You should think more about games

[falciesystemessays]

hey, angie here, i decided to write a steam review for into the breach, which i think is still my favorite tactics game. it's a long one, so it goes below the cut.

This game was a paradigm shift in the genre when it came out. Every gamedev making tactics games, including me, played this game and immediately started taking notes. In the years following its release, "Breachlike" has become a popular subgenre. Between Demonschool, Metal Slug Tactics, and The Hundred Line, squad-based tactics games where the numbers are small and attacks never miss are here to stay. Now I like a lot of these games, they feel good to play, put their own unique spin on the gameplay, and often have a good storyline to go with them.

But as a tactics game, Into the Breach beats all of them.

Let me start with the basics. Just about every tactics game has some form of basic attack. You know, select an attack, select a target, do some damage. You can tell a lot about a game's priorities by seeing how an attack works. ITB's starting punch mech does 2 damage and pushes the target one tile forward. Simple enough, right? Well here's some of what you can actually use that for. -Punching forest to set it on fire and inflict a burn on anyone who steps in it -Punching sand dunes to create a cloud of smoke that prevents attacking -Punching a mountain to turn it into walkable land -Breaking a frozen ally out of their ice at no damage to health -Pushing an enemy away from where they're going to strike -Pushing an enemy into another enemy's firing range to block a shot -Pushing an enemy into another enemy, or into a wall to deal extra damage -Pushing a grounded enemy into water or chasm to instakill them no matter what their health is -Pushing an enemy onto an upcoming spawnpoint, preventing the spawn and dealing damage to the one blocking -Pushing an enemy into one of the buildings you're trying to protect, which is almost always a bad idea but in awful situations it might be the best option

Because Into the Breach isn't just a tactics game about finding the most efficient ways to kill. It's a systemic game, a simulation even, where killing is only secondary to the actual goal. Terrain and weather are neutral entities, and allies follow the same rules as enemies. The game never feels like it's handing victory to you, even though I know from listening to the GDC talk that Subset put a lot of work into making sure the game is never unfair. But your victory is always yours, even when you feel like you lucked out.

But that does come with some drawbacks, if you want to call them that. I would call Into the Breach a "sharp" game, and it cuts both ways. When you're playing at your best, you hold the blade, cutting through the noise to find the perfect set of actions to make each turn go without a hitch. But if you let go for one second, you (or at least I) feel every inch of the knife piercing your foot. Mistakes feel awful, and worse by the fact you can't rewind from them. If you take grid damage, or lose a pilot, or miss out on a perfect clear, you have to hold that. And that can feel terrible. Speaking as someone with OCD, this game is very soothing until it very suddenly becomes painful. That doesn't mean you (or I) shouldn't play the game, but that it's probably a poor choice for comfort media, you know?

But, you know, it's probably good that Into the Breach is a game you can never get too comfortable in. Because while this game isn't what Steam would call "Story-Rich," it is legitimately doing things thematically. If you stop and pay attention to what is actually going on (which a lot of people don't), you might just find that there's more than an excuse narrative here. This is a future dystopia where all that remains of humanity are a scant few small islands run by CEOs. One of those CEOs has made it their mission to make their island as unhospitable as possible for the war effort. One of your optional missions on that island is to terraform newly growing grassland back into desert. You do this using a terraformer that shapes a swath of terrain and kills everything on it. And it feels so satisfying to use. But you are still destroying grassland, and mountains, and living things, as a bid to delay the end for a bit longer. Whatever. Once more into the breach.

There's so much more I could say about this game. Like the way every weapon, way beyond the simple punches, is creative in a unique way. The way that the narrative framing of time travel works as both justification for and commentary on being a roguelike. The way that the (free!) advanced edition actually puts in a lot of the ideas that got scrapped for being too complex for launch, but gives you the keys to decide whether they're used. But I'll end with this: I talked at the start of this about how many games are inspired by Into the Breach. And these games are good, sometimes really good. But they're also, WE'RE also, chasing a trend. And eventually that trend will get stale, and people will get tired of the Breachlike as a cultural object. But I don't want people to forget how fucking good the game is that started this trend. I don't want us to forget why we cared in the first place.

