Why do JRPGs often have weird and often autistic difficulty curves?

not quite sure what you mean.
Classic JRPG design was make it hard at the beginning and slowly get easier as you go.
Modern JRPG design is make it easy the whole way through and save any possible difficulty for optional content.

>>3774695 (OP)
>Why do JRPGs often have weird and often autistic difficulty curves?

RPGs in general are poorly paced and balanced. Stems from a lack of proper playtesting and not very good designers.

>>3774695 (OP)
>weird difficulty curves?
It's because people grind and don't learn how to play.

>>3774697
Uh...my experience is usually that it starts off easy and then fucks your ass.

I would argue most JRPGs have fairly good difficulty curves and difficulty spikes are because of poor balance/poor development decisions (like the famous fight with Ramza's brother which kinda comes out of nowhere and is solo).

>>3774695 (OP)
Because they're long games and give out power ups and skills at a rate depending on the players level of grinding rather than a natural controlled curve

>>3774724
>solo fights in a tactical RPG
Motherfucking Tactics Ogre.

>>3774723
That's a skill issue. You're either skipping all side content or not building your party right.

>>3774698
>Stems from a lack of proper playtesting
It's pretty much this. It takes an extensive amount of time just to QA through a 3-4 hour platformer game. When you have a jrpg that takes literally ten times that amount to complete (if not more), the scale of things to test rises exponentially. Testing for game breaking bugs is one thing, but then trying to balance the game in a graceful manner is even exponentially longer.

>>3774695 (OP)
Because most players are retards that don't know how to play and try to substitute grinding for thinking. Unfortunately, companies cater to this more than they should.

>>3774760
One of the real issues is that modern Jarpiggies cry the instant good design creeps into their games. People love to bitch about enemies scaling to your party's level, yet I've played multiple games that do this which I would consider actual 10/10s in terms of gameplay because the encounter design itself helps keep the challenge relevant and is supplemented by the level scaling, not the other way around. Same thing with time limits or hard fail states/soft locks. Jarpiggie fakers just HATE when they can't out-grind the challenge, when their choices actually have weight, when the number of truly game-affecting decisions is frequent, when the minimum pace is dicated by the game and not by the player.

>>3774763
To add to this post, I think that we will eventually (hopefully soon) hit some critical mass like action games did with Demons Souls and enter some new paradigm of JRPG design that does all of the things JRPG "enjoyers" hate and makes them fashionable. The trouble is that this is also going to require normies who enjoy crap like Clair Obscur to get bored with artificial gameplay mechanics and timed dodges/parries and have open minds towards traditionally engaging JRPGs that find their core challenge in puzzle game design sensibilities rather than story-driven popular Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest-style shit.

>>3774755
>It's pretty much this. It takes an extensive amount of time just to QA through a 3-4 hour platformer game. When you have a jrpg that takes literally ten times that amount to complete (if not more), the scale of things to test rises exponentially. Testing for game breaking bugs is one thing, but then trying to balance the game in a graceful manner is even exponentially longer.

It's also the fact that testing an RPG with builds means you will have to play though maybe 30-60 hours of content, without a good way to precision test specific sections, since it can often involve quest flags, certain builds, items setups and so on.
Then if a game build is updated that generally means that the playtest save is no longer valid, so they have to restart.

There are better ways to go about testing this kind of stuff, but it requires experienced QA, Designers and Tech to actually know how to set things up and plan it.

>>3774766
I used to oppose level scaling about ten years ago, much like you see on /v/. Nowadays when I get out leveled encounters in RPGs I see.. just an absence of gameplay. Pointless.

I think grinders and number guys should just get their own subgenre of games.

>>3774780
Level scaling is bad and is at best a band-aid solutions that causes more issues than it fixes. It's simply a lazy solution.

It's far better to have upgraded enemies, new enemies, irregular threats or similar.

>>3774785
>It's far better to have upgraded enemies, new enemies
That's level scaling to me, and what Oblivion did..

>>3774785
Level scaling in and of itself is not bad.
BAD level scaling is.
Merely changing an enemy statistically as its level increases is not enough and is the exact lazy difficulty you're speaking of here.
Changing enemy behaviors and formations proportional to the scaled-to level is the ideal situation.
One piece of design I've been rolling about in my head is a multi-scaled version of this where there is a "global" scaling factor and a "local" scaling factor - the global one which vaguely aims at your party's overall strength, and the local one being much spikier and functioning like a shmup/beat em up rank mechanic. If the enemies hear that some adventurers are in their dungeon kicking ass and taking names, they should become MORE threatening to the player and be doing more to kill them rather than becoming pushovers.
Again this is something I've kind of seen in very few RPGs before, let alone done well, but I think this should be a baseline, a fundament of design rather than some crazy exception.

