Final boss fights and final dungeons are a bit boring to me

The Game Room
41

I don’t know about this thread. It sounds less to me like “I hate boss fights and long grindy dungeons” and more like “I don’t like badly designed bosses and dungeons without enough save spots.”.

A properly designed RPG will never require you to grind to level up; The “random monsters” that you run into between bosses should be sufficient to get you to the level where the boss will be challenging but not overly difficult. This is the sort of thing that’s pretty easy to balance, because when you get right down to it, unless you’ve built an RPG in which it’s possible to cripple yourself/your party, or if you’re doing something that you REALLY should know better than to do (Party of 4 fighters, or something.) then it’s pretty easy to assess how competent the party will be. You don’t have to factor in reflexes or something (Though the recent trend towards more ‘arcadey’ games complicates matters) so you pretty much know what the party should and shouldn’t be able to beat.

A properly designed game has no use for “anti-grinding” dynamic boss level nonsense, because fundamentally, if the player for some ridiculous reason WANTS to grind, then he should be improved by it. The -correct- way to handle grinding is to use something closer to the MMO-style XP system, (or, as a REAL throwback, the XP system used in the Shining Force games - the SRPG ones, not the new action RPG ones) where killing the same stuff over and over has diminishing returns to the point where eventually you get nothing for it. So if people want to “grind” they need to do it on “level appropriate” stuff - which may not even be available, depending on how linear/event driven the game is (if you haven’t beaten the bandit lord and taken his ship, you can’t get to the continent that has higher level monsters for you to level up on) allows you to predict fairly accurately the MAX power level the player will be at.

Interestingly, though, I haven’t run into the old “wear the party down through the final dungeon and then hit them with the boss once they’re low on resources” gimmick in a AGES, since almost every JRPG I’ve played has insisted on giving me not just a save spot, but a “full heal” save spot before pretty much all the bosses.

I don’t play Western RPGs, really. I don’t agree with most of their design decisions.

42

Do you dislike Dragon Quest? It’s really the most famous JRPG and it requires insane grinding sometimes to get ahead. Especially DQ6 and 7.

43

Of course you are right…but again, even the ones that are “OK” don’t grab my attention or anything. I like a few, but generally, I could do without a Big Boss at the end.

44

I HATED Dragon Quest. Or rather, let me put it this way:

I played DQ1, back on the NES, when it was translated as “Dragon Warrior”. Even at the tender age of 14, with copious amounts of free time, I found it painfully grindy (This is from someone who chewed through the original Final Fantasy AND the aforementioned Ultima 3: Exodus without even batting an eye. Heck, I never even figured out that the game got harder when you levelled up, I just killed EVERYTHING.) . I played DQ8 on the PS2 and found it too oldschool for me.

There is, I think, a reason that Dragon Quest is really only popular IN Japan, and I suspect the extreme grindiness has a lot to do with it.

45

Ironically, I once did a run-through of Final Fantasy 1 without grinding, and the only way I was able to do it was by playing a party of four fighters (though three fighters and a thief or red mage might have been easier, in the long run). Most of what spellcasters were good for in that game, you eventually got unlimited-use magic items that did the same thing.