Would turn-based RPGs be better if levels, and level grinding didn't exist?

Would turn-based RPGs be better if levels, and level grinding didn't exist?

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kinda but the game would still be about making the right choice at the right time via a menu

something like chrono trigger mixed with fft grid-based movement would be pretty cool

Go play sticker star and color splash to find out

try out FF 2

why so many fags are agains leveling up and killing mobs by the dozens?

>but the game would still be about making the right choice at the right time via a menu

That's fine, that's what I want. In theory I really like turn-based RPGs, but almost all of them boil down to grinding and spamming the default attack command.

Strategies, skill/equipment selection and party-building should be how you overcome enemies, not killing Goblins 500 times.

Grinding is optional 95% of the time. Anyway, pic related

Play western games like Might and Magic if you want turn-based and no grinding. Not gonna find it in many JRPGs

Not really, but the people who normally moan about "grindfests" would have to come to terms with the fact they suck, which seems like a good outcome.

Its mostly the leveling system that is a problem. Instead of getting limited skill points from each level, where you have to choose the stats you want to upgrade, its just an automatic "everything the character does is now a little stronger" sort of boost.

FF4 (not easytype) is pretty good if you don't grind; its pretty much what you want where you just choose the tactics that are optimal. But the option to grind IS there.

The vast majority don't require grinding to begin with.

But many people who play them choose to do it.

And then bitch about it.

Your average rpg will give you enough exp simply when you're going from point A to point B to allow you to continue.

At least for jrpgs anyway.

MGQ was pretty good

play smt
good buffs and hiting weaknesses can destroy bozses way beyond your level
that, and the only level that matters is your main character's the rest of your part is completly built up

the game's 80% strategy which is why new plaayers coming from other series say it's hard and why old fans say it's too easy (ant strategy that works in one game usually works for the rest)

This desu. If the answer to what OP said was "yes" people that liked Thousand-Year-Door would love these games.

I don't know, man. I love the warm feeling I get inside when I fill the exp bar all the way up and I see what stats go up and what new skills got unlocked. No other genre can quite hit that spot.

You can always play Wizardry series OP

Literally a SaGa game

You're right, it's the stat boost across the board that makes leveling systems bad (in my opinion).

But I wouldn't mind progressively learning extra skills to give a sense of advancement. I think if FF5 retained its job levels (which don't affect overall stats?), but dropped the 'main' levels, and had enemies balanced appropriately, it'd be perfect to me.

Yes, thanks to mention SaGa series too.

This. SMT is a great JRPG that's all about the party build and not about your current level. SMT 3 specifically makes level grinding pretty much useless.

Not really, you just need to make experience gain scale with the current level to achieve the same result. And it would kill low level runs.

I hate this image, wizardry 4 and all these fucking "hardcore" RPGs are all easy as fuck badly balanced messes that you can break with 2 spells.

RPGs are shitty strategy games and bad games in general.

Suikoden II is a good example of how "traditional" turn-based combat should play out.
The way the exp formula curves makes it both easy to catch up to the level of wherever you're a t while simultaneously making it virtually impossible to grind past it.
More importantly than that, battles/animations are very quick and fights end in seconds. If your combat is gonna be simple, don't make it tedious.

That being said, the traditional turn based combat is archaic as fuck at this point and any developer who uses it is pretty much copping out and saying "i'm too lazy/cheap to go for something better."

>Any Wizardry
>easy

It doesn't count if you're referencing a guide every 3 seconds you stupid anime-liker. Hell, even then the RNG is gonna fuck you over when it feels like it.

>"Wooow professor Layton is such an easy game, I solved every puzzle instantly with this guide!"

Last Remnant is the bastardization of SaGa.
>no sparking skills
>retarded command system
>music isn't good
>generic 3D faggot models instead of quality SaGa artstyle

basically garbage

Oh fuck off, i played these shitty games when they launched, RPGs are jokes in every gaming community that matters.

Yamauchi, are you alive?

The Wizardry series, with the obvious exception of IV, is about finding a safe spot to grind until you feel like it's safe to progress to the next area.

Any GOOD jrpg is designed to be challenging but beatable if you fight only the mandatory story battles. You need to fully understand the battle system and use it to maximal effect, changing your tactics appropriately for each battle. Every battle is like a puzzle. Levels exist and represent how your characters' strength grow throughout the game, and each battle is balanced according to what the player's strength would be if they only fought story battles.

