job quests, because often the item required to turn in on one job is an ingredient needed for another job's request, too. Keeping all the jobs at about the same level means not having to wait to play catch up when trying to collect/craft the quest items.

• On a free account, it's best to take things sloooooow and keep the inventory manageable. Save most of your inventory space for materia, not craft material that you can farm later.

• At around level 20-ish (I think it's more like 17), you'll start unlocking materia melding. You need so many pieces of materia for the level 20 job quests. Again, as a free player, the only way to get materia is to extract it yourself from equipment, so keep all your materia on hand.

• At craft level 30, you can unlock desynth. Here's a desynthesis guide. Point is, this is where a lot of gil will get used up. Since you can't spend gil on trade, time to buy up stuff from NPCs and desynth away. (I haven't actually gotten into this yet. I'm still working on getting my crafts up to snuff.)

• White Mage's Holy is a really quick way to farm large groups of low level monsters. Set chocobo to attack, cast holy in a group of monsters, watch inventory fill up. This is because Holy has a huge range and uses the player as the center of the AoE. I haven't tested it yet, but I think it's actually faster than DPS classes, which has higher single target damage, but slightly smaller range. When the monster is more spread out, however, Bard is much faster because it can just sit in one place and tab-target forever.

Anyway, personally, I don't think it's nearly as fun to follow a guide and speed through the crafting stuff. I mean, yeah, I'm leveling up crafting because I want to be able to craft some glamour items, but at the same time, crafting itself is a fun little puzzle and a nice distraction from all the combat.