What the fuck? Is the real game THAT hard? I thought you just spammed attack and ultima then won…
>>12557462>I thought you just spammed attack and ultima then wonNo that's 6
>>12557462EasyType is for the stupid gaijin
>>12558076No, it's not. Easy Type was designed for the JPN audiance and then the US version was based off Easy Type, or rather branched off an in-development version of it, because they simply used the latest version in dev.The context is that if you look up the reception of any and every famous famicom RPG, every DQ, every FF, Mother, Megami Tensei etc there was a part of the audiance in Japan complaining that the games were too hard. Easy Type was the first time a major publisher listened to those complains and yielded and I consider it a turning point for the genre.You also need to realize how casual the average RPG player was in Japan. In the US at the times RPGs were mostly for hardcore gamers, in Japan they were for *everyone*, from the 8 years old kid to the 45 years old salary man. This also partly explains why Working Designs made some RPGs harder for US release, their audiance was exclusively hardcore gamers.
>>12558076In fact, here is a press release from Square of US less than a year before the release of FF2 US, their marketing was centered around how challenging the game were. The point isn't whether they were really challenging or not, the point is that the marketing is centered around that idea because it was important for the audiance.in b4 >what about Mystic QuestWell, precisely. It underperformed.
making old ass turn based RPGs hard just meant wasting the player's time with inflated HP and damage stats 99% of timeIt wasn't until the 00s that enemy AI became advanced enough to change based on player action, at least in popular games. RPGs were story games meant for player customization, first and foremost.
>>12558117No, making old ass turn based RPGs hard mean forcing the player to take the right decisions in battle or else he'll die, and force him to use his ressources efficiently or else he'll run out too quickly (DQ2-3-4); rather than spam attack to win and heal using the 300 potions in your bottomless item bag (FF7).
>>12557462IV isn't actually all that difficult, it's just development complications that >>12558107 outlined resulted in alternative revisions with greatly reduced difficulty and complexity. Case in point, Cecil lost Darkness in the US on top of all the abilities characters already lost in EasyType. They wanted it to be a newcomer to JRPG's easier approach, but even if you play JP, or the various romhacks that restore the JPisms, it's not like a world weaving change of sheer challenge.You want challenge, you go play the DS remake, that shit actually kinda expects you to have played the original to get the most out of it.
>>12557462You suck at Roman numerals
>>12557462Standard IV is hard for beginners in RPJs. The game also punishes you hard with bullshit, like Rydia being useless in the final boss since it counters magic and summon spells with ridiculous AOE damage and the game never tells you that.
>>12558117>making old ass turn based RPGs hard just meant wasting the player's time with inflated HP and damage stats 99% of timeJust say "jRPGs" when you are talking about jRPGs.
>>12558107>>12558116>audianceaudience*
>>12558126>greatly reduced difficulty and complexityIt's just some extra XP, cheaper shops, lowered HP on bosses, removed abilities (which were bad in general) and unified status effect items. The core strategic layer of the fights is the same, just less grind. A lot of the removed bloat was probably that they wanted to save money printing strategy guides in English.
>>12558116Back when gaming was a masculine hobby
>>12558116It's funny how a niche genre for nerds became Japan's everyman slop. They truly never understood RPGs, outside of the few westaboos who actually cracked a Player's Handbook.
>>12558996>They never truly understood RPGsIf they were just D&D no one would buy them, and everyone would say Japan was just making a cheap knockoff of Western games. The term RPG is largely meaningless in video games and that's just fine because I'd much rather play a 3-4-in-a-row JRPG than a tabletop simulator and apparently many others feel the same.
>>12559010>everyone would say Japan was just making a cheap knockoff of Western gamesThey were. Ultima, Wizardry, and Phantasie. They never evolved past that. There's not a single retro jRPG as good as Pool of Radiance and I say that as someone who loved playing jRPGs as a child.
>>12559031How about... Pool of Radiance... ported by the Japanese for a Japanese system.
>>12558996>They truly never understood RPGsRPGs are pretty easy to understand, Yuji Horii just made a game that more people wanted to play. 2.5 million japanese people bought DQ3 on day 1 and it went on to sell 4 million copies on just the famicom, 10 million copies as its been remade and rereleased. At the same time the contemporary Ultima entry, Ultima V, took 3 years to sell 100k. Those Japs just dont get it man. When was the first western RPG that a child could actually comprehend? 2006?
>>12558107Easy Type is specifically made for young children, it's why a lot of of the changes involves rewriting dialogue to replace slightly complicated words with simpler ones kids are more likely to know.
>>12558107The Japanese RPG audience's understanding of difficulty in those days was considerably different from what you might expect. DQ1 and 2 are so beloved because even though they require heavy grinding, the gameplay loop itself is braindead and you just need the levels to get past each part of the game. So many of the changes made to EasyType render the little strategy the game has pointless by overbuffing items like Ribbons so this audience can just fly through the game.
>>12560161I'll always disagree with people claiming DQ2 is braindead. You have to make the right decisions in battle and manage your ressources well or else you'll die. Of course you can always outgrind the game but that'd take absolutely forever, then again some Japanese players would do that, I remember reading in Famitsu a player letter saying "I reached lvl 99 in DQ3, what should I do now?"
>>12560064What... about... it?
>>12560109I played computer RPGs and actual D&D as a child. Are you saying the quality of a game is determined by its ability to please the lowest common denominator? Yeah, you probably think scrolling your phone is a personal choice you make, huh?
>>12560662It's a Japanese Western Computer Console RPG
>>12557462FF4 is the only one where you can't become a broken murder machine because there's no party customization whatsoever.
