Okay JRPG's, We Need to have a talk... again.

Last time I talked about RPG's habit of wasting your time with a specific kind of quest or mission, but there are more ways RPG's like to waste time these days I hadn't gotten into yet (And no, I'm still not talking about grinding). This time we talk about frustrating dungeon design, and (I know, I keep picking on this game lately) I will talk Trails of Cold Steel as an example of this.

The first problem is what I am going to dub the 'trick puzzle'. Now, this isn't a puzzle that has some kind of trick to it, that could be interesting. This is something that tricks you into thinking you are solving a puzzle. This usually comes in the form of a switch puzzle in which you flip a switch, a path opens up and one closes.

On its own, a switch puzzle can be fun to get through, but the Trick Puzzle will have the elements of the switch puzzle there, but there isn't actually a puzzle to solve. There are areas of the old school house in which you have a series of switches that raise and lower platforms so you can advance, but in every single case you just.... flip the switch as you come across them. And every time you have to watch the shifting of the platforms before continuing.

You're not actually having to solve anything, just slowly advancing forward with additional scenes of moving scenery added in. There are technically a couple chests you have to grab before hitting a switch, but many of these areas include so few enemies that you will have nothing standing in your way from just flipping the switch back and grabbing said chest (Regardless of your thoughts on Random encounters, at the very least having them would add something to this segment, whereas Cold Steel doesn't do those), and you see the whole map so it's not like there is much a chance of missing anything. It's just more wasted time doing absolutely nothing.

Then comes a dungeon in the second title that sees twisting corridors, and paths blocked off with gates. You work your way around the gates in a longer path and then can pull a switch to drop the gates. Then, to get a chest at each one, you step through the gates and open it, with no opposition between you and the chest. So why not just put the chest near the switch in your path anyway? You watch an animation of the gates dropping, and you can see the chest each and every time, so you can't miss it. Hell, there isn't even a need to backtrack at any of them except the one near a save point to heal at, and the few seconds extra to walk to the chest, so why bother with multiple gates at all? It's just dragging down the gameplay while adding nothing.

And this next bit can be applied to more games then RPG's I guess, but dear god I hate climbing ladders. The shortest ladder in Trails of Cold Steel I counted was five seconds. That doesn't seem like long, but what I want you to do is look at a wall and, for five seconds, stare at it. Was that fun for you? Well now do it again, because there was only a small chest and no encounters at the top of that ladder, so now you are climbing back down.

Longest ladder? I am remembering this off the top of my head, so it may be a bit off, but I recall seventeen seconds. And you have to climb right back down afterward. Thirty-four seconds of staring at a wall is all you are doing. Do you realize how much dead time that is in a couple of dungeons that require you to scale several ladders? It is constantly halting your gameplay, and the ladders add nothing to the dungeons.

Then this isn't so much Trails of Cold Steel (Though it comes up) but from my current venture playing Dragon Quest VII, and something that comes up in many Dragon Quest Titles. Do you really, truly realize how much absolute dead space some of these Dragon Quest games have? Vast expanses of nothing but enemy encounters. I cannot count how many times in VII I walked around a new area looking for any of the chests out in the open field, only to find nothing but the same enemy encounters on the rest of the map. Dead ends with nothing can be fine, but eventually, you just start to tire of running across them. A game that lets you roam across these big open map is essentially punishing you for doing so by wasting time.

And this is cheating a bit, as Zelda isn't an RPG, but it is something I have seen in RPG's from time to time. What I want you to do is watch the time it takes to open a chest in Link to the Past, and Ocarina of time. Play the game or watch footage on youtube, it's a very noticeable difference. Outside of possibly finding unique items, there really is no improves the sense of discovery, it's just a longer animation. For a few items it's fine, but for every chest that you come across? For an actual RPG example, compare FF VI to FF XIII, the same thing. Watch the opening of chests in one over the other.

In all three of these cases, it is small increments of time, but they come one after the other, and you start to notice after a while. These small aspects start to noticeably drag down the pace of the game, and dear god do they need to stop. They add nothing and disrupt the flow of gameplay. In the worst case scenarios with Trick Puzzles, they will noticeably pad out the length.

It's the culmination of small details like these in RPG's that can make them hard to play for a lot of people, and drag down the experience for those of us who are big enough fans of the genre to enjoy to it's fullest. When you are making an RPG, you are already asking for a big time sink of your players compared to most other genres, so I would think avoiding things like this would be a priority to stop the game from feeling long and padded, but then again in spite of these being persistent problems in the modern Era I keep playing anyway, so what do I know?

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