The Dumbing Down of Games

The dumbing down of games is something that I feel has been going on for a good while now.  However it's sort of difficult to point out exactly where.  I mean there's the general things that everyone knows about like regenerating health or some games not punishing you for dying whatsoever.  Recently I started playing Child of Light and I think this game really does hammer home just how dumbed down games have really become.

Just as a disclaimer I am enjoying Child of Light quite a bit actually.  I'm not too far in but it's definitely one of the more interesting RPGs I've played in recent memory.  However, the problem with Child of Light is that while I'm playing it there's one other game sitting at the back of my mind and gnawing away.

Every time I enter a fight in Child of Light, I keep thinking about fucking Grandia and just how much better that games combat was.

On a very basic level, Grandia and Child of Light have the same system. Check it out

At the bottom of both those screens there's a bar.  The bar is split up into a waiting part and an acting part.  Basic attacks are pretty quick but doing spells require some charge time and getting hit during that charge time may cause an interrupt.  This adds some strategy to timing attacks and such on your enemies to interrupt their shit while protecting your own casting characters so they can get their big moves off.

But here's where the dumbing down is, Grandia's combat had SO MUCH MORE than Child of Light.  In Grandia things like positioning, equipment, what magic to use and when, what skills to use and when, which characters are on interrupt duty and all sorts of other things were important.  While in Child of Light all that shit goes out the window and it's just a case of "hit them in the cast zone to interrupt" and combat becomes kind of monotonous as a result.

Not to mention that the number of enemies is different because it CoL it seems to be a max of 3 while in Grandia you could get absolute clusterfucks which had to be dealt with in a different way to smaller groups of enemies.  The choice of spells and skills was also much wider which gave much more room to create a strategy but in CoL I'm always doing the same fucking thing for guaranteed success.

Child of Light isn't a bad game by any stretch but it's such a shame because I was under the impression that as gaming grew as an entertainment medium it would get smarter, not dumber, so it's a shame to see a title do significantly less than a game from 1997.

Child of Light is just one example but it's a damn good one.  Another good example would be to compare any modern FPS title to Doom and fucking Doom will win out basically 100% of the time in pretty much all fields.

I'm not saying modern gaming is bad, it's just noticeably stupider and I don't like it. 

Confusion is the worst

So I've been playing quite a lot of a game called Grandia on the PS1 recently.  It's pretty fucking good and made me realise that I didn't lose interest in RPGs but modern RPGs just became a bit shit. 

Anyway! Before that statement causes some kind of shit storm as I get people trying to tell me stuff like Ni no Kuni is actually worth a damn, I want to talk about one of the most annoying things in any RPG that can possibly happen.  That thing is the confuse status effect.

RPGs tend to have lots of status ailments that do a pretty good job of fucking you over if you're not prepared but confuse really does just take the fucking cake.  For those of you who maybe aren't into RPGs, confuse is a status that causes your own party members to just attack characters at random.  If you are lucky they will go and attack the enemy and all is fine, but if you're like me and you're not lucky then chances are your party member is going to flat out murder another team mate.

It's just so fucking annoying when your strongest physical attacker gets confused and then spins round and decides to shove whatever weapon he or she is holding right up the arse of your spell caster or healer.  The outright worst offender for annoying confusion ailments though, in my experience, is the Pokemon games.

I've not played any of the later Pokemon games because I think they are a load of shit, but I remember quite early into Pokemon Blue there was a cave full of Zubats.  Zubats had a skill that could confuse your pokemon, and when that happened shit would really get ugly.  You see in normal RPGs, there is a team of people, so confuse makes one dude hit his friend, but in Pokemon its 1on1 battles so being confused makes your pokemon hit himself.  Not only is this fucking stupid as a concept but the damage for hitting yourself in confusion is fucking massive, and if you are really unlucky your pokemon will keep punching himself in the face until he dies.

Still, for all my ranting about how much I hate confusion effects, if they weren't there I'd be complaining about RPGs being too easy or some shit.  Also this post does not apply to the Shin Megami Tensei series, because in those games, the lead character being petrified results in a game over, so in those games THAT can go fuck itself just as hard.