Chrono Trigger & Techs

January 20, 2022 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

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I’ve been on a strange Akira Toriyama kick lately. I’ve been watching a lot of Dragon Ball Super, which is pretty good, and replaying Chrono Trigger, which is incredible. Toriyama created all the designs for the characters and monsters in the game, and I found myself wanting to play it again while I watched DBS. I bought the DS version of the game around 2014-15, soon after I bought my 3DS and was just getting back into video games. I thought the game was amazing, but I haven’t played it since that first playthrough over a decade ago. So I picked up Chrono Trigger once again to see why it’s still so lauded as one of the best games ever made. And, honestly, there are a lot of reasons–the charming characters and surprising well written and realized story for a SNES game, the incredible soundtrack and chunky, satisfying sound effects, and the unique, engaging battle system that forces players to think on their feet. To me, it was this battle system that drew my attention most in my recent playthrough, especially the tech mechanic. The closer I looked at these techs in the game, the more I realized how much of the rest of the game was designed around them.

The techs in Chrono Trigger are the character’s special abilities. These range from strong attacks, buffs and party heals, and magic attacks that can exploit elemental weaknesses. These add a huge amount of variety to a playthrough of Chrono Trigger. Each of the seven characters can learn eight individual techs (for a total of 56), each character combination have three double techs they can perform (for a total of 45), and there a total of fifteen triple techs, ten with Chrono and five that can be performed without Chrono but instead requiring special gems that have to be equipped. This means there are a total of 116 techs in all that can be unlocked and used in the game. It’s always exciting and fun to unlock new techs and try them out. However, more interesting than the vast variety the techs bring to the games, is how these mechanics affect the design of the gameplay, both in and out of battle.

Each tech has a certain attack pattern. Whether it’s a magic spell that can hit one or all enemies, a spinning sword swing that can hit a group of bad guys in a certain proximity to each other, or Frog flying through the air and dropping bombs along a line of monsters, learning what shapes attacks take and utilizing them effectively is the key to winning in battle. Chrono Trigger places emphasis on patience during fights. Since the game uses an active battle system, enemies will wander around when not using an attack. Knowing when best to use techs that hit in a certain pattern of enemies is important to gain the upper hand. This adds a risk/reward element to fights when you consider whether it is better to attack immediately or wait for the enemies to get into a better position where you might be able to hit multiple at once.

Another addition to the risk/reward dynamic of battles in Chrono Trigger is the fact that techs can be combined. When two or three party members fight alongside each other, they can perform a combo tech, where they each perform a certain attack or spell together. This encourages experimentation with your party composition since different characters combine their techs in different ways. Lucca can set Chrono’s sword on fire for a devastating attack, Marle can create an iceberg for Ayla to throw at an enemy for massive damage, or Frog and Robo can use their healing techs together to provide a huge amount of health back to the whole party. Since each character has a different speed stat that dictates how fast their battle meter fills up, you get a similar situation with waiting for enemies to get into a good position. Is it better to wait for two party members to be ready to use a combo tech, or is it better to do damage or heal now? These considerations help the battles in Chrono Trigger feel very strategic, but still fast paced since the enemies won’t stop attacking you while you think of your next move.

At the end of a battle, the party will receive some experience to gain levels and some Tech Points (TP) to gain new techs. While party members that do not take place in the battle will still gain exp, they will not gain any of the TPs. This is the game’s way of encouraging the player to switch up their party members to gain all the different techs and their combinations. The game is designed around having the player switch up their party in a few interesting ways. First is how the story is told. Each of the party members have unique personalities and ways of speaking, so they will comment on events in the story in different ways. This can add a little variety to a game and keeps it from going stale during repeat playthroughs.

Next is that the game never requires the player to grind, allowing players to switch around their team without having to stop and get the new member up to level. During my last playthrough, I switched party members every time they learned a new tech for someone who was closest to learning their next one. Due to this constant switching, I unlocked every tech and combination in the game with ease. I would face off with bosses using whatever team I was running at the time, and while some were definitely tougher than others, none felt insurmountable. That’s one of the most admirable things I find about Chrono Trigger, bosses require the player to think up better strategies than grind up some more levels when against a tough fight.

Switching around characters at a consistent pace will also ensure you almost always have a new tech or combo to try out. And you will want to try them out too because they all look and sound so cool. Trying out all the combos will also help you understand what all the characters true potentials are and lead to a deeper appreciation for them. During my first playthrough of Chrono Trigger, I hardly ever used Ayla because I didn’t like that she couldn’t learn magic. During this recent playthrough, however, she was in my party more than anyone since her combo techs can deal some of the highest damage in the game. Likewise, I used Robo more during this playthrough once I learned his Heal Beam tech can be combined with most of the other characters’ healing spells for full party effect. In the end, I excluded Chrono from my party all together and fought Lavos with Frog, Marle, and Ayla as my party.

