Tags
Final Fantasy (series), Final Fantasy VIII, Legend of Zelda (series), Shin Megami Tensei (series), The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
As gaming has and continues to evolve, one of the most subtle yet nefarious changes are the way numbers are handled. There’s a “bigger is better” perception played around numerical capacities and caps, but is there truly a point to it all?
Consider the Legend of Zelda series. The first game capped Link’s rupees at 255. 255 is itself a maximum value under certain programming conditions, which (considering when the game was made) likely lent to the basis of why Link’s wallet capped out here.
Nonetheless, the entire game was carefully built around this value set. Enemies dropped rupees in value of 1 and 5, hidden caches of rupees yielded 10, 30 and in rare instances, 100 rupees. Expensive items often cost around and over a hundred rupees (cleverly, depending on which shop you went to, a device sadly unemployed in most other games), and the most expensive, semi-secret item costing 250 out of Link’s 255. Even the arrows Link fired consumed one rupee each, in lieu having an actual quiver.
The experience was, in short, expertly set.
After the rupeeless detour that was Zelda II, the series returned to form (and to currency) with Link to the Past. Aside from giving Link an actual quiver of arrows (fair enough), his wallet’s capacity was bumped to 999, the common 3-digit max of most number based systems.
Naturally, the need for having more rupees was correspondingly adjusted, and red rupees (valued at 20) were added to help even things out. Was this inflation necessitated?
In a manner of speaking. One of the more notable features was a unique fairy fountain which required donations (eventually allowing Link to increase his max capacity for arrows and bombs), providing rewards for every 100 rupees donated. By the old scale, only two upgrades could have been fully made at any one time; lowering the cost proportionally to match a numerical threshold may not have worked as well, considering the value of common rupees and the rate at which they can be acquired.
To summarize, it was a sensible upgrade for the time and worked with the mechanics of the game. What makes the Zelda series something of a curiosity however is that in the next mainline installment, The Ocarina of Time, the threshold was not raised, but lowered.
OoT was the first game in the series to introduce the wallet system- setting a max amount Link can carry by default and allowing the player to raise that max in the course of the story. Part of the reason this device functioned well is that it allowed the designers to create an artificial barrier, placing expensive items in shops but making them unattainable. Part of what made this interesting was that the maximum possible cap for rupees was lowered from 999 to 500, suggesting that Nintendo was attempting to keep a reign on the rupee market and perceived values (so to speak).
And then Wind Waker was released.
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker was the first game in the series to break the 999 barrier. Without any real economic or systematic provocation, Wind Waker’s currency values went into the thousands, requiring a good amount of this money to be spent near the end of the game to open chests containing Triforce pieces needed to enter the final area.
What made this unseemly was the fact that not only was this arbitrary change implemented, but that the game outright required the player to spend this high volume of money in order to progress. There was no basis for why this cost went up, things simply became more expensive.
The point of all this? Big numbers make us feel good.
It’s odd when one considers that the series has regressed, chronologically, from the first two games. Every title since has been set earlier than The Legend of Zelda, not later, making one wonder what economic upheaval Hyrule has undergone in the passing centuries. How high did the value of the rupee get that one only needs a couple hundred when one used to need a couple thousand?
Let’s not limit ourselves to the Zelda series, however.
Look at the Final Fantasy series, whose value caps have steadily increased since the series’ inception from 999 to 9999. Max damage would once peak just shy of 10,000, to that point that merely exceeding this value in a single strike (as an ultimate summon spell in FFVIII did) was considered remarkable.
As the poster child for the roleplaying genre, Final Fantasy is certainly guilty of setting an example. With current games allowing the player to eventually “exceed” the number cap, the perception is created that foes whom the player needs this edge in damage to beat are the exceptional enemies, that challenge is measured less in strategy and more in quantity.
What’s stunning is how artificial this new barrier is. The standing goal used to be becoming powerful enough to deal damage that moved from the hundreds to the thousands, and using those thousands of damage effectively. The new model expects the player to treat the one-thousands not as a milestone, but as a wall—a wall that can only be overcome through the patience of grinding and equipment hunting. Tremendous work is now expected of the player to overcome optional foes who were once merely overwhelming, fueled by the idea that if one cannot deal at least 10,000 damage (and take the proportional value back) then they haven’t a chance.
