JRPG

What determines the "difficulty" of a turn based JRPG? How can a genre all about going through menus and increasing your numbers to beat the other numbers be difficult?

The number of wrong decisions you can afford to make before having to try again.
The number of possible wrong decisions compared to the number of possible correct decisions.
The number of decisions that have to be made correctly in succession in order to advance/progress.

This makes no sense. Can you give me an scenario with wrong and right decisions?

He s talking about decisions against bosses

How much grinding/trial and error the game requires

trick question. difficulty implies gameplay which jrpgs lack

The difficulty comes in how situations can take a turn for the worst with unfamiliar foes. For example, the duder you were fighting might be hiding a confusion spell so if you're not equipped to deal with that, it may cause a setback for you.
Otherwise it's all numbers checks if you just mindlessly grind like I do.

Selecting the right options in battles.

Let's say in a battle where an enemy is weak to everything you can do whatever you want and win.
Compared to a battle against an enemy that reflects everything except one type. If you pick the wrong type you'll take damage, waste your turn, and possibly die.
You might also incorrectly assemble your party so that you are weak to enemy attacks. It might be difficult to assemble a party that won't be weak to any of their attacks.

That's a big part of it. In a "difficult" jrpg you will have to choose between grinding or "solving" the puzzle of a boss. The narrower the solution & the more excessive the grinding required to ignore it, the more difficult the boss.

There may also be puzzles you need to solve in the overworld e.g. mazes.

Whats the difficulty of a turn based WRPG?

in some jrpgs an opponent you lost oo at level 63, might be beatable for someone a level 37 because they understand the opponent's weaknesses and how to best guard their attacks.
it's all about preparing a strategy

The simple answer is the difficulty is beating the game efficiently.
Yes, there are a lot of JRPGs where any chucklefuck can just blindly grind away until they win by just choosing "Attack", but that's never the quickest way to beat a game.
The difficulty is in understanding which actions will increase your efficiency in battle. In easy games, this can be something simple such as exploiting elemental weaknesses. In more complex games, it can be finding party configurations which are suited to particular encounters, finding combinations of skills which work well together, etc.

>grind your ass off
>wooow, this game sucks, the fights are way too easy

I think Persona is a good example of difficulty design in a turn-based setting.

You're encouraged to use spells to exploit weaknesses for greater damage and knockdowns, but SP is a resource you actually have to be concerned over due to the relative rarity of SP restoratives.

By extension, you're encouraged to use buffs and debuffs to make encounters faster, so that you aren't needlessly spending HP or SP.

In the end, the dominant strategy for a turn-based game will always be grinding.
That can't be avoided, so it's best to balance the game so that it can be challenging as you go without making the player feel as though they should grind.

Define gameplay

So, guessing games are good rpgs?

I didn't say that.
You're assuming that difficult=good.

Often the grand strategy element, versus when you can zerg rush
Which is why Necropolis tends to be a extremely strong faction in Heroes of Might and Magic.

Depending on:
difficulty settings
how prepared you are for whatever battle you're going into
have good judgement on what action is best for the current situation

Just because there isn't any time limit on a choice doesn't necessarily mean you're going to find the optimal one.

>In the end, the dominant strategy for a turn-based game will always be grinding.
>That can't be avoided, so it's best to balance the game so that it can be challenging as you go without making the player feel as though they should grind.

Sorry, but that just isn't true; grinding is only the dominant strategy if the game's level progression is poorly balanced. Giving reduced XP for defeating enemies you out level is an easy trick to reduce this problem; hell, if you wanted to take things to their logical extreme you could just get rid of XP completely and level the player characters at appropriate points in the story.

Sorry to jump down your throat, but games which punish the player for doing side missions by rewarding them to the point where the main story has no challenge are a big pet peeve of mine.

>Giving reduced XP for defeating enemies you out level is an easy trick to reduce this problem
That doesn't stop people from grinding. It just makes it take longer.

>you could just get rid of XP completely and level the player characters at appropriate points in the story
At that point I'm not even sure if it can be considered an RPG. It's more like unlocking abilities in an adventure game.

>That doesn't stop people from grinding. It just makes it take longer.
I interpreted "dominant strategy" as meaning it's the easiest way to beat the game. Does making it take longer not reduce it's dominance? I think it at least makes it easier to avoid accidentally overlevelling.

>At that point I'm not even sure if it can be considered an RPG. It's more like unlocking abilities in an adventure game.
Yeah, it would be an extreme option, but I don't think XP points are a sacred pillar of the genre. Most tabletop RPGs have now moved away from XP points; granting characters levels whenever the GM feels it's appropriate has become an extremely common practice.

>Does making it take longer not reduce it's dominance?
Grinding by default is a longer process than any other.

But it's still easier.