Chrono Trigger has the best problem an RPG can ever have and that is not knowing who should be in your party because you want to use all the characters. It’s another strength of the game that I didn’t appreciate until I played through ago with the intention of unlocking all the techs. It’s an amazing game that tells a compelling story and has an engaging battle system with the use of the Tech mechanic. I could honestly write many more posts about different aspects of the game and how well done they are, but I wanted to focus on techs because they are so foundation to the game’s design, both in and out of combat. I implore you to pick up Chrono Trigger if you haven’t. And if you have already, I implore you to pick it up again.

Darkest Dungeon & Stress

April 13, 2020 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

I’m no stranger to mechanically deep games. Games like Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, or The Binding of Isaac have mechanics that run deeper than they seem at first and all take time to master. But if those games are as deep as oceans, then Darkest Dungeon is the Mariana Trench. There is so much to manage in Darkest Dungeon from party positions to their attacks and trinkets, provisions for quests and the effects of curios, character quirks and equipment. It often feels overwhelming and stressful and stress, funnily enough, is another thing you have to manage in the game.

The stress mechanic in Darkest Dungeon ties into the games Lovecraftian themes and portrays the deteriorating mental state of warriors as they encounter unknown horrors. All characters have a stress gauge that goes from 0 to 200 and stress is inflicted by a multiple of sources: enemy attacks, curios, low torch light, and even walking backwards through a dungeon. When a character’s stress reaches 100, their resolve is tested. This either gives them a flaw, like paranoid or hopeless, which will make them act on their own during battle to the detriment of the party, or make them virtuous, which gives them a positive characteristic, like heroic, that they can use to destress or buff their party members. If stress continues to build for a character whose resolve has been tested and it reaches 200, they have a heart attack. A heart attack instantly reduces a character HP to 0 and puts them on Death’s Door or kills them outright if they already have no HP. Stress builds and builds on a character until they finally snap, like they were a rubber band being pulled too far.

A character’s stress meter basically works as a second health bar, but while wounds and HP are healed instantly after a mission is complete, the psychological scars and stress carry over. HP is the immediate concern in a battle because that will most affect if the character makes it out of a dungeon alive, but stress is, to quote the game, a slow and insidious killer. There are things that can be done during a mission to reduce stress on your team. Some characters have skills that will heal a small amount of stress, there are camping abilities for longer missions that relieve stress, and it’s always a smart idea to focus on enemies that deal in stress damage at the beginning of an encounter.

The easiest way to relieve stress is in the hamlet, the main hub of the game. There, characters can take part in activities like drinking, praying, or gambling to forget their problems for a while and reduce their stress. It is in the town that stress becomes a resource management mechanic. All the activities that help characters require money and will take that character out of the action for a while, unable to go on missions. This works as a drain on your resources. You could buy equipment upgrades for your team or you could spend that gold relieving your main healer’s stress to get them out in the dungeons again.

Having characters be excluded from missions to relieve stress guides the player to constantly rotate their parties for dungeons. Not only does rotating them help keep stress at a minimum, it will lead to a barracks of soldiers of consistent levels. It can be a real issue in the later game if you have a gap in levels between your main team of characters and your backups. The dungeons don’t get easier as the game progresses. The dungeon missions only get harder with each passing in-game week and sometimes sending out a lower level team is dangerous, but it’s your only option. If you have been diligent about rotating characters, the gulf in levels will be more narrow, meaning a losing a handful of high value characters will be slightly less catastrophic.

The truly interesting aspect of the stress mechanic in Darkest Dungeon isn’t how it affects the characters on the screen, but the player. You will become attached to certain characters through emergent gameplay moments, like a character struggling through their stress to become virtuous and single-handedly save the rest of the party. Small moments like that make your party feel like they are really fighting for their lives and makes you appreciate the ones who rise to the occasion. But what happens to characters who never do that? Who seem to miss every important attack or whose building stress always becomes a flaw? Well, you might start thinking less of them. And when that happens, Darkest Dungeon adds just the slightest friction of morality in to keep things interesting.

Moral choices are nothing new to video games, but while most AAA games rely on a dichotomy of good and bad choices, indie games fare better. Darkest Dungeon presents the player with a nuanced, grey-area take on morality and, much like Papers, Please, it is solely based on the player’s beliefs and emotions. You can dismiss any character at any time for no penalty. This means you are basically a boss in a right-to-work state, but your employees’ only way of leaving is through death. So what you do with these people is completely your choice. You can take care of everybody, make sure that they are mentally stable at the cost of constant stress upkeep, or you can discard them, just toss them aside when they are at their breaking point mentally and of no use to you. There’s no drawback to this in-game; it solely relies on you to make the choice. When I first played the game years ago, I had no problem throwing away characters that were too much of a hassle or too expensive to keep, but in my most recent playthrough I found that much harder to do. I started dismissing less and less of my team until I was keeping everyone until they died. And even that isn’t necessarily a “good” thing to do. But I couldn’t let them go just because of high stress and bad traits. Those are caused either by my own poor decisions in fight or in the dungeons, or due to the nature of a chaotic, uncaring universe (e.i. the random number generator) which only heightens the Lovecraftian themes.