Numbers are inflated as a power trip, and have been for a long time. Even the high school, a perhaps dated mechanic, showed signs of it. Merely ask yourself how many games you’ve seen where a player can score only 1 point, or 10. The common value is often set at 100, perhaps using the 10 for minute actions. There are very few games where that last zero is not entirely superfluous.
Had high scores maintained greater relevancy in gaming today, it’s likely the escalation would have been much more severe. Even then, high scores still measure in the hundred thousands, even the millions; how much of this value is actually mandated by the design, and how much is the product of creating a feel-good value allowing an arcade-goer to achieve tens of thousands of points in ten minutes of play?
High values, however proportionally high they’re set, should provide an exception, not a standard. Look at the Shin Megami Tensei series which, despite numerous iterations and installments, has kept the average values around 999. The scale is so well grounded that anything that does exceed it (and anything that does that is never placed by accident) instantly conveys the message that it’s larger than life and, indeed, very, very scary.
Numbers are the crux upon which games are built. They need not be proportional between player and opponent (and indeed are often not), but they must be balanced delicately and deliberately.
Instead, what we often have is a meta game of whose numbers are bigger.
I think this is a case where you’re not seeing the forest for the trees (or is it the trees for the forest? Hrm). By that, I mean what these numbers represent to the developer and the player that plays the game.
255 rupees, you are right, was not a thoughtul limitation, but a programming limitation. Upping that to 999, then down to 500 and around again, are specified limitations. Honestly, those limits don’t really matter as much as what they’re forcing you to do with those rupees.
Ostensibly — now I’ve never played the original Zelda, so bear with me — with a low Rupee limit and not much that actually required buying, you probably had most of the rupees you needed just through adventuring. If you were getting near 255, well, go to town and buy things. Rinse and repeat.
OoT did something similar, but used the wallet system to limit your progress in a seemingly natural way. Other games would force rupee hunting on you to actually progress, rather than putting normal gameplay between you and your objective. It pads gameplay using existing assets.
But all in all it’s not really a numbers game. It isn’t really an escalation quite like that, as I really don’t think players are going to look at the next Zelda game and proclaim, “but you could collect more rupees in the previous game!”
Of course, arcade games use inflated scores to appeal to gamers. The score is really the only point of the game, so naturally this has to be appealing with high numbers, even if you could shave off the zeroes to no noticable difference.
A huge example of the inflation racket is World of Warcraft. Not only have damage and health values skyrocketed since the old cap of 60 (now 90 with the upcoming Pandaran expansion), but gamers focus very heavily on damage charts, not only showing total damage during those big boss encounters, but DPS as a measure of how fast they’re dealing that damage. Guild discussions at any level, casual or top level, have in-depth discussions over who’s “topping out the meters.”
Speaking from experience as a healer, I used addons that easily showed health values for the 10 / 25 person raid in a large grid. It literally looked like I was playing Excel Spreadsheet. But oh man were those meters and numbers important to some people.
I did enjoy how, back in the day, Final Fantasy had only the rarest, most tremendous attacks exceed the 9999 barrier, but today I would consider such a limitation to be immersion-breakingly artifiical. If I never get that far because you don’t naturally become that powerful, well, that sounds like a well-thought design.
Regarding the Zelda series, part of my objection is that the expanse into the 1000 rupees terrain seems frivolous. They didn’t start doing it until Wind Waker, and the high volume of cash was only itself used for an 11th hour fetch quest on the tail end of the game.
I’m nearing the end of Skyward Sword, which allowed me to buy extra pockets for my wallets, creating an additional 900 rupees of space. This would have been fine, until I finished a side quest which awarded me with a wallet which added an additional 4000 rupees of space on top of what I could carry. I’ve not seen anything in the game that would demand near this much space, and I suppose I only feel the need to comment on it as this is a series which has generally stayed fairly specific concerning matters of cost and carrying capacity. It’s perhaps odder too since the game places greater limits on the more practical resources you can carry, yet makes several leaps in terms of currency.
