LogFAQs > #977639855

YoukaiSlayer posted...

At the cost of destroying the gameplay fantasy. What is the goal of rpg gameplay? It is to become powerful.

And having a scripted loss as part of the story is part of that. Losing gives you a baseline to compare yourself against. When you later become powerful enough to beat the thing that beat you before, you feel a greater sense of accomplishment than if you just beat it outright.

Does it always work? No, particularly in cases where the player actively tries to become much more powerful than a typical player would be at that point. Sometimes, the loss just feels contrived and can do more harm than good to the power fantasy. It's particularly frustrating when you blow a bunch of consumables with limited availability on the fight trying to win it, only to find out you were never expected to. Generally, though, it doesn't interrupt my power fantasy so much as it reinforces it by making me laugh at how the only way the game could beat me is by cheating.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

Which is what they should do in a game.

"The protagonist never loses" is exceedingly limiting, narratively speaking. You can make it so that every loss is a cutscene with no battle attached to it without subjecting yourself to that narrative limitation, but then you fall into the issue that the player's going to see that loss coming if they don't get a chance to fight (unless you also get a bunch of cutscene victories, ). Properly balanced scripted losses keep the tension up by making you believe there's a chance of winning right up until your struggle ends in failure, at which point the plot joins you in that failure.

YoukaiSlayer posted...

But what IS the intended power level?

Depends on the game. Generally speaking, it's not going to be balanced around people who have done all the side content. If it were, that wouldn't be side content. It's also often not going to be balanced around doing no side content, since that's not an overly realistic scenario. Usually, that's something you figure out with playtesting, getting a sense for how much side content players tend to do and tuning the bosses and side content rewards around that (this is something you do with any content, really, not just scripted losses).

YoukaiSlayer posted...

If they don't want me to become powerful by that point in the game, then don't let me.

You've gotta take some responsibility for that yourself. You know full well that games aren't (and never will be) balanced around 100% completion and whatever power level that gives you, especially in games that are relatively open-ended and let you go off on wild adventures before advancing the story. You should expect that doing so is going to give you a power level that's inconsistent with the story. If you don't like being more powerful than the story expects you to be, don't deliberately seek out every available optional power-up opportunity before advancing the story.

Entity13 posted...

It's like a DM in a tabletop game who cannot accept that a level 5 party defeated the BBEG and has to pivot the situation accordingly.

To be fair, that's just inextricably inherent in video RPGs. Some offer more narrative flexibility than others, but there's always going to be a limit on how flexible the story can be when the only available possibilities will be those explicitly added to the game files. JRPGs in particular are generally quite static, narratively speaking, and by now that's just what's expected of them. It's CRPGs that fill the niche of offering more narrative flexibility.