Valkyria Chronicles

Problem: Mixing genre conventions makes the game unpredictable, and invalidates the strategy in the strategy game.

Oh, Valkyria Chronicles. You’re beautiful, and I want to enjoy your gameplay. But every time I do a new mission, you find a new way to frustrate me.

Thinking about it, I believe that the reason Valkyria Chronicles is so frustrating is that it mixes genre conventions. It presents the veneer of a strategy game, but it keeps pulling tropes out from action games and RPGs. That’s a big selling point for the game – the tactics of a strategy game, with the ground-level excitement of a third-person shooter – but a lot of the game’s design decisions drive me crazy.

For example, in the latest mission I attempted, I captured the enemy’s base, only to be told that it was a decoy, and now I’m trapped in a pincer move. Okay, that’s fine…war is unpredictable and changes rapidly. What bothered me was that the new enemy units dropped onto the battlefield instantly, in excellent positions, and ready to attack. Essentially, they pulled a convention from the RPG genre, that of the multi-stage boss battle, such as Kefka or Sephiroth in Final Fantasy. But in the context of a strategy game, it meant that all my tactics from the first half of the fight went out the window, as I was now given an enemy I could not have seen coming and could not predict. Additionally, the need to advance and gain ground is a central element of any strategy title, yet my enemies were given ground entirely free and clear, while I didn’t even get a turn’s worth of warning to change my position.

Secondly, and more infuriatingly, this mission featured action game-style infinitely respawning enemies. Foes spawned in groups of six. I thought I was being clever by using a well-placed sniper to pick off the entire assault force, only to have the enemies respawn on top of their own corpses and immediately take their actions. I think this is another core tenet of strategy gaming – if you take ground, it’s yours, for as long as you can hold it.

Third, the game mixes uneven, FPS-like terrain with a movement engine that doesn’t allow the characters to interact with that terrain. Will I be able to move past that barricade next to the one-foot high slope? I have no idea until I run up to it and waste my movement trying to get past it. This is an example of trying to get away from the genre conventions of strategy – gridded battlefields, and movement marked in spaces – and adopt more of the conventions of action and shooter games. I don’t think it works.

So I can’t rely on my mission objectives, I can’t rely on my tactics and positioning, I can’t rely on taking ground and holding it, and I can’t even rely on the movement of my own troops. With all those elements gone, there’s not really much strategy left in this strategy game.

Solution: Give the player a way to see the results of their actions and modify them before they suffer the consequences.

For enemies appearing out of nowhere: When a new wave of enemies appear, the player gets one free movement with each of their units. They can’t shoot, but they can see where the main enemy forces will be coming from, and attempt to take up a defensive position.

For enemies respawning infinitely: Have areas of the map which are clearly enemy-controlled and impassible, such as an armored barricade. When enemies respawn, they come out of the barricade. NPCs should comment on how the enemies will just keep coming, and encourage the player to focus on their objectives, rather than the infantrymen. This allows the player to see that the results of their action (attack those troopers) will have certain results (they’ll just keep coming).

For being unable to predict which obstacles can be passed or not: Allow the player to plot out a unit’s movement before committing to their turn. If the player is unable to draw a line to the destination, they know that the obstacles inbetween must be impassable. This wouldn’t inviolate the interesting third-person movement of Valkyria Chronicles, because a player might see a good shot or a new enemy, and decide not to follow their original plan. But at the very least, they would have a new tool to allow them to counteract the game’s unpredictability.

Arg. I feel like I could write several posts about bad design decisions in Valkyria Chronicles. How can such a beautiful and well-produced game make so many infuriating missteps?

Phantasy Star 0

For this post, I’m just talking about PS0’s single-player campaign.

Problem: Once the player hits the boss, they have nowhere to gain XP.

After adventuring through a dungeon for two hours, the party reaches the area’s boss. Unfortunately, the boss kicks their butt, and sends them back to their home base. The teleporter out of their base will return them directly to the boss fight, and in the meantime, they have nowhere else they can go to earn experience.

The player has two options. They can throw themselves at the boss again, but with no way to gain experience and power, they’re sure to lose. Or, they can abandon their quest and gain XP elsewhere – but they’ll have to spend another two hours going through this dungeon if they want to fight the boss again. (And even then, they have no way of knowing if they’re strong enough yet.)

The main source of this problem is the final boss. She waits at the end of a 2-3 hour dungeon, and is significantly harder than anything else in the dungeon (or in the game.) It’s entirely likely that the player’s party will be eradicated the first few times they meet this boss. I had to gain about 10 levels to beat the final boss, and I tried fighting her every 3 levels or so – that meant that I ran through her entire dungeon 4 times before I was strong enough to beat her.

Solution: Allow players to access XP-building zones while in the middle of a quest.

Phantasy Star 0 has two mission types: quests, and ‘access field.’ The quests have plots and progress the storyline, whereas the field allows the player to run around an area  just to adventure and level up. The player can only be on mission at a time, and must abandon their mission to start a new one.

To fix the boss frustration, that restriction should be raised so that the player can be on one quest and one field mission at the same time. That way, if the player gets stuck in their quest progress, they can set the quest aside for a while and run through fields to gain levels and items. Whenever they feel like testing their strength against the boss, they can do so. They’ll jump straight to the boss fight, and the only cost for failure is their time and the cost of the items they use.