Thursday 24 January, 2008

Gameplay, Take 2

It seems things can really change from day to day. While this may be good for people who like variation, it’s not good for a video game level system. After I grew my characters a level or two, the difficulty of the enemies seemed to increase steeply. Right now I’m pretty frustrated with the game, since it seems impossible to safely get to the next area without power-leveling for hours on end. It takes a ridiculous amount of experience points to get to the next level, and you don’t even get the freebie levels some games give you at the start. The sharp difference combined with the general unhelpfulness of the game (unexplained abbreviations everywhere) could be enough to make me stop playing this game for a while.
While RPG’s generally don’t lend themselves to improving social relationships, this one can, in a way. It is so ancient, and rarely seen anymore, that people will sit down and watch you play for a few minutes, saying things like ‘Whoa! So oldschool!’ Then you may reminisce together about games you played when you were a kid. But then the novelty wears off, and the bystander leaves. Still, it can be a good way to break the ice.

Design

Ok, I haven’t finished the game, and probably never will, but for a very good reason. As I have mentioned at least once before, the levels, in particular the difficulty from one to the next, is really bad. It is too hard to play the game without gaining a lot of levels before progressing, but power-leveling can literally take hours. To improve, the necessary amount of levels to progress to the next level should be obtained through gameplay as the player progresses through the story.
The tone of the game is a different matter. Although when compared to any of today’s games the graphics and music are laughable, they combine to give the game a very distinctive feel. There is a sense of epic-ness but it’s hard to take it too seriously because it doesn’t feel very realistic. I wouldn’t change this aspect of the game.
One more thing the game could do better in is being user-friendly. That means no more abbreviations, explanations of what kind of character can equip which weapons and armor, and exactly what each item and spell does.

[Nicolas Kent - grader]

This is exactly what we're looking for, great work.

I agree with your last design comments about FF1 being severely user-unfriendly. At the same time though, given the limitations of the system I'm impressed they had the interface as understandable as it was. I'm personally not convinced RPG's became a practical console genre until the SNES...but thats just my humble opinion.