RPG Difficulty Spikes

Before anyone asks where the top picture is, I'm currently on a road trip with my in laws so I'm posting from my phone.  The blogger app crashes so I'm stuck using fucking Safari and this thing just hates the idea of pulling images from from my photo roll.

Anyway, difficulty spikes aren't exactly a new concept to anyone that's been gaming a while.  There are plenty of games in all genres that have but I feel like it's the most annoying in RPGs because of the greater sense of security before the spike.

Now the main reason people have trouble with RPGs is because they are either underlevelled from running away from enemies.  Of course RPGs can pose all sorts of challenges but when people are complain that's usually the reason. However there are times where everything will seem completely fine but then you reach a boss and you just get your shit kicked in.

For example I was just playing pervy vita dungeon crawl Dungeon Travellers and the dungeon I was currently in was a complete breeze.  Enemies aren't really doing shit to me of any concern and and I'm killing enemies with ease.  Hell, my magic user was one shotting stuff for fucks sake.  So I get to the end of the dungeon and BAM the boss just shits all over my face.  Eventually I won but it required some extra grinding for skill points to get it done.  Other examples of this could be the wall boss in FF7 or Matador in SMT: Nocturne

It's annoying because the game makes you believe that everything is fine with easy as fuck trash mobs and then slams the breaks on your progress with a bullshit boss battle that makes you fuck off and rethink everything.  In other genres it's either easier to deal with or faster to change up what you gotta do to progress.  In RPGs all the management and preparation you have to do means that dealing with a spike could potentially take hours of tedium just to get on with the game.

Being challenged is good and all but any developer who puts these sudden spikes in their games need something sharp through their cheeks.  Fair challenge please guys

Gaming Log March 14 2017

Well shit I fell asleep after streaming so I'm awkwardly posting this log from my phone

Whenever I have to work early my days are quite uneventful so I spent most of it playing Dungeon Travelers again.  I managed to kill that boss though pretty easily after I discovered that my characters could be class changed.  You would think it would take an idiot not to notice that but character levels aren't displayed on the main screen and you have to go into individual status screens to find out.  Since I don't check that shit too often I had no idea that class changes were even an option.

Once I got home I streamed Megaman 4 speedruns which went well for the robot masters and then I fucked basically every end game stage.  I finished the night with Final Fantasy 9 where I watched a bunch of cutscenes and then played Chocobo Hot and Cold which may be the only mini game worse than Blitzball

Gaming Log March 13th 2017

Here's a new blog feature for you all that will keep the written side of things flowing daily once again, a gaming log.  I know most of you don't give a flying fuck about what I'm doing day to day but I quite enjoy the idea of making a sort of public diary of my gaming so here I go!

Well this morning I did what I do every morning which is skip breakfast and fire up Persona 5.  It was a largely uneventful time although I am a little concerned with the current point in the game.  Without spoiling anything I THINK I've cleared the dungeon and done everything I have to do but there's still a big fat red countdown in the corner of my screen that basically reads "8 MORE DAYS TILL YOU LOSE!"

I'm assuming everything will be OK but the progress I stand if the story doesn't get off its arse and start moving soon is pretty great.  Still, I finished the session by heading into the optional dungeon, Mementos and fighting a boss that was susceptible to magic.  He nearly one shot my entire party in the first turn but after I survived and healed up, everything was fine and he went down pretty quickly.

Of course though, I can't spend my entire day playing P5 because I have my job to go to so that means I have to switch to something a little more portable.

Right now my current game of choice is Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita which I got for free a couple of months back on PS+.  So far its been a pretty enjoyable experience.  It's a competently made dungeon crawl game with an absolute metric shitton of fan service.  All the main cast with the exception of one character are cute anime girls and all the monsters are cute anime girls and at frequent points the game will show you full screen images of cute anime girls in their pants.  Well I love dungeon crawls and I love titties so everything has been pretty peachy so far.

UNTIL TODAY

The dungeon I've been currently crawling though is just bursting at the seems with complete bullshit.  Monsters doing absolute shit tons of damage with area of effect magic was just the tip of the iceberg with this place.

If you can't read Japanese then the big red text at the top of the screen basically says "No magic zone".  I'm pretty heavily reliant on magic for both killing shit and staying alive so these corridors are particularly annoying.  I don't mind being challenged in a game but this is just balls, I hate having my hands tied behind my back like this, it's just not fun.  Luckily, my main damage dealing spell caster has a rod that does instant death sometimes so it's not all bad I guess.

As if that wasn't enough though, I manage to make it to the end of the dungeon and then this bitch shows up.

HO-LY fuck the game has just thrown some impossible bullshit out of nowhere.  Every single boss up to this point has generally been pretty easy but this bitch is just smacking me all over the place.  If she isn't doing some weird party wide physical attack that comes pretty close to one shotting people, she's doing some weird debuff dance thing where at the start of her turn I just go and take a handful of damage.  Before I could figure out how to kill her I got home and stopped playing but I'm thinking that a little bit of grinding might be in order for this one.

After that I was sort of planning to stream but I made this mistake of getting into bed and lazing around for a bit and now I'm far to sleepy to do anything properly.  I'm sure there's going  to be errors in this post somewhere... Anyway I have to go to work a lot earlier than usual tomorrow so an early night and an early rise might do me some good.