QuickNavigation - FF Odyssey Editorials Archive (March 24/2002) (Last updated on 11/14/2007)

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RPGs – How Difficult Are They?

By: wsim

     Now that RPG games are more mainstream, I personally believe that RPG games are easier nowadays then they were a decade ago. In this editorial, I will outline my reasons and views as to why RPGs are easier in terms of difficulty then they were 10 years ago. There are many different factors that contribute to this issue as well as the fact that these ideas can be perceived in many different ways so the following editorial is based on my sole opinion.

     After beating through FFIX without too much trouble, I started to realize that newer RPG games are easier in comparison to older RPG games in my personal view. The first indication was that you no longer need to heavily level up as much as you used to nowadays, since one factor that made older RPGs so difficult was the amount of time needed to level up to the levels needed to beat a particular boss and stuff like that. Not to mention that most of the recent incarnations of FF games seem not too difficult compared with earlier games in the franchise. This is due to several factors, including the fact that RPGs have been becoming much more popular and mainstream as a gaming genre nowadays then they were about a decade ago. Since FFVII introduced the RPG genre to an entire new set of gamers for the PlayStation, the developers of the FF franchise, Squaresoft seemed content on keeping the difficulty down to make the game less frustrating and more enjoyable to play for gamers who were relatively new to RPG games in general. Perhaps another important factor in the reason why RPG games are getting easier nowadays is because there were more useless and more mediocre party characters that you had to use in the older FF games. A prime example is when you compare FFI to FFVII as the characters in FFI were rather limited in terms of skill and ability and were quite unreliable throughout most of the game. In newer FF games, some characters have useful Limit Breaks and other abilities to use, such as Cloud’s Omnislash and some of Quistis’ Blue Magic spells that can all do a decent amount of damage. In older FF games, characters have limited special skills or abilities; sometimes they are quite useless and generic.

     Personally, I find that more recent RPG games happen to be geared towards a more casual audience and this makes the genre appeal more to gamers in general, thus, RPG games are easier as a result. Remember when there were two versions of FFIV on the SNES? The FFIV hardtype version for the import Super Famicom and FFII on the SNES in North America? Square believed that the Japanese version of the game was deemed too difficult for North American gamers, since at the time period, Japanese gamers were far more experienced in RPGs and were better skilled than North American ones. This move signified that there was a gap in between the popularity of RPG games in comparison to the Japanese gaming market to North America’s. However, nowadays, RPG gamers in North America are sometimes as equally skilled as Japanese RPG gamers. These are solely based on my opinion and of course you may either disagree or agree with me on this issue.