Castle Paradox

[Soule X]

I don't see how you can enjoy something that's at least 25 percent something you don't like. So I think it's a pretty good educated guess to say they enjoyed it. Also, figuring in personal experience supports this.

[Machu]

Soule likes repetitive games, PHC does not. I don't think this is gonna change, so you both can just pass each other off as design-enemies and quit (unless you want to teach other people stuff, but PHC really is repeating himself, and reading all of those wasted my time).
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[Soule X]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. We're just two apples on opposite sides of the opinion tree... uh... or something...

[The Wobbler]

[Soule X]

Well, you have to level up for quite a long time before you can do anything else, so if you didn't like it you'd never make it to the other 75 percent. Besides it's probably a much higher number than 25 percent, but I don't think I'd enjoy a game if that much of it was bad, just my personal taste.

All this is really making me want to play Dragon Warrior.

[The Wobbler]

[Soule X]

Man, that Axeknight was a bitch, huh.

[Rinku]

i think we're straying off a more interesting point: why should anyone find leveling up fun? i offered one explanation, which i still think is accurate, but soule x has never actually explained why he finds leveling up fun, except that he liked the gradual increase of gold and experience. well, there are plenty of ways to get a gradual increase of something. you can play the stock market (it's more productive than leveling-up). you can save pennies that you find on the street. you can count to a million in your head. why are those things not as fun as leveling-up is?
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Tower Defense Game

[Joe Man]

Okay, here's something actually similar to leveling up:
You want to be able to hold your breath for two minutes. Right now you can hold it for 20 seconds. So, you dive into a bottomless pool. You keep on swimming down until you can't hold your breath any longer. On your way back up, you pass out and have to be resqued. However, over time you get better at figuring out exactly when you need to start going back up, or perhaps when you need to hover in one spot for a while, and you are able to hold your breath even longer too. However, even being able to hold your breath for two minutes in shallow water doesn't mean you can way down where the pressure is stronger, so you keep it up, until you can hold your breath for two minutes at 5x normal pressure. But since you enjoy swimming, you keep it up until you rival most whales.

The problem with video games is that they don't offer the same level of enjoyment actually doing something does. However, adding extra twists, such as requiring certain elemental attack for certain enemies, always makes it more interesting. With Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, the battles not only require strategy with it's vast array of uniqu enemies, but it requires timing. There is very little leveling up, but it can be used as an aid if you have less-than-perfect timing (though the battles were enough fun that I went ahead and leveled up), but also, with all the characters aside from Mario, levels weren't gained through fighting, but rather with exploration and finding items to level them up. However, if Mario dies, you get a game over, while any of the other characters can be revived, so traditional level-ups are still important (By the way, I think that PM:TTYD had some of the most fun RPG style battles ever because you needed both strategy and skill).

Personally, though, I think more games should be like Super Mario 3.
A person who likes to take his time and look for immediate details, a person who likes to run through the stage quickly, and someone not too skilled with platformers can all play it, enjoy it, and know something about the game the other two don't know. Hard to apply to RPGs, yes, but good to keep in mind.

And now to something completely different, Golden Sun. One thng I loved about this game was that it set goals for every type of player. There were goals that required puzzle-solving, goals that required level busting, and even goals that required mixing and matching djinn so you could have the right powers (which was really fun if you were bored, and made battles so much cooler), and many others. Half of the enjoyment in Golden Sun had nothing to do with following the story, which, by the way, I liked, and even the most pointless tasks, like killing deadbeard, were ultimately satisfying. However, I stray from my point: Only a small part of the actual game was leveling up, but many goals were set so that there was good reason to do so if you wanted.


And there you have it: My feelings about leveling up.


P.S. If any of this is doesn't make sense, I may only think it does because it is 1:00 in the morning right now.
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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
~Charles Martin Jones

Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Charbile]

Here is how to resolve your problem of games not being as enjoyable as actually doing something:

Think of them as condensed experiences, a way for you to quickly learn the essentials of something useful in reality. Reading a few stories in a day, you can gain experience that may not have been available to you, or at least not in as short a time as you did. The experience system is a nice complement to RPGs, since they lend themselves easily to the value of stories, enhanced by means of a battle/experience game.