Old Man Yells at Clouds – New Fangled Scoring/Ranking systems.

The high school grade system has become a pretty well-accepted method of delivering a grade for performance in society, to the point, you can do something you're not even trying to get a score at, like making breakfast, and someone will eat it and say 'I give it a B' and you immediately get the joke. Naturally, this saw itself implemented in video games as well. Not only for ranking your score, but it also found a home at ranking the difficulty, the higher the 'grade' the more difficult the mission. This system is so well understood you can even use it to grade the quality of items or abilities on some games.

Then along game Final Fantasy VII, the first time I have ever seen the use of 'S Rank', a rank that outclassed even A or A+. S Rank was, at the time, something special. Yes, it was special in an entirely superficial way, but the inclusion of that new rank many had never seen before still had an impact all the same, to the point, it's more strange to see a game not include S Rank if they use a grading system at all. Despite not really meaning anything, as you could just make A the highest rank and not bothering with creating a new one, as well as starting your races at D rank instead of C, that S Rank had a certain feel to it that made it stick around.

But somewhere along the way, shit started to get a little silly. The idea that this was at all a replicable event is absurd. The standard was set, the world was happy, and then someone decided they were going to pull a 'Turn it up to 11' but tried to play it straight, instead of as a joke. It's hard to pin down when this happened, but I am sitting here playing God Eater 3, and the very first mission I cleared I got an SSS rating. Do you know what I realized pretty quickly? If you get anything less then SS, it basically means you did terrible, by whatever standard the game is using to judge you.

I know one of the factors is the time it takes to beat a stage, and I got as low as B's (I forget how many B's there were, forgive me for not caring enough to remember) because rather than do the mission, I felt like wandering the stage for a bit to see what I could find, and searched every nook and cranny.

A superficial overhaul works pretty much once, and maybe every so often to give something a nice new look. But we have hit a point of absurdity where a B, something that at least meant you were competent enough to do a job pretty well has become something you have to actively sabotage yourself to get.

Rather then try to find a new or interesting way to handle things, they are just slapping more and shinier stuff on top of a system to make it look like something is actually different and trying to make you feel like you've accomplished something by flashing all these additional letters at you, but you haven't. That SSS ranking I got on the first mission? That was not going above and beyond the call of duty, that wasn't even the highest rank. That would be SSS+, unless there is one higher than that I missed. SSS Ranking is basically now just A-. This shit needs to stop, just stick to the F-S Ranking. It works perfectly well and there comes a point it just looks like you think your consumers are idiots.