Guess what I've been doing while you were hiding...

by mskills 

Back in the "golden days", console-style RPGs challenged gamers by testing their wits, their patience, and most important of all: the gamer's stamina. Honestly, can you remember struggling through Dragon Warrior 2 because of its "labyrinthine" mazes, or even as a result of its "strenuous" puzzles? Of course not! You were too busy cursing at the ridiculous amount of random battles (which, I might add, were often fatal). List off some RPG classics: Phantasy Star, Final Fantasy, 7th Saga, Paladin's Quest·each of these games have earned the classification of "difficult" purely because of their numerous RANDOM clashes.

In contrast, modern RPGs have followed a fairly recent trend of reducing the amount of random battles and replacing them with optional ones. To further clarify my meaning of "optional", allow me to highlight the popular Lunar: The Silver Star remake for the Playstation. For instance, you guide young Alex through a twisting corridor, only to spy a mysterious figure just a few paces away. At this junction, you can either rush the figure (and enter combat), or you can attempt to avoid it - hence the term "optional battle". Many modern RPGs have decided to follow this model. Considering the favorable reception this concept has received, I predict that even more RPGs will ditch random battles in lieu of optional ones in the near future.

The question that needs to be considered is this: are random battles really a "bad" thing? Even if you agree with that statement, have you considered whether or not optional battles are "better" than random encounters? While these may be simple questions, the implications may be anything but simple.

Consider this scenario: your party of heroes has been avoiding battles for hours, and an enemy boss character has now forced you into a melee. Does anything seem wrong with this situation on the surface? Probably not - "bosses" are a mainstay of the RPG genre, and gamers expect to encounter a fair share of them. But what if this particular boss was created with the expectation that your party would possess the specific resources required to defeat it? Since the developers have no way of knowing how many battles you will choose to fight, why should they be expected to provide boss characters that are equivalent to your party's level of experience? Could the seemingly wise choice to allow optional battles actually be a hindrance to your gaming experience? I think so.

Try to envision one of those "RPG classics" of yesterday. If nothing else, most likely you can remember the dread of encountering that "one more battle". If you were anything like me, you may recall shouting at those RPG developers, wondering why they had to force so many battles down your throat. In retrospect, the answer is amazingly simple: all of those random battles forced your characters to step up to the challenge, to experience growth. Now, there were those fluke boss encounters where you still had to spend hours leveling up (Dark Force from Phantasy Star 2). For the most part, though, you could usually defeat these primary enemies within two or three attempts.

Now that developers are now opting for optional battles in place of random ones, my forecast is that gamers will experience much more difficulty in defeating those event-triggered required battles (AKA bosses). This increased difficulty will lead to more frustration in gamers, which then takes away from the RPG experience. So here is my plea to the developers: feel free to include optional battles in your RPGs IF and ONLY IF a random battle system just doesn't make sense.