I personally don't like level grinding but it exists as a sort of adjustable difficulty meter. If you play the game without level grinding then you get the full experience, but if you choose to grind then you can beat the game without figuring out the optimal solution to each puzzle/battle. Therefore casual players can "beat" the game as well. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of video game players have no interest in mastering and RPG battle system in order to get the full experience. Rather, many games don't even bother making a properly balanced base game because most players prefer grinding to win; they get no enjoyment from figuring out strategies, they enjoy the big numbers they see while grinding, and they still feel an undeserved sense of accomplishment when they beat a game on easymode. The number of people who care about a game being good is minuscule in comparison so there's very little incentive for a developer to make a good game. It makes more sense to make a game with flashy animations and lots of grinding because that appeals to more people.

>I have no idea how Wizardry 4 works
Good luck getting off the first floor without a guide.

I wish there was some way to force people to play lesser known RPGs that actually have fun, engaging gameplay like Baten Kaitos 1/2 before basing their entire conception of a genre on mediocre entry level shit.

People will never know just how casual they are, and that upsets me a little bit.

Presumably that would put you AT LEAST in your late 30s to early 40s. Are you an old man who likes Suzumiya Haruma?

>gaming community that matters
you dont know how dumb this makes you sound do you
take a picture of this and open it in 5 years so that future you can understand just how much of a faggot you were

Are you from iraq or just america? Who the fuck doesn't like anime?

Only if it fits. There's a hack for Chrono Trigger that removes levels and rebalances it to be a lot more difficult and it's significantly better than the original game from a gameplay standpoint.

>fanbase that pretends they're tough games
>poorly balanced
>easy to break

Sounds like SMT.

My nigga.
People who sperg about Last Remnant without ever having touched any of the SaGa games can suck a big fat dick.

Reminder that they remastered SaGa II on mobile
youtu.be/QQnSLv6qUXE

I got Last Rem back when there were almost no JRPGs on Steam. Abandoning that clusterfuck of half-thought out concepts was the best gaming decision I ever made.

I actually do like mecha anime but you insulted all of my favorite games in one swoop and that was all I had to go on.

Some Megaten games handle it well. In Nocturne for example, levelling up only awards one point to one statistic, plus a little HP/MP, which combined with increasing EXP requirements and new equipment that's often just different, not strictly better, is not enough to allow you to overcome any difficult boss or section through mindless grinding. Gaining levels is still required to succeed because it gives you access to more skills and party members, which are what really win fights, but only if utilised correctly - so levelling up never becomes a replacement for strategy.
I think more games should handle levels like that; reduce the impact of levels on stats or raw power, and use levels to give players more tools and force them to make choices about their build instead.
Make equipment a choice, too, don't have too many pieces that are just better than others in all or most categories, make them all useful in different contexts.

Getting rid of levels altogether seems more drastic, but I would definitely be interested in an RPG that did that to see if it could work.

Seriously check out Nocturne, older games in the series are the exact dogshit you described though so stay away from those.

Why do BK fans always have to let everyone know what special snowflakes they are?

SMT isn't even that poorly balanced, it's just highly exploitable in really boring ways like buff/debuff stacking infinitely in Nocturne, which is super fucking tedious and makes the game less fun imo.

The 3DS SRPGs, Devil Survivor I think? Those are really poorly balanced, basically forcing the player to grind due to ridiculous difficulty spikes and enemies that simply oneshot you without high enough stats.

ITT: butthurt people who should really be playing a different fucking genre instead of rpgs

i just want people to fucking play the games
they're the apex of jrpg combat but they got put on a horrible meme console at the end of its lifespan and faded into obscurity unduly

Aren't they just Strategy/Tactical RPGs then? Also, on the whole I'd say no, but I'm not privy to decades of growth for the genre in an alternate history.

You can stack four buffs and debuffs in Nocturne IIRC.

no one that plays alot of smt thinks smt is hard
they just say that to new players because it's harder than standard, popular rpgs (eg. pokemon, Final Fantasy...) if you haven't played the games before and don't know how to break the system

>The 3DS SRPGs, Devil Survivor I think? Those are really poorly balanced, basically forcing the player to grind due to ridiculous difficulty spikes and enemies that simply oneshot you without high enough stats.
See this is what happens when a video game has actual well designed and well balanced gameplay. The biggest flaw of the games is the lack of difficulty and there's absolutely no need to ever grind and yet there are filthy casuals who blame the game and make up complete lies even though it's 100% their fault for being retarded.

Resonance of Fate is a good example of this

Wizardry can be though and sometimes unfair, it's even recommended in the manual to rest the game if bad things happen.

But if you grind to get Lords with Lord Mail, Samurai with Murasama, ninjas and leveling up a cleric to cleric spell tier, then turn him into a mage to level up to max mage spell tier , then turn him into a bishop , of course it will get easy.

I loved Baten Kaitos 1, dropped Origins at disc 2 after the Honololo Bird. I will finish it sometime later. Why they droped the deck per character for Origins?