[fioras-resolve]

do you ever think about who you play as in an rpg? i'm not talking about the action rpg's where you play as one single character, but those party-based ones where you're giving commands to several in a single fight. we know who these characters are, but who are you in this equation? well, you are the party, a kind of collective id controlling all of them like game pieces.

so, next question. who are these characters to you? because none of them are you, individually. in final fantasy x, tidus, yuna, and whoever else you can think of are not you. but in battle, they are extensions of you. they are tools for you to use. so while, in cutscenes, you will understand these people in terms of personality and arc, in the parts where you control them, you understand them primarily in terms of utility and limitation. what can these people do for you?

these are both questions i was very mindful of when making daybreak hearts (you don't need a link, i've posted one a dozen times already). and while i am proud of it, i can't help but notice the limitations of this framework. if you wanted to make a tactics rpg about, say, disability, then representing any one condition mechanically means giving a character a clear limitation to how the player can use them. because that's what disability is to most outsiders: a limitation on being useful.

a more charitable read is that a party-based game can't show you the world from a character's eyes, but can shed light on them in a way that's possible for anybody who isn't you. it's like the difference between empathy and sympathy, you might not literally feel the things that they feel, but you feel good when they do, and wince when they're doing bad. it's not like being useful is the only reason you can like a character, and most people playing rpg's do so with a level of pathos beyond the utilitarian.

but i point this all out because, even in that charitable read, there is still an imbalance that should be remarked upon. i used disability as an example earlier, because i've been thinking about my own disability a lot recently. because… okay. if you're in the room with me, and i'm feeling back pain, you don't know that unless i tell you, or let out a groan. the invisible nature of it means that, if you're feeling maternal, you can tell me i'm overreacting. but if you do believe me, then you probably feel something different. maybe it's concern, or pity, or guilt, or anger. or maybe you are also disabled, and genuinely empathize, or want to help me in ways that have helped you. but however you feel about my pain, i am still in pain, and you are a person who is seeing me be in pain.

but then… maybe the actual point is to acknowledge that imbalance, and work through it. because empathy isn't inherently good praxis. i don't want to make some fucking Chronic Pain Simulator that lets able-bodied people feel like they're doing something important before voting to slash disability income. the truth is, there just isn't going to be a miraculous game that gets people to fucking do something. we shouldn't be making art to plead to the people with power. we should be making art to resonate with the people without it.

[fioras-resolve]

reading about ea developing a new form of online matchmaking designed specifically to keep players engaged, i realized that this model seems to treat it as a negative if you ever stop playing. like, seriously, check out this study. the way it measures "churn risk" in the test, the likelihood of logging off after a match, it defines churn not as a month's break or even a week off, but eight hours without playing. going to bed, or work, or just doing anything besides playing that one game is treated as a thing to avoid as much as possible.

and it makes me think that maybe... we need to be more intentional about how our games fit into somebody's life. like, i don't think it's bad for a game to be a consistent part of your life. like, i play guilty gear strive almost every day, i find the pursuit of mastery rewarding, and going to locals has gotten me to make friends i never would have otherwise. but it's important that i have other interests, other valuable things to do with my time, and that the game doesn't punish me for taking a break. i just wish more games got the fucking memo.

[fioras-resolve]

watching a friend of mine learn to play guilty gear strive, i started thinking about just how cool frame data is as, like, a feature of fighting game design. a lot of players tend to complain about it, but like, every attack in a fighting game has to have some amount of startup, recovery, and blockstun, even if that number is zero. so if it's going to be there, you should probably design it thoughtfully.

so let's talk about some thoughtful frame data.

here's Unika's A.T.T.G. Penetrate.

also known as "gun dipper." this is a very powerful approaching move for a lot of reasons. it's technically a slow move having 16 frames of startup, but just fast enough that you can't react to it unless you're actively looking for it. the hitbox is out for a very long 20 frames, which keeps it threatening during its approach and punishes backdashing. unika's hurtbox is low enough to the ground that a lot of mid-body attacks whiff against her. and the move hits low, meaning you have to block it crouching or you get hit.

it just has one problem... the recovery. this move has 26 frames at the end where she cannot act, which cannot be cancelled without spending a resource. this means that, if she whiffs it, you can punish her with pretty much anything. and if you block it, you get out of blockstun way before her animation ends. 17 frames earlier*, to be precise, and your character probably has something really good that's fast enough to punish it. seriously, check the dustloop wiki!

