Often when playing certain games, mainly JRPG's, there's a design decision that angers me to no end. I'm talking about having to continue from the last saved game whenever there's a game over. I'm pretty sure anyone who has played a JRPG has has this happen to them. There's nothing worse than playing a game for a few hours, then dying and having to start from your last saved game. If a game has plenty of save points close to each other, then this isn't much of a problem, but one game I'm playing right now is just so bad for this. The game is called Persona 3, and yes, I have just had a game over, and yes, I am extremely annoyed.
In persona 3, one of the things you have to do to progress in the game is to climb a seemingly endless tower called "Tartarus". You go from floor to floor in this tower fighting enemies and opening chests until you reach a checkpoint. Once this checkpoint has been reached, the player can return to the bottom floor to heal, save or go about school life until they are ready to reach the next checkpoint. The player can also use a teleporter to return to a previous checkpoint or bottom floor, however, they lose any progress they've made from the previous checkpoint, and if the player has just climbed 15 floors, then the last thing they want to do is do it again.
I was having fun playing Persona 3. I had just reached a very powerful boss who quickly wiped out my team, and so I figured my team needed some training. I returned to level 49 of the tower and started going from floor to floor levelling my characters. After 2 or so hours, my team have levelled up a good bit, and have lost some of their SP (MP), So I decide that one more battle should before I return to the bottom floor, save, heal and then take on the boss. I smack the enemy about a bit, and the fight goes pretty well. It's 3 lions with a ball and chain around one of their legs. They're pretty easy to beat, and I defeat two of them, so their is only one left. I get him down to so little HP that their is nothing left on his bar of health. It had to be around 1 or 2 HP, when he unleashes this insane move called "Strike" something, which wipes out my entire F****** team!! 2 hours of training, only to be wiped out by some damn lion. Persona 3 has an absolutely horrible difficulty. Enemies aren't too difficult, though it's easy to take a good beating by them.
An even more annoying thing about this game is that you get a game over if the main character dies in battle. Now, their is four characters in battle, and team members die all the time, and can be revived, but for some really, really stupid reason, the main character dying gets a game over. Why the hell can't I just revive him?! It's far too easy for the main character to die. All it takes is some unlucky battle with a powerful enemy or a battle where everything goes for him.
I've had plenty of bad experiences with this in Persona 3. So much so, that I'm considering if I ever want to play it again. I've been playing for about 15 hours, and I've died about 10 times. Each time has been really bad, and just made me so mad, because I'd lost an hour or so, but this one has just annoyed me so much, and I know that if I continue playing, then I'll have to do those two hours of training again, and that as I prgress through this "70+" hour game, that it's going to happen a lot more. I'm just letting the games cinamatic before the menu repeat as I write this.
Like I said, a lot of JRPG's have this way of playing. It might have been alright back in the early days of gaming, but why on earth does exist in 2009? Do the developers not realise how afwul it is to put this in their game? Surely gamers all across the world have had an unlucky incident similair to mine happen. There are a good few games nowadays that have removed this. I just recently finished "The world ends with you" and it had a feature where I could continue if I died in battle without going to the last save point. Final Fantasy 12 aswell, I believe, and RE4.
I just think it's something that should have died a long time ago. It wasn't so bad back when I was younger, as I had plenty of time to game, and it didn't phase me as much as it does now that I'm older and have little time to game. The fact that I'm questioning whether I want to continue playing the game should be enough to tell developers that it's not a very good design choice. It's a shame I think this way, because Persona 3 is a damn fine game, that is so good in nearly every area, but If I stop playing then the developer has just lost a sale on Persona 4 which comes out here next month.