Map Design and Random Encounters in Retro RPGs

As recently as a year ago, I would contend that my favourite RPG subgenre would be the turn-based JRPG. While everyone else had moved on to Oblivion and Fallout, I stuck with my Final Fantasy and Pokemon. I liked the sometimes nonsensical, fluffy stories, the patient menu-based battle systems, and even the thrill of random battles. But having worked through Pokemon Black 2, Penny Arcade’s Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3, Final Fantasy VII, and now Final Fantasy Dimensions all this year, I suddenly realized that these games don’t hold the allure for me that they once did.

For a lot of ’90s JRPGs and retro-styled indie RPGs of today, this is due to one fatal flaw: a brutal combination of lazy map design and a high encounter rate. In any JRPG of yesteryear, you’re often faced with a choice when dungeoneering: go one way to get the treasure chest, go the other way to progress through the dungeon. A completionist like myself wants to always get the treasure first, then take the other path and inch closer to the end of the dungeon until I’m presented with another forked path. This is the much-vaunted “non-linearity” that people who decry modern game design love to champion as an example of why the old ways were so much better. But when I’m presented with a forked path, nine times out of ten my view of the ends of those paths is deliberately obstructed, making me choose at random. If I find the floor exit, I know I’ve missed out on the treasure, and I have to go all the way back to the other path, then get the loot, then trek all the way back to the exit, fighting random battles all along the way. In a game like Final Fantasy where your party’s health and MP don’t regenerate after battle (even a little), this wears down on your mages, who are constantly struggling to keep the party’s health up without having to resort to expensive healing items. And if there are more than two available paths, that’s just cruel. The game becomes a slog, with what should be healthy exploration bogged down by a combination of too many unknown paths and too many random battles.

When this design pops up in games today, I feel punished for wanting to explore the game world. I want to see every nook and cranny and make sure I haven’t missed any loot or any secret shops/conversations/party members, what have you. But my desire to explore goes down once I realize that means fighting through another series of battles every few steps, which can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes depending on the game.

I’ve currently sunk 25 hours into Final Fantasy Dimensions and I’m only about halfway through the game, but don’t let that fool you into thinking the game is a deep classic JRPG experience. The dungeons aren’t long by any means, usually only about five or six floors with only two or three forks per floor (one to the treasure, one to the next fork, then repeat), but the game’s taking me so fucking long to get through because I’m fighting a random battle every time I twitch. There’s no way to reduce the amount of random encounters, and running can take up to twenty seconds and allows the enemy to get plenty of free hits in before that. Hell, I’ll just give you the skinny right now: the game is a neverending sequence of forest, cave and mountain dungeons (the mountains are the worst, as you usually go up the mountain and then back down…yeah, no boss battles at the summit in this bad boy) broken up by the occasional town where nothing special happens beyond allowing you to buy new pieces of armour, with the only story progression usually occurring at the very end of each chapter (often after a town-dungeon-dungeon-town-dungeon sequence).

Zeboyd’s retro JRPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World, Penny Arcade 3) are prime examples of this kind of map design, except their branches take even longer to find out whether you chose the treasure path or the exit path than in Final Fantasy Dimensions. However, one large plus is that after you fight a set number of random battles in each dungeon, the random encounter rate will drop to zero and require you to manually enter battles via the menu screen. This allows you to explore to your heart’s content without fear of getting jumped by a bunch of slimes, while simultaneously acting as a levelling tool (once you hit the max number of random battles, it’s suggested that you’re done grinding in that area, and you’ll have a chance against the boss). Penny Arcade 3 does away with random battles entirely, placing enemies on the map in scripted positions and regenerating your party’s health completely after each battle; progressing through the dungeon is more like clearing away barriers in the form of enemies until you have a clear path to the exit/treasure. I like the latter more than the former, but both are acceptable alternatives to traditional JRPG design, and the former in particular is kind of innovative.

Nowadays, I think I’m losing my patience for JRPGs that have this kind of design. I find myself gravitating more toward stuff like the Tales series, where the enemies are visible on the overworld map and avoidable, there is no penalty for running, you get a small amount of health and TP back after each battle, and you can usually explore to your heart’s content without fighting an endless series of battles. Or even stuff like The Last Story, where every battle is scripted and there are no random enemies whatsoever. Or, hell, even Western RPGs, where combat might not even be broken down into discrete “battles.”