*i know it can technically be slightly less disadvantageous, but not by that much.

so here we have a move that's good at catching people off-guard, but punishing if used predictably. risk and reward. and all of this is done with very normal fighting game design, it's just boxes and frame data. you could design a move like this yourself if you had the tools. (speaking of.) and this is the beauty of game design to me, how a couple of numbers and boxes can create meaningful dynamics. and this is a relatively simple one! we can get a lot more nuanced!

like, check this move out!

hey wait a-- so this is the enhanced version of a.t.t.g. penetrate. (and yes i hear you laughing. her other specials are called top attack and blast off) putting aside that you have to be in a special mode to use it, this version is very similar to the version we talked about before. but with one crucial difference: this move is -3 on block. as in, if you block this move, you are actionable 3 frames before unika is, not 17.

now, this doesn't seem like much, it's still minus on block, you still get to act first. but crucially, you cannot punish her in the same way you could before. the fastest attacks in guilty gear strive have 4 frames of startup, and you're never close enough to get an instant throw. it's still your turn, but everything you do, she can respond to. wanna do a quick jab? she can block it, or dp it, or backdash. wanna block a dp? she can just do a different attack and start up her offense again. all of these options have weaknesses, but she is far from helpless.

and that nuance? the tension of being on the backfoot but having a way out? of wanting to push an advantage but knowing no option is safe? that's the stuff that fighting games are made of. it's why they're exciting, both to play and to watch. guilty gear is known for its complex mechanics and esoteric character designs, but it's a fighting game series at its core. and it's one that can teach us a lot about what goes into designing a fighting game. starting, of course, with a single move.

[fioras-resolve]

I've been really hitting some strategy rpg games hard lately after a long break from the genre, and I'm curious what you think about the idea of story bits that are tied to specific characters' survival.

For instance, I was playing Valkyria Chronicles 4 and eventually the player unlocks support conversations between characters who fight together long enough (or something similar) which is fairly common for these types of games. I was considering how these story beats stand in contrast to the typical genre convention wherein permadeath is a potential consequence.

I guess what I think is interesting is the tension between permadeath as a gameplay mechanic and a consequence of (usually) poor gameplay and the idea that parts of a game's narrative assume the survival of the cast, especially in a strategy game like Valkyria Chronicles or older Fire Emblems. These games really incentivise survival of their casts, which, I feel, detracts from the intended mechanical seriousness of permadeath systems. In these types of strategy rpgs, it seems the only validity in death is that dictated by the narrative, because the player is incentivised to not allow any units/charactersto fall.

This is a bit rambly and likely poorly-structured (and I'm not hitting some bits like how protag deaths will often force a game-over and supporting cast are mechanically expendable aside from loss of narrative elements so like. whatevs), but I'd love to hear your opinion on what I perceive as a sort of strange tension between gameplay mechanics and narrative here.

Just something I've been kinda mulling over!

oh wow this is actually the perfect ask. i've been thinking about this stuff for a while and even talked about it fairly recently on the Angie Nyx Games Discord. (i'm much more talkative on there, if i'm honest.) but this is worth articulating in a full post, which is what i'll do now.

so, the core of the question here is about how permadeath mechanics interact with authored narrative, particularly in turn-based tactics games like fire emblem and valkyria chronicles. there's a lot of layers to this, so i might as well just go into it.

Punishment for Permadeath

the idea of your units being gone forever after they die is a really hard sell to a lot of people. even when your units don't have a lot going on narratively, losing them means losing access to the power they have and the options they provide. if you simply run out of healers in an older fire emblem, you're basically fucked. if you let caeda die in fe1, you lose access not only to her but to the four people she can recruit down the line. failure now makes future failure more likely.and that's before we get into the fact that people will naturally attach to these units as characters.

and, to be clear, the idea of getting attached to character only for them to die, likely due to your failure... that's awesome! at least artistically, it's really potent. but as you mentioned earlier, the framework of games like these tend to heavily disincentivize this. resetting in fire emblem to win a map is a time-honored practice, to the point where turn rewinds are now an explicit mechanic (and even before then, the fates director went into an interview wearing a "Reset? Bring it on!" shirt).

if a designer really wanted you to live with character death, there's all sorts of things they could do. the obvious is to simply force you to live with it, autosaving over character deaths so you have to live with the consequences. you could also reward death, for example letting the memory of a fallen one be a blessing, offering tangible rewards to the whole party that are only available if the unit dies. this could easily go in the opposite direction, where players are encouraged to kill their own units on purpose, but that can be done well too.

