Random encounters, less is more

I recently tried Breath of Death 7, a parody game filled with references to retro JRPGs. It had great music and visual design. Unfortunately, I overall didn’t enjoy it. It did get me thinking about random encounters, and the difference between difficulty and the frequency of battles.

Random encounters are one of those features that, despite being nostalgic, are an archaic mechanic. Even in the SNES era with Chrono Trigger, games were drifting away from surprise battles that popped out of nowhere. Random encounters did linger for a couple console generations, but now they are mostly found in games trying to tap into nostalgia.

I noticed that my frustration with random encounters is not consistent. Some games I find to be slog, while other I thoroughly enjoy. This made me stew on what the difference is, and why is it in certain games I become engaged with the random battles, but in others I become frustrated. I don’t have an ironclad answer, but I think I’ve gotten close to parsing it out.

High encounter rates

I’ve started to really dislike high encounter rates. They create a frustrating sense of interruption. Recently, I started to wonder why. A RPGs combat is one of its main features. So why would more fights tip over into annoyance? I think it’s dependent on the difficulty of each fight and how much time you spend popping in and out of battle.

If the fights are difficult, and a battle is triggered once every few steps, then the dungeon turns into a slog. Having to intently focus on each fight while making minimal progress doesn’t feel satisfying. Often, our goal in a dungeon is to reach the end, constant interruptions every few steps impedes our progress. It doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle, but instead like wading through mud.

Making the encounters easy doesn’t change much either. In those instances, the player is likely to button mash their way through fights. It’s not engaging to have auto-battle turned on for an entire dungeon, with the only interesting encounter being the boss.

The longer, more maze-like, and puzzle dense a dungeon is, the more a high encounter rate becomes infuriating. If we’re trying to find our way through a maze, or backtrack to solve a puzzle, constant surprise battles at a high encounter rate become a hindrance. If surviving battles is a tertiary goal, then their inclusion takes away from our primary and secondary goals—in this case solving the puzzles and getting to the end of a dungeon. An example of this is Final Fantasy II, which had long maze-like dungeons, but with an encounter rate so high it made navigating each map a pain. There’s a reason common sentiment is to avoid the original release and instead play the pixel remaster, which allows you to turn off encounters.

Later entries in the series caught on to this. In Final Fantasy X, there are no random battles in any of the trials, which were areas dedicated to solving a series of puzzles. If there had been, I guarantee it would’ve become a recurring complaint from players.

Low encounter rates

I prefer low encounter rates. They make each battle more impactful, and allow you to engage in the mechanics of the fight without the pace feeling bogged down. Final Fantasy IX is a good example of this. In FF9, you’re likely to only have one or two battles per screen. Often, there are no encounters over multiple screens as you navigate the environment. This gives you freedom to explore, with the fights being more engaging because of their infrequency.

And there are whole segments of FF9 where the random battles are turned off, instead opting for planned encounters. These integrate with the narrative far better, usually having enemies deliver dialogue or take an action before initiating the battle. This gives extra context, adds to the sense of verisimilitude between gameplay and story world, and creates build-up that excites us to partake in a story moment via the game’s battle system. It’s a far better and more immersive way to engage players in combat.

Why I didn't like Breath of Death

Breath of Death has great visuals and music. I also like the combo system, where certain abilities increase your combo modifier, the higher the modifier the more damage finisher attacks do. It’s a simple and clever way to get the player to use all their abilities instead of defaulting to the biggest damage ones.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the game, and ended up not finishing it. The most frustrating part for me was the dungeon designs and high encounter rate. The dungeons are long and maze-like, with winding corridors broken up with little bits of impassable debris that you have to zig-zag around. While trying to navigate these long dungeons, the player is bombarded with constant battles at a far too high frequency. This turns dungeons into a frustrating experience of constant interruptions while trying to find where the exit is.

It's made worse by the fluctuating difficulty of each fight. Some fights you can button mash through, others you have to stop and pay attention or you’ll die. And dying boots you back to your last save. Since there’s no autosaves, not remembering to save regularly could mean you lose a large chunk of progress.

The high encounter rate mixed with long, maze-like dungeons created an unenjoyable experience for me. It felt like a slog grinding through so many fights while searching for the dungeon’s exit, doubly so with the fluctuating difficulty of battles.

There’s a “Fight!” option in the menu that lets you initiate a battle whenever you want. Each dungeon has a set number of encounters, about a few dozen. You can park next to a HP/MP replenishing save point and grind through all the dungeon’s battles. This ends all battles and lets you roam the dungeon freely. I wasn’t keen to sit in one spot and grind out fights, and the option to do so seems like a band-aid solution to larger problem. I’d much rather have the encounter rate lowered, so each fight could still be difficult but not feel like a constant hindrance while trying to navigate the labyrinthine dungeons.

