I’ve been playing quite a bit of RPGs in the last 6 months or so, before that I think the only one that I actually had finished was Dragon Quest 11 back on the 3DS. Mostly there has been a difficulty spike or something that just brought me out of it, so I decided to just realise that I’m not that great at games and just set the difficulty down to easy. I don’t quite know what it is that I’m doing wrong which makes these difficulty spikes so difficult for me to deal with, but this way I do get to at least experience the whole thing, which is nice.

Turn based RPGs are the ones that I prefer, and they all usually follow quite a set and traditional format, and then throw in a system or two which kind of spices things up, being the Final Fantasies' Active Time Battle or Shin Megami Tensei’s Press turn system. It’s fun figuring out how to use these the best ways to deal with normal battles, the attrition and so on.

One realisation that I made this week is that the system of Octopath Traveller (shield break) basically just is a slight change on Persona’s 1 more turn system, where you exploit the enemies' weakness and put them in a state where you can more easily deal with them.

So those are the battle systems themselves, but that’s usually just the most visible ones, then you have things like monster catching, demon fusing, jobs, and other ones that in addition with the slow-ish growth through levels and experience makes a place where you can lorecraft and build together something that works with how you want to play. I really enjoy that slow working towards something and seeing it coming together, and then you noticing something that steers you in a slightly different direction.

Currently I’m playing Persona 3, and I really enjoy the variation and little breaks from battle to fuse together demons and having a new team to play with, some more and less skills, and weighing which types to keep around for the social links, and which ones are getting too weak to keep around, it’s the most fun I’ve had with that kind of system since I was playing siralim which works more like a card game, with each monster having a passive skill that works together to form broken combinations, and fun interactions.

The best thing a system like this can do is when it’s captivating enough that I keep on thinking about it and lorebuilding in my head over the day, and then get to try out things in my “gaming time” in the evening, some times it just doesn’t work, others it does. I guess it’s just kind of a informatics person thing, that it’s fun to play around with systems, figuring out how they work, and what you can do with them.