Hierarchy of Disposability

this is a pet peeve of mine i've had for a while now. it's about which of your units are actually allowed to die. gears tactics is a particularly egregious case of this, where the death of any character with a role in cutscenes is a lose condition, but all of your random grunts are just fine to kill. they're disposable. they don't matter like the real heroes do.

fire emblem has a similar issue, where some characters will straight-up die when their hp reaches 0, while others will simply retreat because they have to be alive for cutscenes. note that in most (but not all) cases, the characters allowed to live are usually nobility. but even though they're alive, i can't do support conversations with them, so them being alive feels like a big fuck-you to me in specific.

there's other examples of this too, like how npc allies in final fantasy tactics just pass out rather than having a death clock. and a lot of times it really is just for narrative convenience. but it always takes me out of it, because like, what is permadeath even here for if you're going to break it like this? strategy games thrive on a sense of simulation, that the world runs on a consistent set of rules. in japanese, the s in srpg even stands for simulation. and when that simulation is broken, and obviously so, the integrity of the entire game is brought into question.

Crisis of Identity

the thing is, permadeath makes a lot more sense in games like xcom (née x-com) and 90s fire emblem. these games owe a lot more to straight-up war games where some sacrifice is inevitable. hell, older fire emblem was made by the same people as the (advance) wars games, and often shared a lot of code. they're not perfect in how they handle death, but there's a very clear sense that the games were designed around it.

i can't really say that for a lot of the tactics rpg's of today. and, to be fair, a lot of modern srpg's have dropped permadeath because it didn't really help the experience. but do you really think fire emblem engage or three houses were designed for classic mode? this is particularly prominent with three houses, because you don't really gain new characters in the second half, and many levels are designed with surprises that force you to either rewind or accept a loss.

there's a really good gdc talk by strategy design legend soren johnson about knowing your inheritance. every game in existence inherits the legacy of the past. maybe it's the game's genre, maybe it's older games, or maybe it's previous versions of the same game. at some point, you have to stop and ask what that inheritance is even doing. where did this mechanic come from? what is it doing for your game? if the answer is "nothing good," how do you go about scrapping it?

i feel this particularly hard with fire emblem, as it is deeply entrenched within a very specific set of core mechanics. in my opinion, the big problem with games like fates is that they so badly want to do their own thing, while still tying themselves to legacy mechanics that at this point are doing more harm than good. imagine what fates could have been if it was allowed to be more than Awakening But Better. awakening is good enough as it is.

Conclusion (or something)

when done well, i think permadeath is a wonderful mechanic. but doing it well requires so much thought, more than a lot of devs even can put in when deadlines are tight. a lot of game development, when you really get down to it, is about making something "good enough." perfect, after all, is the enemy of good. i'm sure a lot of the people working on these games probably have the same complaints about them that i do. but the best game is the one you make. but we have to confront that our games aren't going to get better if we don't confront the base assumptions of our design.

i think a lot about into the breach and how it's ended up being a massive paradigm shift for the entire genre. i was hoping this would lead to a new wave of experimentation, of devs trying to push the bounds in their own way. and while that has happened in chunks, really the main impact was turning "breachlike" into a marketable niche. into the breach is probably my favorite tactics game of all time... but we're not gonna get anywhere new by just copying it.

i want to see tactics rpg's that push the genre forward. that handle death in a more nuanced and meaningful way. that treat storytelling through play as a primary consideration (plug). that aren't about making the player feel powerful or badass. and the only way for anyone to get there is to be creative, to actually think about this stuff deeply, and to put those thoughts into practice. in the meantime, i'll be resetting in my fire emblem of choice.

[fioras-resolve]

Been playing an open world game and getting frustrated with how everything in the world is just a resource to extract. And people have already talked about the obvious colonialism in games like these, but what stands out to me is that it's just kind of boring? Like, yeah, it probably would be more interesting if I had a reason not to collect every single item in the world as fast as I can.

