How do you feel about games where note taking is considered required by the developers?

How do you feel about games where note taking is considered required by the developers?

Vagrant Story is a good example. It is the lesser known of the Ivalice games made by Squaresoft but has a cult following from its tone, presentation and gameplay.
Being somewhere between Parasite Eve and Demon's Souls you play a 'Riskbreaker' who devs into the ruins of a sunken city to chase the instigators of a political coup. Inside this ancient ruin there are wild animals, bandits, undead, demons and all variety of monsters in between.
What made it stand out was the combat. Like Parasite Eve you move in real time but pause to select an enemy in your sphere of influence. Only in VS you can select body parts with their own hit and accuracy ratings as well as the games key component: elemental and damage type weaknesses.

You may fight the first wolves and bats with your base none elemental slashing blade weapon just fine. But not too far in you will run into things like Ghosts that can only be harmed by blunt weapons imbued with certain elements. How do you figure this out? by finding new weapons and trial and error. Does the game tell you the weaknesses? nope. Does it list them after you discover them? nope. So you need to take down notes yourself to make progress or reach points where you are out of items and cannot progress at all.


Do you like or dislike this idea? Should the game do everything for you? or is this just another layer to the gameplay?

What? You mean you are forced to take notes to not get lost?
Pic unrelated then?
I beat Vagrant Story as a kid and never had to make any notes.

I aint reading that wall though.

Common Core pls go and stay go.

Or you can just chain kill them like any other enemy.
Vagrant Story doesn't require you to take notes. It has a fully functioning bestiary ingame that doubles as a model viewer.

I'm probably two times older than you.
If you can't express your idea in a couple of sentences, you should kill yourself.

Vagrant Story was shit, every turn based game is garbage. Deal with it nerds, you are just fucking casual faggots that cant deal with actually hard games in real time.

While I do agree with the notion, your posting style makes it obvious that you're baiting and probably don't even believe it yourself.

Do you have autism?

Aggressiveness is a defensive mechanism.

What did he mean by this?

wdytwa

OP is the one making shit up, like other posters already also said.
And you are the faggot with bait style posting.

Its safe to say, its a case of autism going on.You can cry and moan some more now.

What did he mean by this?

Professional football is so easy you just have to throw a ball to another person and you can make millions of dollars xD.

try GETTING GUD

What did he mean by this?

Man, I was never any good at the combos. I think Super Mario RPG ruined me because I am shit at both Vagrant Story and Legend of the Dragoon (I think, or some other PS1 JRPG I tried ages ago).

Also, for the sake of the thread: Vagrant Story doesn't originally take place in Ivalice. It was retconned into it later on in FF12. Just some fun trivia.

I only did that with smt 1,2 and the first 2 persona games

This.
Absolutely never needed to use anything aside from the weapon repair chain and phantom chain from the start of the game.
Only ever had an issue with the final boss, but eventually brute forced him by abusing the broken defense skills that instead of cutting damage like any other game, healed half of the damage value after the actual attack.

That said, I should probably replay it one of these days and take a proper look at the other skills.

Its a fun game with a hard to learn but easy to master crafting system. You can absolutely break the game on its back halfway through carrying a few different weapons which one shot different types of enemies, not that you need to fight most enemies to begin with as you only level up after killing a boss.
There are also neat little details like befriending certain enemies if you heal them enough times.

Nigga you can only fit so much meat into 2 sentences, that's a retarded criteria

Just filter him and ignore him.

Now I try playing through Etrian Odyssey for example and find the ingame mapper too cumbersome, and the maps are far too irregular with too much space inbetween corridors for me to fit them neatly in paper without it looking like garbage

I think making the player think, pay attention and map things out is excellent. Usually game development aims to please the lowest common denominator of the console peasant crowd, though.

I'm inherently allergic to Squaresoft/Enix logic when it comes to games so I always have to wrestle with myself before I can play through their games. VS looks really good graphics-wise, but I feel like I'm doing things wrong all the time.

The gameplay sucks, for lack of a better word. Ok, you kill enemies with a certain weapon and it gains affinity towards those creatures, and you need to time it perfectly for your hits to succeed.
First, the logic is dumb as fuck, there are always 2 affinities for a weapon that you can grind, killing anything else outside these creatures lowers your affinities. My weapons suck, so I can't really experiment all that much when fights already last forever due to the nature of the gameplay. Do the attack, run and wait, do it again. Not to mention, the hardware starts lagging when you try to do spells, and when your hits need to be EXTREMELY precise, it really fucking blows. Add to that fact that you have to figure this affinity shit out on your own, and you're in for a hell of a grind-fest.

Second, is there ANY god damned reason why you can target body parts? Ok, you can inflict status ailments, but is that really it? I killed the living armor and a giant golem bosses by whacking only one part of them and they died to that.

So far, the game is very frustrating. The gameplay isn't very satisfying, the leveling is tedious, the riskbreaker system is utterly underwhelming. The game demands extremely precise timing of attacks if you want to chain your attacks further. After I killed those two bosses by whacking them in the feet, I was left in a state of "What, that's it?" What am I doing wrong? Help me enjoy this game.