It’s probably a silly thing to think about, but I comment on it as I used to admire the more meticulous aspects of design that Zelda would involve. Knowing just how much I could carry and finding the places where I actually needed just nearly that much money was in some crazy way, gratifying.
Regarding MMOs, I can’t comment as much, but I can see where the escalation comes from. I recall when I friend of mine told me the level cap was only 60 WoW back in the day, I was surprised, especially coming off PSO whose second iteration capped off at 200. PSU, the successor, employed level cap restrictions as well, but released them as updates rather than coupling them with expansions.
Still, that meticulous level of planning is half of why I could never get into something like WoW… partly because I just don’t want to spend half my game time obsessing over stats and equipment as opposed to, well, playing the game. When evidence came out that the Old Republic was going to be more of a WoW clone, I got cold feet over it for the same reason (this close to release, I’m still on the fence about it).
Regarding FF, I mostly think back to Knights of the Round in FF7. The summon spell did some 13 attacks, potentially capping off at 9999 per attack. The total damage could peak over 120,000 points per hit, which was outright ridiculous compared to what you could do just one game earlier. Eden in FF8 did about 40,000 by comparison (which is actually less impressive), though I hated the ability more for the long animation coupled with the fact that all the damage came at the end, rather than occurring throughout the summon’s activation period.
However, both these abilities could be acquired through a reasonable amount of work within the game itself. The “Break Limit” function that began in FFX required an asinine amount of work that seemed to be intended to create a barrier where there didn’t need to be one. I can’t help but feel that better planning for higher tier bosses would supersede the need to bump stat values up another digit.
This is more or less why I mention Shin Megami Tensei as a whole- many of the optional bosses do require you to be high level, but once you’ve hit that mark, strategy does become key. I’m not fond of the grinding (of course) but I’ve made more of a serious effort to tackle these bosses in recent years compared to FFX or XIII’s because HOW I play is just as important as how high my numbers are.
This is the crux of my discussion- inflated values seem to be used as a substitute for better planning with these values. Yes, it’s funny when something kills your entire party in one stroke, dealing more damage than they could ever survive (something the Demi-Fiend does in Digital Devil Saga- his 9999 special attack can obliterate your 999 HP), but you tend to know when this happens, you’re meant to fight smarter, not merely stat higher. Yet when it happened to me in FFXIII, well… I merely knew it meant my stats weren’t high enough and there was nothing I could do.
Similarly in the later Zelda games, if I’m going to be allowed to carry so much more cash than I could before, I’d like to know that I still need to be smart about how I have to spend it. In the original Zelda, it was the difference between buying those bombs now or saving up for that better shield. That volume of care and demand in planning seems to be falling to the wayside in favor of bigger, better numbers.
The real question is whether you take more exception when “strategy” in a game is (and only is) just levelling up enough to take and deal enough damage, versus when the strategy requirement can be circumvented with enough of a time investment (grrrrinnnddd).
Zelda games that give you arbitrarily large wallets mean you don’t need to keep an eye on your rupees, which makes a number of other features (disposable item management) trivial. It isn’t like other RPGs where you end the game a millionaire. Is it okay if they toss the bigger wallet at you late in the game? Like lifting a restriction you’d had to deal with the entire game.
WoW uses a third model which requires time investment and strategy in big raid bosses. Most raids are well-coordinated enough to survive boss fights indefinitely, so “rage timers” are employed, meaning if you don’t beat a boss in ten minutes you just lose. From there it’s simply math: X number of DPS classes need to pull of (Damage/Time) DPS. Using the DPS METERS as above, they cut underperforming players from the raid until they gear up or learn to play their classes better. But then, they’ll lose even at the peak of their class if they can’t do Hagan’s safety dance.
To my understanding, asian MMOs tend to favor the “massive time investment” model, so it does not surprise me that the many iterations of Phantasy Star have massive level caps. But a few have abandonded that in favor of a “pay to win” model, which is a separate issue entirely.
Really, I don’t mind games that let you “level past” strategy requirements as sometimes it’s just asinine or relies too much on the Random Number God. But then, the truest form of noninflation are the RPGalikes, where you get inventories and stats but no levels, and are forced to rely only upon your skill.