No

Levels are an absolute necessity of you want the player to give a fuck about your game. Wanna know what you get when you make a turn based RPG without levels?

Sticker star ;)

Origins actually becomes significantly better than BK1 but it takes quite a few hours for the mechanics to fill in. By the point you actually get your hand/discards leveled up and can combine cards/do specials, the game gets fucking ridiculous. It's much harder than BK1 though, and you're pretty much forced to rush-down the bosses and even normal enemies or they'll crush you in a few turns.

>Strategies, skill/equipment selection and party-building should be how you overcome enemies, not killing Goblins 500 times.

Most RPGs I have played are like this. It's a lot more common than you are making it out to be. Just because the nature of stats makes brute force an option doesn't mean it's the only / optimal one.

>SMT isn't even that poorly balanced

Yes, they are. You don't need to pretend to tell me how they are, because I've played them and am a fan.

I'm just sick of all the idiot memers in the fanbase who try passing them off as hard or super strategic so they can enjoy the smell of their own farts more while incessantly regurgitating buzzwords like "buffs/debuffs."

They are needed in certain tough battles, but these games do not revolve around them and are among the least significant method of making headway.

Your strongest weapon is abuse of the elemental weaknesses, especially in any game with any form of the press turn system. Then there are tetrakarn/makarakarn, which are absolutely unbalanced game breaking shit in some of the games.

Or you could be playing a game like SMT2 and break it with elemental/status swords/bullets.

Or with OP demons or party members in many games.

Or OP builds like in the Devil Survivor games, clearing everything with piercing multi-strike in 2 for example.

Just to name some of the more prominent examples that came to mind off the top of my head.

Face it famalam, the balance is shit.

>buffs/debuffs
>buzzwords
What?
are you on a new dimension of memes

>The 3DS SRPGs, Devil Survivor I think? Those are really poorly balanced, basically forcing the player to grind due to ridiculous difficulty spikes and enemies that simply oneshot you without high enough stats.

No, this is just a sign that you're terrible at the game and can't actually handle good design. Grinding is fucking inherently designed against, user, you can't seriously say the game wants you to do it.

Origins has more spikes than 1 and I agree, you have to rush-down the enemies. I still like more 1 because a deck per character let me choose whatever "build" I wanted, if I wanted a healer, I only had to stack more heal cards, if a wanted a character inflict debuffs, I only had to stack more debuff cards. In Origins, if your cards doesn't stack up for a combo, are virtually useless so you have to drop a lot of shit.

Does someone knows if "droping" a character from your party aka let them autoplay makes a difference?

Or Riviera: The Promised Land. That game was pretty cool.

No SMT discussion is history occurs without idiots mentioning them constantly, in spite of the fact you don't need them 95% of the time.

>mfw 1st time hades

>MFW last boss killed mai waifu

You must be genuinely retarded if you think no levels is the main or even major problem with Sticker Star. No levels is a very minor part of why SS sucked.

Ok, now you got my attention, Riviera has permadeath or what?

Nah, before the press-turn it was bad but after nocturne it's just easy to win with the right skills, not really breaking the game.

>Devil Survivor

Are you kidding me?

The DeSu games have the most broken fusion mechanics and the most broken part customization in literally the entire franchise.

They are holyfuckeasy.

>The DeSu games have the most broken fusion mechanics
SMT IV exists.

>Sticker star ;)
>A bad game did it, so it's a bad idea

I've never played a SMT game and Persona 3 and 4 sounds boring to me, are DeSu games a good place to start?

>Persona 3 and 4 sounds boring to me
>are DeSu games a good place to start?
Dude no

DeSu 1 was my entryway into SMT as a whole. The first one did a pretty decent job of instilling in me the importance of fusing a well balanced team and how to abuse elemental weaknesses and resists, a skill that carries over nicely to the mainline series as well.

>The DeSu games have the most broken fusion mechanics and the most broken part customization in literally the entire franchise.
is right. DeSu's are the next most broken though.

This

>playing baldur's gate 2
>win because i have 3 mages in the party

Still doesn't rival DeSu1.

Which had that mechanic that allowed you to keep teaching demons any skill from the human characters' movepool of skills, which you could then pass on via fusion.

DeSu2 at least ended that, but it replaced it with that system win additional sets of skills to pick from when fusing.

Baldur's gate is not "hardcore"

You're retarded

No. That asshole Hector kills the girl that likes you the most, then after defeating him, he fuses with Seth, to become Seth-Rah, the final boss of the game. A goddess revive the waifu at the end.

And you're an unskilled pleb.

>spoiling the game
wtf dude

You can literally fuse any moveset you want in any demon you want directly from the compendium in IV.

The DeSu games are srpgs like Final Fantasy Tactics.