And to answer your question OP, yes, it's a good mechanic so long as it isn't being handled by FUCKING Square.

The prevalence of guides has basically killed note taking. Everything you wrote can be searched on a wiki which folks would rather use by default. I dunno, man. Times have changed. I'd rather have all my info within the game and be able to have access to that info through gameplay, like the monster books in Witcher 1 where it tells you the proper strategy and such. If you obfuscate your info too much, you incentivize people to search the internet which can expose them to ALL the info.

removed all the extraneous bullshit from the OP. Summarized to two sentences plus the redundant question from the subject line. youngfags are getting dumber by the second.

It's kinda annoying.

I started my first playthrough of Vagrant Story a couple of years ago. I'm still waiting for the first workshop to finish loading.

Can I backtrack to areas that had the information or replay conversations to check for stuff I missed? Then it's great. I love that stuff. I've still got a whole notebook filled with stuff I wrote down from Zork Nemesis and hundreds of graph paper maps from NES games.

Do NPCs repeat what they said once or do I get locked into areas I can't or can't easily go back to? Then fuck that. That's garbage.

nigga do you even have memory? god damn. that shit doesn't require notes. i'm not writing down foreign symbols and the gods they represent to solve a puzzle two hours later i'm remembering "you can spinjump on sawblades"

might and magic 6-8 back in the day, but that is rectified by all the resources online about the worlds now

also might and magic 1 and 2, and the wizardry games where you literally had to draw out maps and take notes on the maps themselves for everything using fucking grid paper

Feels like there needs to be a good balance between
and

If something has an in game notepad or map marking I know I'm on the right ride.

I hate relying on that, especially considering all the weird shit that can make you OP. Takes the fun out of it if you are full cheesing it and not running across things while exploring.

This.
It irritates me to no end that Ultima Underworld's simple map notation mechanic didn't become more standard throughout gaming.

There are about 6 enemy types ranging from Human to Evil. Yes, each weapon can be used to grind against 2 enemy types BUT there are more to enemies than just grinding against their type.
You can just use their element or weapon type weakness against them, so there really isn't any need for much grinding unless you're an autist. The only QTEs you should be minding are your weapon's QTEs, no one needs to care about timing their magicks.

Apart from what you said, which is far mor than what most mainstream RPGs/Dungeon Crawling games do, sometimes different body types of certain enemies are weak against different stuff.
Tails could be weak to edged type weapons while head could be weak to blunt type weapons. Could also be weak to different elements as well. The status ailments are a pretty fun mechanic: low legs HP makes an enemy unable to run for example is quite intuitive than you're making it out to be as 'really just it' though.

IDK man, you seem like you suck and is unable to find fun in the core system gameplay, so you probably should just find other games that is more suited to your taste.

It's annoying if there isn't some kind of virtual notepad in the game itself (some DS games did this). I don't always have paper on hand.

There wasn't any need for note taking in this game, considering that it already has an in-game manual too. The mechanics are also simple enough to understand once you get the hang of it.
I feel like crafting weapons and armor in particular makes more difference in the damage dealt than grinding.

it's not even really required to master the crafting system though it definitely makes the game a lot easier, as i have played this as a stupid kid, and simply mastered the QTEs of the weapons and went through the game dealing damage in this succession:
miss, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and so on, until i miss and do it again

Cool as long as you have a notebook mechanic in the game.

It is not about me sucking, but rather the game just being underwhelming. You are right that this game isn't for me, but I think it is also the way this game is designed that busts my balls. It looks to be a fun concept but they way it was handled is just so mind-numbingly dull. IF I wanted to, I could grind this shit out, but right now it doesn't look like it's worth the effort.

Ok, what I can look forward to according to the game: keeping track of what weapons to switch out for which enemies, so that means constant menudiving if I don't want to weaken my weapons in every god damn encounter. Fuck that.

Getting into fights, SLOWLY smacking the enemy in the most utterly unengaging manner possible until my risk meter gets unbearable, eating a risk item, rinse and repeat until the fucker is dead. That is how I defeated one of the bosses. Yawn.

Platforming and blockpushing, dare I say, is the only cerebral action in this game. It doesn't take almost any time at all to time your attacks perfectly, which I'm thinking is the thing that Square banked on giving the player a challenge, but which I had already mastered in minutes, bar the magic. I had more fun pushing blocks than I did trying to fight through Squares butchered mess of a system that is lifted straight from Parasite Eve but only made worse.

My point is that during the entirety of the time I played this game, I felt more cheated than I did motivated. You have melee attacks and timing, but it is shrouded in this weird pseudo turn-based system that feels extremely wonky. You have a load of weapons, but make sure you don't kill any wrong enemies with it. Here are some huge and awesome monsters, now go smack them in the legs until they die.

If the meat of the game is gameplay and dungeoncrawl, make the statcrunching fun and the gameplay bearable, with some variation to gameplay at least. But there IS no statcrunching, the gameplay is woefully bland and there aren't any different ways to play the game. It only ever seems to amount to melee and how far you can reach with said melee.

Instead of insulting me, how about giving me some tips, then. Tell me when this shit gets better and I'll try and beat it.

I love VS but you're retarded. There is absolutely no note-taking required in VS.