Justin: Our next topic tonight has to do with the difficulty level of RPGs. Many complaints have been made in the PSX era and beyond that RPGs have become much easier and require little or no effort to beat. Is this simply to reach a larger audience or a result of the increased focus on story? Is it a good or bad thing?

Googleshng: It's really an ongoing issue. Games of all types have been getting steadily easier since they went 16-bit really. Some recent games, though, are hitting a point where I consider them offensively easy. I'll grant however that DW1 levels of tedious character building are something modern audiences can live without.

Michael: It is a known fact that to reach a larger audience in any media, you must dumb it down. In the RPG world that means make it easier. I don't think the increased focus on plot has had any major effect on the difficulty of RPGs, though. Video games as a whole are reaching a larger audience, and there is a general complaint that games aren't hard as they used to be. In that regard, the expanding popularity of RPGs is a bad thing; however, we have a much larger choice of games to play now, so I can't complain about that.

Googleshng: Well I can, but only because I'm expected to have a large knowledge base on all of them.

Alan: Ultimately, RPGs are a matter of tactics, and if you have patience and the right tactics, you'll do fine. Many people call the Lunar games very hard, and they often are, but the right combination of commands will make you win 99% of battles. Ultimately no RPG is 'hard' because you can simply level build to a level where the battle becomes easy. More recent games have just required less leveling up time.

David: I have never really noticed the difference between how hard games are, since I generally level up my characters as much as possible. I do notice how long it takes to level characters though. And for those who say games are getting easy, I point to Hoshigami.

Googleshng: Hoshigami isn't so much hard as it is mean. You just can't force players to go 5 hours without saving.

David: Hoshigami is not that difficult to play, just incredibly hard to level. If you can get the right equipment and the patience to get it for everyone, you can do well.

Alan: Hoshigami still conforms to my rule: build your characters up enough and the game becomes easy. It does take considerably longer than most all RPGs, but it's still doable. It might not be in the spirit of the game, true, but in terms of pure difficulty, it becomes easy.

Michael: And there is no strategy in that. You're not using your brain.

Googleshng: Again, my main gripe with Hoshigami is that it demands too long of a sitting to accomplish most things. Hence my "mean, not hard" statement.

Michael: Some games have tried to counteract mad leveling up though. Final Fantasy VIII had its beasts level up as you did, correct?

Justin: Very true, but they made it simple to beat without leveling at all. I think I beat it around level 18 my first run through.

Alan: Hoshigami also levels it's characters up as yours do, but they reach, say, level 75 whereas your characters can reach level 100.

David: Actually, in my experience, equipment makes a bigger difference in Hoshigami then it does in most other RPGs.

Googleshng: I don't really consider the difficulty an issue of how much level building you have to do, though. It's more a question of, when I arrive at a boss, will I kill it with everyone at full HP, or with one character barely pulling it off with the rest long since dead? The latter I've always found far more enjoyable.

Michael: It sure pumps up the adrenaline in those types of battles. Battles where my heart actually starts to beat faster are much more enjoyable than the ho-hum button mashing ones.

Justin: The only way I've had those experiences lately were by running away from battles early on. I always thought the Lunar games had it better than most. The enemies leveled along with you, and the bosses actually were hard if you followed the normal pattern of "Strongest attack, strongest spell, heal"

Googleshng: Games that actually reward varying your strategies have always had a lot more appeal in general for me.

Alan: I tend to define hard as something that makes me need to think about what I'm doing like, say, Final Fantasy Tactics. In Lunar, the general strategy of a boss battle was 'spam off your most powerful moves', which to me isn't the definition of hard, it's just a standard tactic.

Googleshng: One of the most refreshing things about Skies of Arcadia were the tactical choices in the airship battles. Honestly speaking, I think the best way to help the difficulty of games would be to ditch experience systems entirely, so bosses could be fine tuned to be just barely beatable when you reached them. Chrono Cross' system worked nicely for this, aside from the whole making it difficult bit.

Alan: Suikoden had a good idea, with the experience system's exponential curve stopping you from effectively gaining experience once you were at a certain level in the dungeon.

Michael: What would be the point of battling in between bosses then?

Googleshng: Take out the run option? Or leave in the need for money?

Michael: Perhaps there could be a new way of earning money. The idea beasts held large amounts of gold on them always seemed ridiculous to me anyway.

Justin: Well, with games becoming more and more linear, there's really no point in an experience system anyway. There wasn't much of a point of battling in Chrono Cross, but I still did it.

David: Dragon Warrior 7 did that with the class levels, since you stopped gaining class levels from enemies if you are past a certain character level

Alan: Dragon Warrior 7 did it to a lesser extent. I seem to recall spending about 20 levels-worth of fights because I wanted to see where the job points maxed off just outside Dharma Temple.

Justin: Well, then, I think we can all agree that while the difficulty level has dropped off in the past few years, there are a few ways it could be balanced in the future. Hopefully some of these plans will make their way into future RPGs.