Alright, I didn't comment on this before because
I just wanted to avoid posting in this thread again after Chupperson came in and ruined it like he does every thread on the subject,
but one of the games I've been playing reminded me of this:
RPGs require as much strategy as action games if they're made properly.
This is absolutely correct, but two things:
1. Strategy != skill. This thread is about the latter, but I think discussion of the former has a place here as well as long as the fact that there is a distinction is pointed out.
2. Most RPGs clearly
aren't made properly, because a lot of them hardly require any strategy at all.
I'm going to use an example here of an RPG that
should require strategy, but ultimately doesn't because of a single tactic that works in almost every situation. The game in question is
Final Fantasy Tactics A2, and the tactic is as follows:
1. Build a party of Illusionists, with the full Illusionist magick suite and the Halve MP ability.
1a. Your hume Illusionists can instead be Seers with the Illusionist suite as their secondary ability; Magick Frenzy just makes a
great thing even better. In fact, your Illusionists can be any class available to hume and nu mou units, as long as they have the Illusionist suite as their secondary ability and Halve MP as their passive ability.
2. Earn the clan title that unlocks either the MP Efficiency or MP Channeling clan ability. The same effect can be achieved with either:
3. First-turn, elementally-tuned (or not), target-all-foes magick attack. From six units.
It's pretty bad with other so-called strategy RPGs as well.
Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis.
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (though this is clearly intended to fall closer to the RPG side, to the extent that the DS port uses a standard RPG battle system).
Knights in the Nightmare.
Disgaea.
Utawarerumono.
To put it another way, here are some SRPGs that can't be boiled down to any number of real game-winning strategies.
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (and only because "have inhuman luck" is not a strategy you can rely on even though it's your only option if you want the best ending, which is why I don't like this game).
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (unless you consider "pay attention to how you configure your party and don't allow your units to be isolated in battle" a game-winning strategy).
Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars (pretty much the same thing). While the first of these three games ends up largely luck-based (unless you don't care about getting the good ending and are willing to sacrifice units to the plume, in which case it becomes pretty easy but still doesn't require any real strategy), the other two require you to actually think about what you do in each battle and about how you configure your party members.
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor allows you to grind levels, but this won't help you much.
But none of these games are the one I was referring to at the start of this post. I was talking about a
Touhou fangame called
Labyrinth of Touhou.
Now, as I've said before, I love games like
Etrian Odyssey and
The Dark Spire, so when I read about this game and saw it compared to
Wizardry and similar ultra-traditional JRPGs, I ended up trying it out. And getting slaughtered by optional boss
Evaccaneer DOOM on the first floor. And then downloading the soundtrack. And later finding an item labeled "
Persona 4 Glasses," and another item labeled as a "
Bomb Ring." And I'm only on the fourth floor (out of thirty), because I didn't beat Alice Margatroid when I tried to fight her this morning.
But I'm still playing
Labyrinth of Touhou for a reason that dwarfs it being like other games I enjoy, the awesome cameos and references, the familiar characters, the music, and the fact that it runs on my netbook.
I'm still playing
Labyrinth of Touhou because
it requires more strategy than any other traditional turn-based JRPG I've played before.To give an example of what I'm talking about, I tried battling Alice Margatroid again while writing this post. After losing when I fought her for the first time this morning but seeing that she and her dolls can be poisoned (poison drains HP from the afflicted between turns), I figured I'd start the battle off with Wriggle Nightbug's Firefly Phenomenon spellcard, since it doesn't do much damage but hits all foes and has a good chance of inflicting poison. It worked, and after several turns, I eventually managed to take down my main target, Healing Light (one of Alice's dolls, which, true to its name, heals itself and its allies). A few turns later I switched in Patchouli Knowledge (the only character out of twelve who had yet to fight in this battle; she's got the best magic of any party member so far and takes very little damage from magical attacks, but has almost no physical defense to speak of, and has the lowest max HP of any of my characters). Alice then used a spellcard I hadn't seen before but should've expected. It did physical damage to all of my party members, enough to take each one of them out at their current HP.
Sounds like a regular unfair boss battle I was too weak for, so I should go grind, right? Wrong. Hong Meiling and Remilia Scarlet, two of my three tanks, were sitting with Patchy and a few other characters in my reserves with more than enough health to have survived that spellcard. Had I switched one of them in instead of Patchy (which I should've done anyway while I still had three out of four enemy units to contend with), I could've then had that character start pulling in other reserve characters to replace the three who got taken out by the spellcard. Since Alice and her dolls were still poisoned, and since there was no longer anything there to restore their health, there wouldn't have been anything left aside to stop me from achieving victory. In other words:
with a better strategy, I could have won. And next time, knowing in advance that Alice starts using a strong physical-damage spellcard after one of her dolls is destroyed, I'll plan better, make better decisions with character-switching, and win.
Without needing to grind.I wish more JRPGs were like
Labyrinth of Touhou. That is, I wish more JRPGs - traditional turn-based, strategy, real-time, action, whatever - would be made to rely on actual strategy, or skill, or what have you, but
things other than grinding and pure dumb luck. It's sad that a doujin circle seems to realize this when the big developers oftentimes don't.