It's Weird When a Video Game's Difficulty Is Mostly Based on Time

Maybe all video games are a little bit like that, but some more than others... With speedrunning being so popular nowadays, you could argue a game can be beaten in an impressively short amount of time, but if you want to play it the way it's meant to be played, which would be something like spacing out gaming sessions and really taking the time to discover all of the game's features as you unlock them, then you might take much, much longer to reach the end credits. Even more so if you try to go for an ever-illusive one hundred percent completion run. Thing is, content can't be all that creative and varied, especially with some of the older games I love and aim to talk a bit about, and thus some of it is bound to be a little repetitive. The weird thing, to which I don't have a great answer either way, is when a game's difficulty, or even its whole run, is essentially based on dedicating a whole lot of time to it, that is to say, you have to grind until you get whatever it is you need in order to advance. It's often not so much that it requires skill per say, it just requires patience. So if you were to find a way to tweak that aspect of the game you would be making it, not necessarily easier, but faster, which paradoxically would make it easier...

Take Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, for example, and I mention that one from this series only because it's my favorite. You could play through all of the story missions as fast as possible and the game would soon be done, even with roughly forty or fifty percent of side missions left to complete. And if your character dies while playing through the story you'll have to do the mission all over again, and you might have to once again collect weapons and armor to help you... With a game like Pokémon Emerald you likewise can complete it incredibly fast but you'd be leaving a ton of stuff out. Also, weirdly enough, a lot of other stuff is quite inaccessible, and even some of the stuff that is accessible is a colossal waste of time. For example, as a kid I remember constantly going through the pokédex, and when all that was left was a Milotic, which I didn't know how to get, I began to trade from my Leaf Green version, starting from Bulbasaur. I made it to Rattata... More recently, I replayed Dark Cloud and felt it was bizarre that a game that once upon a time took me an entire summer to beat now only took me a couple of days, including a one hundred level dungeon, a very repetitive but weirdly addictive level to speedrun... What I'm trying to say is that a lot of times completing tasks in a video game isn't all that hard per say, it doesn't require deep skill, it's just either impractical or very time-consuming. And on that note, of course, there's Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, the game around which this essay is written.

5 down, only 999994 to go

It's a bit of an odd game because it's not particularly difficult, in fact, if you have the right cards it becomes boringly easy. You just learn the basics, the main fusions, then you figure out a bit of strategy and you'll be alright. The point of the game is mostly to slowly but surely build a powerful deck by being rewarded one random card after each duel, as well as starchips ranging from one to five with which you can purchase specific cards. So with a lot of grinding and a bit of luck you'll get a powerful deck that allows you to either steamroll or cheese through the competition. And then if you really want to you could complete the entire game by obtaining all seven hundred and twenty-two cards... sorta. Technically you can only obtain six hundred and eighty-nine. That is because the remaining thirty-three are impossible to obtain unless you purchase them for a million starchips each, which, considering you get a maximum of five per duel, it would take you I don't even know how long... In essence then, this game has two challenges – completing the campaign mode and completing the card library, both of which require a ton of patience. You'll either be grinding for hours on end until you have the strongest deck possible, painstakingly going through lame cards until surely but slowly you get a rare one, or you'll be grinding for months until you get all six hundred and eighty-nine cards. But the funniest thing of all, the thing that makes this game so surreal is that obtaining all seven hundred and twenty-two is still theoretically possible, but not for mere mortals.

As good as it gets

However, because this game has a bit of a cult following, fans eventually came up with various mods, perhaps the most famous of which being one that changed the amount of cards you receive per duel from one to five, ten or fifteen. And to be honest, after playing the fifteen card mod, I could never go back... It just stopped making sense for me to dedicate all this time to get one specific card when in a few quick duels I could obtain all of them and then some. Grinding went from dueling each character two hundred times to a quick twenty. And in a way it's great, it's like christmas morning after every duel, at least until you go for a one hundred percent run and you get the same fifteen cards every damn time. But still, it essentially makes the game fifteen times faster, which is great, it saves time you would otherwise have to spend grinding, just doing the same boring task over and over again. It almost makes no sense for the game to be that time-consuming, and so this mod is a blessing. But then again, it does make the experience a bit less fun in a weird way... It makes cards just a little bit less special, less rare, because while their drop rates remain the same, the fact that in ten duels or so we can move on to the next stage seems to make the game less enjoyable. We no longer stop to smell the Rose Spectre of Dunn...

Maybe that's impossible though, maybe it's just one of those long-lost things from childhood. Realizing how to play any game is a great feeling but it also kills the mystery. Rarities become objectives, secrets become tricks, and genuine fun becomes killing time... It's like games nowadays are only fun when we reminisce about the good times we had when playing them. I now remember my summers playing Forbidden Memories very fondly, ironically both the one from when I was a kid, but also the summer of a couple of years ago when I decided to go for a complete run just because. It's a strange feeling because at the time I wasn't all that happy, I didn't enjoy it with the thought that the experience would one day become a good memory. But it did, as memories so often do...

But I digress. My point here is that, because the difficulty of this game is precisely tied with grinding, implementing a mod that changes that, though it completely maintains everything else, makes the game much faster and therefore easier. The difficulty itself isn't changed, all that changes is the time required to obtain any given card, and that's what ironically changes the difficulty. It's a strange paradox that makes it seem like it's cheating to say you completed the game in this manner, while at the same time it doesn't alter anything about your strategies. If you complete it in the fully vanilla version it just means you have way, way, way more patience than the rest of us... But is that patience a great thing in and of itself? I'm definitely not the busiest busy bee around and even I value my time a bit more than that, even when I totally waste it. It's almost like at this point it's entirely irrational for me to play Forbidden Memories any other way. It's a bit sad but it's as if the vanilla version of the game has been thoroughly debunked and, much like those childhood memories, I can never get it back.

Would it then be possible to make a game without this little quirk? Probably, because fighting games are rather like that. Story modes and achievements are mostly secondary, the bulk of the game is instead all about mastering at least one character and becoming as good as you can. Therefore, your experience of the game is directly correlated with your time investment. But with single player games that doesn't always happen, with such games you play on your own as you move forward in the story. In fact, after completing the story, trying to become as strong as possible is a little futile, it's mostly a bit of an OCD sort of thing. That would be another weird paradox, this thing of desperately wanting to reach the end only to one day do it and realize there's no longer any point to the game itself, much like obtaining the strongest sword in the aforementioned Dark Cloud or becoming overpowered in Fallout: New Vegas. Like with most things in life it becomes a constant chase, it's just weird, and I use the word advisedly, that never again will I feel it is expedient for me to play Forbidden Memories, or any other similar game, the way it's truly meant to be played. And it's not so much a criticism of gaming, the intricacies of which I don't understand with any kind of depth. No, it's more to do with time itself, which, as you grow older becomes much more valuable, though you also often feel like wasting it with these old familiar things.

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Paulo Seabra

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