But it would be a harder game to make.

And that's something that I've had to come to terms with as I make my own game. Genuinely thoughtful and conscientious game design takes so much more work than doing things the easy way, and the easy way is still hard. There's so many ways that a game can either fuck up its message or just be a boring game, which is why most games tend to not stick the landing on this stuff, even when they try.

That's not to say we shouldn't do it, but it has to be something you commit to from the outset. Anti-colonialist design, authentic portrayals of queerness, and true body diversity take work, so much work. But we have to be willing to go the full nine yards. If for no other reason than that the easy way is getting boring.

[fioras-resolve]

adding real-time minigames to your turn-based combat is a great way to engage the more action-y parts of our brains. it's also a great way to make combat trivial to anyone really good at those minigames.

[fioras-resolve]

pros to a parry system: players can avoid all damage if they're good enough

cons to a parry system: players can avoid ALL damage if they're good enough

[fioras-resolve]

so it's been a little bit since i made this post, i did not expect it to get hundreds of notes. i stopped replying to the commentary after a while because i'm human, but now that it's died down i do want to give proper responses to the general trajectories of criticism this post and this kind of game have gotten. so!

"These systems fucking suck and RPGs should stop using them."

i understand this sentiment emotionally, i personally feel it towards leveling systems, i've heard people echo it for roguelikes or open world games, it's fine to not like a certain kind of game. but they do have a place in the ecosystem of games. people like these systems, i like these systems, even as i tend to prefer more traditional turn-based combat. it's not bad that some rpg's let you avoid damage with action minigames. it's just that the entire game has to be designed around it.

"These systems make turn-based combat inaccessible."

this is true literally, but i don't agree with the intent of it as a blanket criticism. like, traditional turn-based games are inaccessible to people with dyscalculia. rhythm games are inaccessible to deaf people. there are ways to design around this, like accessibility options or a general ease of play. and games like mother 3 are designed around the prospect that players simply never engage with the rhythm combo system. but the truth is, challenge is inherently inaccessible, and that doesn't make it illegitimate as an artistic choice.

"Skill expression is not a bad thing."

(sigh) i really wish more gamers had a concept of skill that goes beyond the action genre. like, okay, somebody gave sekiro: shadows die twice as an example of a game being great specifically because you can avoid all damage. the thing is, sekiro is a game about avoiding damage. it is the primary form of challenge, and the entire game is designed with the expectation and desire that some people will ace it. but in the context of a turn-based rpg, acing the execution challenges often trivializes the more numerical challenges like resource management and planning for risk. what use are spells like Cure and Protect if you avoid everything? again, not inherently a bad thing, but some games do chafe against this.

"Just make some damage unavoidable, easy."

this is true, and plenty of games do exactly that, either by limiting the action elements to simply reducing damage or by making specific attacks unavoidable. just keep in mind that when done clumsily, this fucking sucks. like, crisis core ff7 isn't turn-based, it's a pure action rpg, but bosses occasionally escape your combo to do large unavoidable damage, and it's probably the worst thing i've experienced in an action game. you might want to look to classic doom and its use of hitscan enemies. you take them out first to minimize the damage you have to take, then focus on the more manageable threats later.

"These systems are just pandering to action gamers."

This is true in a sense, but i don't think that's always a bad thing. attracting new audiences by taking elements from other genres can be a great thing! like, to use my home genre of turn-based tactics games: fire emblem made rpg fans care about tactics by giving each unit a name and a face, and pioneered the entire genre of tactical rpg. and the xcom reboots attracted a "mainstream gaming audience" by using a lot of fps pastiches while still being unabashedly tactical, which imo contributed to the genre's current renaissance. and like, yeah, if clair obscur framing timed hits in the language of dodge rolls and parries is what gets action gamers to play and enjoy an rpg... even if they're annoying about it, i can't bring myself to see this as a bad thing.