They aren't like the other games.

So no, probably not.

But they are passable srpgs and pretty fun.

Oh yeah, forgot about that.

I barely remember a damn thing about IV beyond cheesing almost every tough battle with the karn moves.

>SMT 3 specifically makes level grinding pretty much useless.

I almost always grind to get Fog Breath in order to beat Matador (Along with Equiping Hifumi and a Party of Uzume, Koppa, and Nekomata) And it completely destroys him, so I wouldn't call it useless

sup

DeSu is like Persona with dialogue 10x as cringey and Final Fantasy Tactics combat, but 10x worse.

And Vita!

Is the turn-based rpg Japan's FPS? The game genre everyones sick of seeing but everyone buys it anyways?

>removing progression from an rpg
Genius design decision. You would grealy succeed as game designer. 140+ IQ and full understanding of RPGs confirmed.

No tetrakarn or makarakarn for you, Beelzy. Don't spam me.

Just enjoy my reflect gun team.

the only demon that I think i ever died to in STMIV was the green snake dude in NG+

You want a hard RPG? One that will make you numb from all the pain? Try Genius of Sappheiros. Not the casualized weekend version, the original version that I played when it came out. The one where every battle is a struggle to survive, where you have to learn strategies for certain enemy group formations you might have the misfortune of encountering. Oh, you got a rare .05% drop? I hope you can make it out of the dungeon without getting raped by mindflayers because if you die that shit is lost forever, along with anything else you picked up. Grinding doesn't help when you're getting killed by instadeath attacks before you even have a chance to move. But if you do grind, make sure you grind all your team because there is a dungeon coming up where you split into three teams and unless your ass is solid snake and can dodge enemies on the map that run faster then you, your ass isn't going anywhere. This isn't even mentioning the bosses. I don't even know where to start there. Let's just say that there are certain moves that your blue mage can learn only from bosses and at a low chance at that. So in between getting raped multiple times by the boss, you have to manage to beat it while getting your blue mage to learn the 1% chance move if you want to get all of them.

I've played a lot of hard games but no game left me with PTSD quite in the way the original Genius of Sappheiros did. But I still enjoyed every minute of it and even now I'd say it is the best touhou fangame in existence.

RAIIIINBOOOOOW!

Not really. Japanese games are a somewhat dying industry so devs has to restrict themselves to games and series that actually sell copies. Western games become popular (more) between 2004 and 2015 but CoD and other shit killed the creativity western games used to have.

What do you think of mega man battle network, op? It isn't turn based but.

>Matador
>Hifumi w/ Fog Breath
>Uzume
>Koppa
>Nekomata

Completely Overkill Defensively, and How do you deal Damage to him if your MC is busy Fog Breathing and your party members only know Zan?

At least turn-based RPGs feature a wide variety of settings, plots, artstyles and characters.

FPSes are almost all exactly the same. There's a lot of samey RPGs as well, but there's tons that are unique and I could name all the FPSes with interesting design on one hand.

Are you trying to mimic the Wizardry 4 pasta? Anyway, post the link the faggot

Leveling up is asinine. Your numbers go up, the enemy's numbers go up, whether it's advancing to the next area or one of those level-scaling games. An irrelevant mechanic doesn't even make sense in the world. Just by fighting some chump enemies nonstop, your strength and intelligence and spiritual power all suddenly rival those of godly beings? Fuck off with that.

Instead of just making numbers go up, your adventures and fights should have you earn and learn things.

Reach level 50 and now you can summon meteors? Just shows up in your spell list after a random battle. Fuck that.
If you want to cast a magic nuke, you travel to this asshole wizard's tower, break in, kill his dudes, kick his ass, find the spellbook that has "NUKE" in it and read it. Now you can cast nuke, and you earned that shit

Level up by fighting and you put your skill points into lockpicking on level up?
You want to learn that, you're going to have to talk to the local locksmith and pay him or do work for him in exchange for learning about how common locks work. Or you go down into the shitty side of town and hit up the shady guy who is willing to give you a place to train on some stolen safes for a price.

RPGs that use simple EXP and leveling up cripple their own worlds, the same goes for loot systems where you're looking for a +53 sword to replace your +52 sword. That shit isn't content.

All turn-based RPG combat systems are braindead as fuck, even the SRPGs where you think placement and moving around might add to the "depth" are still as shallow as a dog bowl. If they're not going to make the combat fun or the progression feel like you're actually improving, they could at least use systems that lend to making the world more interesting and actually fucking incentivize you into exploring it.

>Reach level 50 and now you can summon meteors? Just shows up in your spell list after a random battle. Fuck that.

Play SaGa games and Last Remnant.

Isn't all that just walking around and talking to people?