>Game has ultra-strict builds where 90% of the skills are useless>Game has such completely free-form skill selection that none of your skills matter because everything ends up playing exactly the sameWhich is worse?
trying to make useless skills work is fun. just so long as things work as they are described and there's nothing absolutely beyond any practical function
There's a big unanswered question here: whether the "ultra-strict builds" are actually fun to play. Often the character-building mechanic is pretty much tacked-on to begin with, not based on any highminded game design ideas, but because suits think it's something that the game is "supposed to have", and in that case it's honestly not even a downside of note: in practice it operates like Team Fortress and the like, in which you have different types of playable characters, but no builds. But it could also go the other way, such that the incentivized builds are anti-fun, unthematic and generally degenerate (one variety of this kind of meta builds is excessive multiclassing, in which you grab all possible passive buffs for maximum power, but have no more than basic attacks: completely dull).But without knowing the details, I would say the latter is worse on average. And that's if it genuinely has no differences whatsoever: if there are *slight* differences, no matter how marginal or implicit, then you have super-bland game but for power-conscious players it's nevertheless just as restricting as the former.
>>737623984Bumparoni lol.
>>737623984Cassette Beasts did the second one, and it made me bounce off the game really hard. It's a Pokemon-like, but the customization is huge. Moves and abilities are all in the same pool of "stickers" that can be put on your monster tapes, so you can mix and match pretty freely. Any monster can also be any type wit the bootleg system (shinies, but MUCH lower rarity rates).Playing through the game felt odd, like you'd find a new monster but it didn't feel like you'd got something new, just a slightly different blank slate. The only thing that distinguishes monsters from each other is stats and movepool, and most movepools are pretty wide so you just end up playing through the game blind to the stat numbers and going by vague feel to tell what everything does, then looking up the stats in endgame and picking the best.