[fioras-resolve]

you know that long-running Thing that game series sometimes do? where they have that one game that wipes the slate clean and features basically nothing from the older games? like, the original monster hunter 3 was entirely new monsters except for the three most iconic. street fighter 3 had ryu and ken, but none of the other world warriors until later versions. pokemon black and white went even further and had the entire game only use new pokemon up until postgame.

this is a really cool thing in my opinion. like, admittedly most of my experience here is with pokemon having actually been around for the soft reboot... but black and white was something special. an entirely new experience that to this day hasn't been matched. but i've been starting to wonder, you know, maybe this is the kind of a thing you can only do once. like, if they did it again, would people respond well to that? would it even have the same power as when they did it the first time? i don't know, i don't have the keys to a long-running series. but it's worth a thought.

[fioras-resolve]

i've been replaying pokemon heartgold recently and, i think one of the main unique things that the pokemon rpg's Do is like, actual matched duels. 'cause like, the games have been designed for pvp from the outset. fighting silver for the second time, he fights mean, and in exactly the way an actual person could be mean. mean look into ghost-type curse is evil. and it makes him so much more personal as a villain.

most rpg's tend to be in the realm where every enemy is either a mook or a boss. even when a game wants to do a straight duel, like the erhardt fight in octopath 1, he still has to have boss health, he can't use items, he doesn't have passives like you do, and unlike you he has weakness that can be targeted to stun him. he still has the mechanics of an enemy. but in pokemon, everyone follows the same rules. and that's something i wish i saw in more rpg's.

[fioras-resolve]

i haven't played clair obscur, it seems cool, but a while back i talked to someone who said she normally can't stand rpg's, but has been loving this game. similarly, a couple days ago i found a tweet saying that clair obscur is unique as a turn-based game because of its real-time parries and dodge rolls.

now this obviously isn't unique if you've ever played a mario rpg, but it's got me thinking. maybe framing action commands in the language of parries and dodge rolls is what this game needed to cross the hump. to become the rpg for people who don't think they like rpg's. it's like how xcom made a pretty involved tactics game palatable to shooter audiences by using the 7th gen oeuvre of cover and loadouts with familiar fps archetypes. idk, it's interesting.

[falciesystemessays]

so earlier this year i made a post about The Hundred Line's combat, praising the boldness of a mechanics set that actively encourages you to kill your own units. i still hold that the game is a really solid showing of how to use mechanics to tell a story and enforce a Vibe. if you are a tactics game designer interested in seeing what this genre can do, i highly recommend giving this game a shot.

however, at this point i'm nearly 200 hours into this game, and while the visual novel aspect of it has stayed consistently engaging, i cannot say the same for the combat. in fact, i've become acutely aware of some pretty major flaws that are baked into the game's core. i don't say this as somebody who hates the hundred line, this game has inspired me in a way few others have. but a game this good deserves to be criticized. so, under the cut i'm gonna do that.

Part 1 - It Goes In The Square Hole

sometimes in a game, there will be a strategy that will simply beat everything the game has to throw at you. gamers would call this "cheese," pretentious people would call it a "degenerate strategy."

i call it the square hole. and the hundred line: last defense academy has such a square hole strategy. the core of it is simple: get as much out of your action and voltage economy as you possibly can. keep your AP-gained-to-AP-spent ratio high. use suicide supers to build voltage while killing two (hopefully three) enemies at once. each death adds one point of damage to takumi's attacks, and you can use the voltage to give him even more turns. you can take out most bosses in one turn with this strategy, as you can see here.

now, of course, this is pretty fun to do, and also very thematic. you are throwing bodies at the problem until it goes away, and it encourages a very wanton view of human life. but after the dozenth time, it just gets stale. even the super-hard mode that was added in a patch doesn't make this problem go away. it makes it harder to execute, as supers now cost 2 action points instead of zero, but it's not impossible, not in the slightest. especially when you combine it with other powerful strategies like bomb spam.

Part 2 - A Puzzle You've Already Solved

now, the elephant in the room here is that, as of a patch, you can now skip any battle, provided the enemy layout is one you've already fought. this is... highly unusual for a tactics game. now, it's not a problem that this game reuses fights. plenty of games in this genre have repeat content, or even expect you to play through the game multiple times. repetition isn't inherently a bad thing, and if a game has good enough combat, i will grind just to play more of it.

but what other tactics games have and thl doesn't is randomness. the same encounter in a fire emblem game can be made interesting by a miss you didn't expect, what game designers would call output randomness. into the breach, clearly a big inspiration for the hundred line, has little randomness on output, but a ton on input, in the form of enemy behavior and environment conditions.

into the breach and the hundred line have very similar combat systems, where each turn plays like a small puzzle. but into the breach, by its nature as a roguelike, can generate infinite new puzzles for you. the hundred line can only give you the same few puzzles you've already solved, with the occasional new one if you get lucky this route.