Party Interaction in RPGs

Around this time every year, I get the urge to play Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Though the original, Bioware-produced game is generally considered to be the superior installment, and though I enjoyed it very much in its own right, I’ve never felt tempted to slog through that beast of an RPG ever again; I always come back to Obsidian’s sequel instead. This is largely because of the difference in writing between the two games. Drew Karpyshyn’s writing in the original is serviceable and adequate for a typical “save-the-world” story, but its much-vaunted “moral choices” are painfully black-and-white and everything else, from the love scenes to the expository background revelations, rely slavishly upon standard tropes. Chris Avellone’s writing in the sequel, however, is much more nuanced and subtle, coating everything from characters’ allegiances to the player’s moral choices in heavy shades of grey. I always find the latter an interesting read, and thanks to Avellone’s wordiness, there’s a hell of a lot of dialogue to sift through in The Sith Lords, so every winter I like to sit back and listen to my party members bitch and argue.

That’s what weird about this game: unlike a lot of party-based RPGs, your team in KotOR II actually feels like a living, breathing unit. Each individual has their own biases, secrets, and grudges, and these come out in numerous short scenes on the Ebon Hawk over the course of the game. Some of them hint at important story points or character backgrounds, some are merely comic relief, but almost none of them involve the presence of the player character. They’re just there to show that, yes, cramming twelve people into a tiny ship is going to force them to talk to each other, whether you and your dialogue wheel are there or not.

After playing KotOR II, the lack of party interaction in other RPGs became a lot more noticeable to me. Perhaps it’s there and it’s merely not as well-implemented as in KotOR II, but in some games your party members honestly do not seem to be aware of each others’ presence. You can see this a lot in the original KotOR, where your party members will often speak of themselves or the player character, but never about anyone else on the team. It’s like they’re operating in a complete vacuum, and they have no idea who the other ten strangers on the ship are. Mass Effect is a little better, since the second game has Shepard break up a few fights between specific party members, while the third game allows Shepard to eavesdrop on many conversations between party members around the Normandy, but even these are usually either a meaningless discussion of the previous mission or a tired reference to a meme spawned from one of the previous games. They do little to build upon the characters’ relationships.

The Tales of series takes its writing cues from Japanese anime culture rather than Western cinema, but its approach to character interaction isn’t much better than the average Bioware game. The games’ optional party “skits” show your party members interacting in an informal manner, but it’s usually for the purpose of showcasing example after example of strange Japanese humour. It’s awkward to watch, and these games are still a product of their translation team (though they’ve gotten much better since the early days of JRPG localization in the ’90s), but hey, at least all these party members seem to be actually aware of each other.

In the case of most of Bioware’s RPGs, the problem seems to stem from an almost fanatical desire to make each party member connect to the player character in some meaningful way. When you spend this much time making sure that each social outcast or disgraced soldier you pick up has a sob story ready to go (let’s get that dialogue wheel going!), you can bet the devs aren’t spending much time drawing up relationships between the outcasts themselves. The focus in most Western RPGs, where character creation seems to be almost mandatory these days, is on the player. Devs figure that if the player isn’t allowed to interact with their party members during a scene, their egotistical personalities will flare up and they’ll get bored.

The Bioware problem is exacerbated by the fact that sometimes your party members can die, and then they won’t be in the next game. This is an asinine design choice dressed up as the mother of all moral decisions. The problem is not that they’re dead, and that’s weighty and heavy; the problem is that sometimes that person will be around to talk to other party members, and sometimes they won’t be. If either party member is dead, the potential conversation cannot occur, and the chances of not having the conversation occur increase with the addition of other party members to the conversation (KotOR II has several convos that involve a specific group of your team), all of whom may potentially be dead. But rather than waste time scripting a conversation that many players will possibly never see, any reasonable designer would opt for not placing a conversation there at all. It’s cheaper and less of a headache than to work out the variables that must come together for that conversation to occur. As a result, if those characters are in fact alive (I like to keep all of my team alive whenever possible), they still don’t get a potentially character-building scripted conversation simply because it would’ve been pointless to insert it if there was the chance it could be missed.

I realize this is such a minor part of RPG storytelling that I’ve still managed to enjoy many games despite the lack of inter-party interaction. I suppose I feel spoiled by how well it’s used in KotOR II, and I’m frustrated by other games’ insistence on bending over backward to make the player feel like the focus of the story. My ego isn’t so fragile that I can’t bear to see how my party members are getting on in my absence. In games where you assemble an ensemble of globetrotting scoundrels, you should feel like they can relate not only to the player character, but also to each other. That’s how I like my characterization.