In truth, I prefer the latter format of “strategy” as we’re discussing it, provided it’s implemented correctly. This is, admittedly, a tricky prospect, as grinding should best serve as a fallback solution when other approaches are falling short. If strategy is solely dependent on leveling, then it’s simply not strategy, but an absence thereof.
To be certain, for a game to rely on grinding as the sole means to overcome an obstacle isn’t desirable, and it’s one of the reasons I do have many problems with the endgame quests that become available in most RPGs. When Mystery Boss X appears but you shouldn’t even consider facing him until you’re twenty levels higher then, yes, it is bad when you have nothing to do to make gaining those next twenty levels entertaining.
I’ve seen too many games guilty of this approach, as though the designers were trying to reconcile a level 100 cap with a game whose conclusion likely occurs by the time you hit around 60. While the challenge is certainly welcome, demanding it on the condition that the player wastes 5-10 hours fighting trash mobs in order to take it is nothing short of padding. Yet many classic RPGs were able to avoid this approach, creating a share of optional foes which sometimes demanded specific strategies, but in doing so avoided simply hammering numbers down.
An example off the top of my head: the Mage Tower in Final Fantasy 6. The boss at the top (assuming you could get to him) wasn’t absurdly hard, but would unleash Ultima when he died, dishing out 9999 damage to the party. In order to beat him, the player would need to come prepared with Life 3 or the Phoenix summon, both of which would auto-revive a fallen character. A bit of preparation and examination of the game’s spells would allow the player to formulate a strategy to deal with the boss at the top of the tower.
Alternately: the underwater materia in Final Fantasy VII. Added solely for dealing with the Emerald Weapon, and used solely to remove the time limit from the fight, giving the player some breathing room in what was generally regarded as a freaking hard battle for its time.
Both things that were right there in the game and could be readily sought out in preparation for the optional bosses. Neither required extensive and tedious detours (and in fact, FF6′s Phoenix esper was acquired during a story quest while retrieving Locke) and both lent towards strategy in dealing with particular opponents.
I’ll digress there, as this wasn’t really meant to be an optional boss discussion, but they do somewhat became the focal point for number inflation by the end.
Regarding Zelda, removing limits the player has had to deal with in the game is often frivolous when one considers the timing and impact of the removal in question.
I’ll propose Skyward Sword, since I’m playing it now (and very nearly finished). In the course of the game, the most expensive item I’ve seen was about 1600 rupees, for a piece of heart being sold in a particular shop. A bit pricey, but around the time my wallet could hold around 1900, so it seemed about reasonable for a saving/spending threshold. Said shop had already provided so many other items that my money was going into it regularly, so there wasn’t any concern about hording money coming up.
The side quest in the game provided me with my various wallet upgrades. However, many of the events used to advance the overall side quest are story locked, and cannot be accomplished until later in the game. In fact, the overall sequence cannot be completed until the very end of the game, at which point getting a wallet boost serves no purpose because in all likelihood, the player has already bought everything they’ve needed anyways– and if they haven’t, they most likely intentionally did not do so.
Wallet upgrading has become a frivolous reward system. I can carry nearly 6000 rupees, but there’s nothing that costs even a third of that in the game. The final wallet will let me carry nearly 10000 rupees, but if all I’ve got left is the final boss, there’s no incentive to go for it.
Were the game to provide some special, rare expensive item- not necessary but, perhaps, exceedingly useful, then this wallet system might have a use to it. There’s more than enough money caches and rewarding mini games that it would give me something to save up for.
This was, in a manner of speaking, what Zelda 1 did. The Blue Ring- only available in one shop and costing virtually everything you had- was expensive. Getting a few hundred rupees in the first game was much harder than in later entries, and the item was hardly required but extremely helpful. It was to your benefit to go out of your way for it and it showed some basic thought and planning that the currency system in the later games did not.
Inflating numbers like this is, in general, a poor way to pad gameplay, and is often a time waster or an empty reward. It’s true that games in general have moved past the point of being hard because of a lack of refinement (which is a good thing) but showing the player with large numbers and empty riches really only serves to diminish their value.