Part 3 - Difficulty Curves

you know, there's a problem that a lot of open-ended games have, where they can't really ramp up the difficulty over time. i first noticed this in breath of the wild, where the four major bosses are around the same power level, but link only gets stronger. a lot of these games have a flat or even negative difficulty curve. i've heard some people call this empowering, but i don't personally enjoy having fights handed to me. it's just... boring.

after the hundred line's 40-hour prologue, the fights are largely flat in their difficulty. now, given, i'm only 70 endings in, and i haven't played the serial battles route where things apparently get harder. and, to be fair, a lot of battles are intentionally easy for storytelling purposes, and others are intentionally unwinnable. but wouldn't it be cool to have more fights that are winnable, but hard? the game already has story locks dependent on having played other routes, why couldn't the same also be applied to beating a hard boss?

but then, once you get enough upgrades and items, pretty much any battle becomes incredibly easy. this is an issue i honestly have with a lot of rpg's, especially as they rarely give you an option or reason to level down. a couple of youtube commenters have told me that they play a bit of a challenge run. maybe they don't use items, maybe they don't sacrifice units, that kind of thing. and like, that's cool, genuinely! challenge runs rule. but if you have to do one to really enjoy the game, that reflects a problem with the original game.

[falciesystemessays]

so earlier this year i made a post about The Hundred Line's combat, praising the boldness of a mechanics set that actively encourages you to kill your own units. i still hold that the game is a really solid showing of how to use mechanics to tell a story and enforce a Vibe. if you are a tactics game designer interested in seeing what this genre can do, i highly recommend giving this game a shot.

however, at this point i'm nearly 200 hours into this game, and while the visual novel aspect of it has stayed consistently engaging, i cannot say the same for the combat. in fact, i've become acutely aware of some pretty major flaws that are baked into the game's core. i don't say this as somebody who hates the hundred line, this game has inspired me in a way few others have. but a game this good deserves to be criticized. so, under the cut i'm gonna do that.

Part 1 - It Goes In The Square Hole

sometimes in a game, there will be a strategy that will simply beat everything the game has to throw at you. gamers would call this "cheese," pretentious people would call it a "degenerate strategy."

i call it the square hole. and the hundred line: last defense academy has such a square hole strategy. the core of it is simple: get as much out of your action and voltage economy as you possibly can. keep your AP-gained-to-AP-spent ratio high. use suicide supers to build voltage while killing two (hopefully three) enemies at once. each death adds one point of damage to takumi's attacks, and you can use the voltage to give him even more turns. you can take out most bosses in one turn with this strategy, as you can see here.

now, of course, this is pretty fun to do, and also very thematic. you are throwing bodies at the problem until it goes away, and it encourages a very wanton view of human life. but after the dozenth time, it just gets stale. even the super-hard mode that was added in a patch doesn't make this problem go away. it makes it harder to execute, as supers now cost 2 action points instead of zero, but it's not impossible, not in the slightest. especially when you combine it with other powerful strategies like bomb spam.

Part 2 - A Puzzle You've Already Solved

now, the elephant in the room here is that, as of a patch, you can now skip any battle, provided the enemy layout is one you've already fought. this is... highly unusual for a tactics game. now, it's not a problem that this game reuses fights. plenty of games in this genre have repeat content, or even expect you to play through the game multiple times. repetition isn't inherently a bad thing, and if a game has good enough combat, i will grind just to play more of it.

but what other tactics games have and thl doesn't is randomness. the same encounter in a fire emblem game can be made interesting by a miss you didn't expect, what game designers would call output randomness. into the breach, clearly a big inspiration for the hundred line, has little randomness on output, but a ton on input, in the form of enemy behavior and environment conditions.

into the breach and the hundred line have very similar combat systems, where each turn plays like a small puzzle. but into the breach, by its nature as a roguelike, can generate infinite new puzzles for you. the hundred line can only give you the same few puzzles you've already solved, with the occasional new one if you get lucky this route.