Just recently, the creators released a remade version, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning: Reanimated. This new remake has updated visuals, music, and quality of life changes. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like an impressive revamp of the original. Despite my frustration with Breath of Death, I’m very interested in trying this reanimated version.

Conclusion

I have a lot of nostalgia for the format of retro JRPGs, including random encounters. But, I can’t deny that it’s an archaic design choice that modern games have drifted away from entirely. Opting instead for planned encounters or having enemies visible on the map, which I think is better overall.

When random encounters are present, I think the best mix is to have a low encounter rate with higher difficulty. This means that each fight can feel more impactful and force players to use all their abilities. Less, more engaging fights means dungeons shouldn’t feel like a slog, hitting the right mix of forward progress and challenge.

Final Fantasy II, the bad one

Final Fantasy II is the one entry in the series that is rarely talked about. It always seemed that when listing oldschool FFs, you could find people who had good things to say about one, three, and everything after. But FF2 was oft skipped. I didn’t give it much thought until recently, when I started to become curious. It’s the only game that I knew nothing about. I had no concept of FF2’s characters, villain, abilities, anything.

Most online sentiment for FF2 is not very positive. Particularly for the original release, which was apparently brutal. But, the pixel remaster fixes all that and makes the game far more playable. So, I finally gave FF2 a try.

Too many random encounters

This is agony. The encounter rate is atrocious. It’s way too high, every few steps triggers a fight, making exploring dungeons a chore. The fights themselves are also really easy and straightforward, to the point that I played nearly the whole game on auto-battle. I wasn’t engaged with the combat, just auto-attacking through everything. With such a high encounter rate, I can’t imagine what it would be like if each fight was difficult. I probably would have tapped out and not finished the game.

The high encounter rate makes the pace of the dungeons grueling. Each dungeon is built like a maze, with multiple floors of winding corridors and dead ends. The exit to the next floor isn’t clearly marked, and is usually hidden behind a door. The game loves to fill dungeons with empty rooms, that means you’ll be going in and out of doors with little to no reward, butting up against dead end hallways, and doing it all while the high encounter rate bogs down the whole experience. This makes dungeons a frustrating grind, which is unfortunate considering there isn’t much else to the game other than its dungeons.

Thankfully, the pixel remaster gives you tools to mitigate this. You can turn encounters on and off with the press of a button. And, there is a boost option in the configuration menu that allows you to apply experience multipliers, so you can level up faster by doing less fights. I still find it frustrating that I have to go noodle in the options menus, and turn off combat—a core feature of the game—to enjoy it. I’d much prefer having the encounter rate reduced overall, with more exp from each fight, so we could just play the game from beginning to end without any hinderances. They could’ve added a classic mode for those who wanted to play through a grinder like the original release.

Flat characters

I didn’t find the main cast interesting at all. There’s not much to them, nothing interesting is revealed about their past, and their relationships with the other characters are sterile at best. This is true for almost all the NPCs in the game, from the princess who gives you your early quests, to the final villain. There’s no substance to any of them.

The rotation of guest characters doesn’t fare much better. They all fall into the same category, uninteresting and flat. The only intriguing thing about guest characters are their interesting visual designs, but that only goes so far. Even then, they lack a sense of uniqueness in combat, since each character has the same moveset and spells. Unless you keep the guests with their original weapons, like the dragoon with a spear, there isn’t much that differentiates them. They don’t even get special abilities like jump, steal, chakra, or any of the other Final Fantasy staples. All this makes the guests feel like just another unit, easily replaced with a blank soldier rather than a named character.

Proto-Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy II has many of the hallmarks that would become the norm for the series, like guest characters and character deaths. But, being an early entry in the series, none of it is fleshed out yet. The characters and villains are loosely tied together, but not in a way with any meaningful depth. The guest characters feel shallow, and the deaths are often lacklustre (except one that I thought was well done). All in all, FF2 very much feels like a proto-Final Fantasy. An early version filled with all the narrative beats that would become standout moments in the following games. The characters and story arc even feel like an early version of Final Fantasy IV, like FF2 was the rough draft to FF4’s final edit.

Conclusion

I thinks it’s fascinating from a historical perspective, but on its own I can’t say it’s a good game. I would not recommend playing it, especially if you don’t already have an interest in the history of the series or that of JRPGs. If you do play it, I’d suggest making shameless use of the experience multipliers in the boost menu, and turning encounters off whenever they start to annoy you.

The boost multipliers and toggle for encounters help a lot, but I still find it frustrating that I have to turn off a core aspect of the game. The most fun I had was when encounters were off and I was only fighting monsters from chests and bosses. Which made me wish they’d modified the encounter rate and experience by default, and then gave players some kind of classic option for those that want the grind.

Despite all that, Final Fantasy II grew on me in the end. This is clearly an important part of Final Fantasy’s foundation, one that future FFs would build off of. Even if I can’t wholeheartedly recommend FF2, I’m still glad to have experienced it.