This really rang true for me... (Cool Story Bro alert)

I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing two different RPGs in my early teen years: Ultima 6 and Final Fantasy 3 (SNES, FF6 by Japanese reckoning).

I treated Ultima 6 as a world simulator more than a "game", and so I never actually finished it because I had discovered and thrown away key plot items, and done enough"evil" stuff to have low karma that prevented me from actually proceeding with the story. But I didn't care much, I enjoyed just exploring and steamrolling anything that crossed my path.

Final Fantasy 3(6) was more forgiving though. I put experience eggs and other stuff on each character and then ground xp in the dinosaur forest, and eventually got every one up to level 99 with 9999 health and high stats. Similar to Ultima 6, I mainly enjoyed exploring and leveling up, so I had never even tried the final boss battle (Kefka) until I had every single character up to level 99 (not just 4-person party, I mean *every* character).

I figured being the final boss meant that it would be a tough fight no matter what. So I decked out a group of 4 (I liked Edgar, Sabin, Mog, and Umaro as my favorites) all with high end stuff. Edgar had Genji Gloves (dual wield) and Offering (attack 4 times per weapon, so 8 with Genji Glove), with Atma Weapon and Ragnarok swords.

Fight my way to Kefka, and order Edgar to "attack" -- 8 attacks of 9999 damage each, Kefka dies without getting so much as a single turn. Welp, guess I overprepared for that boss!

/end CSB

<knowingly geeky response to comedy bit>
It's actually a really interesting game design question.

There are basically two approaches here: enemies are either fixed level or scale with the player.

Fixed level enemies mean it's possible to remove all challenge from a particular encounter by being waaaay OP for it. Scaling the enemy stats fix that issue, but you then miss out on the fun of going back through an area and roflstomping previously challenging foes.

Mark Brown of Writing on Games did a great video on this recently in relation to the design of Dark Souls


</knowingly geeky response to comedy bit>

Edgar had Genji Gloves (dual wield) and Offering (attack 4 times per weapon, so 8 with Genji Glove), with Atma Weapon and Ragnarok swords.

I didn't get to level 999, but I had the same gear as you. Those 8 attacks were insane.

I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

Invocations (love) cannot be called by MilkmanDan because MilkmanDan is not privileged - sorry.