Part 3 - Difficulty Curves

you know, there's a problem that a lot of open-ended games have, where they can't really ramp up the difficulty over time. i first noticed this in breath of the wild, where the four major bosses are around the same power level, but link only gets stronger. a lot of these games have a flat or even negative difficulty curve. i've heard some people call this empowering, but i don't personally enjoy having fights handed to me. it's just... boring.

after the hundred line's 40-hour prologue, the fights are largely flat in their difficulty. now, given, i'm only 70 endings in, and i haven't played the serial battles route where things apparently get harder. and, to be fair, a lot of battles are intentionally easy for storytelling purposes, and others are intentionally unwinnable. but wouldn't it be cool to have more fights that are winnable, but hard? the game already has story locks dependent on having played other routes, why couldn't the same also be applied to beating a hard boss?

but then, once you get enough upgrades and items, pretty much any battle becomes incredibly easy. this is an issue i honestly have with a lot of rpg's, especially as they rarely give you an option or reason to level down. a couple of youtube commenters have told me that they play a bit of a challenge run. maybe they don't use items, maybe they don't sacrifice units, that kind of thing. and like, that's cool, genuinely! challenge runs rule. but if you have to do one to really enjoy the game, that reflects a problem with the original game.

[fioras-resolve]

as an rpg and tactics developer i find myself working with randomness a lot. i have a complex relationship with randomness these days, which is best articulated through a thought experiment about a guy named barnes.

now barnes (they/he) is a longtime gamer, and a skillful one at that. and they have to be, because they have literally the worst luck possible. they have never rolled more than a nat 1 in tabletop, never gotten the cards they've wanted, and gotten nothing but awful gacha pulls and the worst of whatever pity prize. maybe at some point while gaming you have thought "i just have the worst luck today!" but that was temporary, an anomaly. this is every day for barnes, and he knows it.

now think of a given game you like, any genre. could barnes win that game? what kind of playstyle would they have to adopt in order to play well? what, in this game, is guaranteed? what's the worst-case scenario? it's worth noting that most video games don't do perfect non-deterministic randomness. older games especially tend to have specific seeds, and rng manipulation is a very real skill. do you want that to be how barnes succeeds? or, on the other hand, are you okay with alienating barnes and making a game he literally cannot beat?

now, i know, barnes isn't real, they can't hurt you, this is a thought experiment. but if you're making a game with a lot of randomness, you're going to end up with a lot of people who are way more like barnes than you'd want to admit. how would you want them to feel playing your game?

[fioras-resolve]

free-to-play in games is always a bit suspect, but for multiplayer games in specific i do get it. like these games really depend on having other players in order to function. playing with bots just is not the same, and if it's hard to find a match, a lot of people won't want to stay. it's especially bad in pvp games, where not only can you struggle to find a match, but the ones you do find are often of radically different skill levels to you. saying a game is dead is, in a lot of ways, a self-fulfilling prophecy. so i understand wanting to keep your entry barrier low, so that new players are never discouraged from coming in.

[fioras-resolve]

one kinda fucked thing i learned about itch.io is that your game will get much more attention for being 100% off than it will for being free to begin with. your game will be posted onto so many forum threads linking games on sale, and you will get so many views and downloads from people looking to dodge paying for something. but none of them will tell you what they thought of it.

[fioras-resolve]

[fioras-resolve]

i don't tend to get involved with the broad strokes of Fiction Discourse because i have better things to do but i just... it genuinely baffles me when people say fiction has no effect on reality. like, yeah, the effects are often overblown by people with an agenda, but like...

surely you have said or heard at some point "this changed my life," or even "this saved my life" about a work of art. surely at some point a work of art has changed the way you feel about something, or even changed your opinion. maybe it made you empathize with someone, maybe it helped you process something, maybe it helped you realize things about yourself. affecting us is kinda the point of art, you know?

so it drives me up the fucking wall when people say fiction doesn't affect reality, because it's just... it's just a shield against the idea the very obvious effects of art could ever be negative. that the power to make you feel things could ever be used for harmful ends. and no, i'm not saying that video games cause violence, or that you're going to turn into a bigot if you engage with ~problematic~ media. but to deny fiction's effect on reality is to deny art the capacity for meaning.