Darkest Dungeon is a game of staggering depth and the stress mechanic, how it affects the gameplay and the player, is just one aspect of it. There is so much to the game that I could easily make many more posts about it and probably will revisit it again in the future. What I just thought of at first as a neat idea to have two different types of health made me reevaluate the entire game. Stress in Darkest Dungeon is like a glass bottom boat tour: you can see what’s on the surface easily, but so much more lays in the blackness of the unknowable ocean’s depths.

Fallout – Critical Miss #14

March 31, 2020 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

Set the World on Fire

The Fallout series is a household name in the video game industry and one I have always been interested in, partly due to my fear of nuclear weaponry. However, the only game in the series I ever played to completion was Fallout 4. It was the first game I bought for my PS4 so, while I don’t think highly of it today, it has a special place in my heart. I put about 5-10 hours into New Vegas, but that ran so poorly on my low-end laptop that it triggered my vertigo and made me extremely nauseous. While Fallout is one of the most popular series in gaming, there is a divide in its fanbase of those who like the classic games in the CRPG genre or the more modern FPS games. I’ve never played any CRPGs for an extended amount of time so I decided to play through the first Fallout, released in 1997. My thinking was I could experience the game that started the Fallout series and try out the CRPG genre at the same time. The problem is that I’m not sure CRPGs are for me.

The first hurdle I had to jump over were the controls. Clicking the mouse to where you want your character to go was no issue, but right clicking to toggle actions between movement and interacting tripped me up. Since you have to wait for your character to run to where you guided them, the movement feels extremely slow, and when you add additional directions to open any doors before entering a room, it never stops feeling clunky. A slower pace for a game isn’t an inherently bad thing, but having to constantly change between interact and movement did irritate me at times. Inventory management is also extremely tedious. With no way to quickly scroll through your items, you are forced to click down the page and it is way too slow with how often you will need to look through your gear.

Combat doesn’t fare much better, sadly. This is partly due to the finickiness of the controls and partly due lack of tactical input offered to the player. While the combat is a tactical turn-based system, it is based on limited Action Points that don’t leave much option besides attacking or moving. You also cannot directly control any party members, who act automatically. The game also lacks any sort of interesting character abilities like XCOM or Divinity Original Sin offer, so most fights wind up being characters standing in a group shooting or punching each other. There is a great variety of enemies and weapons to use in combat, but I never wanted to deal with fighting any more than I had to so I never got to experience the variety on a meaningful level. My dislike for combat may be because I built my character as a charisma/intelligence build so they weren’t made for tough fights, but I’ve never had a problem handling combat with similar builds in other RPGs, so I can’t help feeling unengaged by Fallout’s combat system.

There are two major aspects of the game I truly loved, though, and one of them was the character creator. There are seven stats you can freely change at the start of the game: strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. These stats will then determine where points are allocated to your skills (ex. strength will affect melee and unarmed skills, agility affects sneak) and with each level up you can add more points to desired skills. This allows you to focus your character and build them the way you choose. With my playthrough, I focused in high intelligence and charisma so I could talk my way through as many quests as possible, but it’s easy to build other character builds like a big, tough brawler or a sneaky thief. Every other level gained also lets you choose a perk that grants you a passive skill or buff. This style of leveling up is one of my favorites in all of video games. Fallout allows you such fine-tune control of your character that you feel you can truly build any type of character you want.

But the thing I loved most in Fallout is the world. It is a post-apocalypse game where most of humanity was wiped in a total nuclear war and the remaining people are trying to survive, be it through scraping together a living in communities or through violence. You explore the wasteland of a world that never culturally advanced past the American 1950’s and there is something fascinating about seeing all the retrofuturist ruins. Fallout mixes the old, the new, and the dead in a fantastic way and the world building through exploration and character dialogue is expertly done. This was my favorite part of the game: finding a new city and taking the time to explore and talk to everyone. It is very immersive and I found myself getting sucked into the world and hours passed by in real life without notice. It’s such a shame then that the controls and combat in the game prevented me from truly loving the game itself.

These types of games are always hard to review: perfectly good games that I didn’t enjoy very much. I’m objective enough to see through my own experience and look at the game as an unbiased whole, and through that lens Fallout is a great game. It’s no wonder why people in 1997 loved it so much and I have no doubt that it will continue to attract fans in the future. I’m just not one of them. Admittedly, this could be due to my lack of experience with the CRPG genre and that’s what makes Fallout really hard to give a definitive opinion on. Things I didn’t care for in the game might be what fans of the genre love and seek out in games. It’s awesome that video games offer such a wide range of experiences that anyone can find what they like.

I haven’t given up on this style of CRPG. I still really want to check out the Baldur’s Gate series. Maybe with Fallout under my belt, my expectations will be a little more in line with what the game might offer. I haven’t given up on the Fallout series either. I’m still looking into buying a Xbox 360 or PS3 so I can check out Fallout 3 and New Vegas where, hopefully, it won’t make me so sick. Sadly though, my desire to play Fallout 2 has been dampened, even though I hear nothing but amazing things about the game. Who knows though? Maybe someday I will take the time to dive back in the wastelands of the original Fallout series.