>>3774786
>That's level scaling to me
Except it's not.
An old area that only had wolves and small weak monsters suddenly being changed to have orc camps and orc patrols that are far more dangerous:
>doesn't get in the way of the satisfaction of getting progressively more powerful that you can easily tell from how challening older enemies are
>improves world building and makes the world more dynamic
>makes more sense that orcs are the more powerful enemies instead of some rabbit now suddenly being able go toe to toe with someone that otherwise beats up ogres and wyverns

>>3774789
>Changing enemy behaviors and formations proportional to the scaled-to level is the ideal situation.
That is also a bad idea if they are perceived as the same enemies, only for some reason these are now suddenly hyper organized and badass.
You should at the very least have a new enemy type (or current one from later areas) that togeher with the older enemies make them more dangerous.

Like you've fought individual red cap goblins before that were moderately challenging. But now when they have other goblins from the older area around them, they make them more organized and whip them into a frenzy. This could contextually explain any potential stat boosts they might have and also change old and new encounters.

Even things like shooters do it all the time. Where you might face 1 shotgun enemy and 2 grunts. Then you might fight 2 snipers pinning you down, while 2 shotgun enemies flank you from the side.

>>3774724
>with Ramza's brother

>>3774807
>weak monsters suddenly being changed to have orc
.. Due to PC level?

If it's triggered by an event, then it's not level scaling.

>>3774810
Realistically players will not stay in one area exclusively with lv 5 mobs until they're lv 25.
It's perfectly fine if they choose to return to an early area at lv 10 and mobs are still lv 5.
Those kind of world changes where better enemies can appear could be triggered by progression in the narrative, progression in the world, playtime/in-game time or something else.

>>3774763
The only game series to do level scaling correctly is SaGa and that's mainly because BR is it's own thing due to the lack of traditional levels while also mixing it with fixed scaling ranges depending on the game.
As for the rest of your post, I'm not sure what you even enjoy out of JRPGs if you dislike numbers such as level actually mattering but it's very ironic that you criticize Clair Obscur in the same post.

>>3774763
>enemy scaling
What is the point of enemy scaling? If enemies and players are always supposed to remain at the same relative skill, why let either improve at all?

>>3774816
Organic scaling like enemies evolving in response to the player (their boss trains new squads/issues better equipment/etc) is better than 'you hit level 5, the goblins are now replaced by orcs'.

I like the idea of early bosses becoming mid/lategame fodder/normal enemies.

>>3774834
>Organic scaling
If it's the exact same enemies just becoming stronger for no reason, then no, that's complete trash in every single way. That's the very reason why level scaling is trash, on top of it making exploration and replayability even more shit if you do it for higher level ones too.

>>3774842
Level scaling in the case of organic would be a specific response to the player, though. Not 'you gained ten levels in smithing that increases your character level' and suddenly monsters get bumped up a tier for no reason.
Ergo, if you avoid conflict with the enemy, enemies would not escalate as much as they would if you were mass murdering them.

>>3774695 (OP)
Could you give examples and explain why those particular games have curves that are ”weird and often ahtistic”?
You really should have done that in your OP post because without it the thread is based on nothing but generalizations of a massive genre.

>>3774697
What's so hard about continuously using the basic attack? I mean, I guess sometimes you have to use a potion.

>>3774695 (OP)
how can a curve be autistic

>>3774695 (OP)
>Why do JRPGs often have weird and often autistic difficulty curves?

better than having no difficulty, like in FFXV.
That was Hold O to win bullshit until the very end

>>3774737
I actually don't mind them, if you just fucking let me know it's going to happen.

>>3774763
>>3774766
The most popular CRPGs on the market are all about absolutely min-maxing your stats and overpowering the living fuck out of enemies. So the idea that the west "gets it" in a way Japan doesn't is laughable.

>>3774967
The core of the problem is that bad game design is being mistaken as good design because it artificially inflates engagement metrics - pointless progression systems, infinite grinders, low-risk garbage that doesn't require frequent meaningful decisions from players. Main issue being that these kinds of systems APPEAR "good" and "feel good" to many people because they deliberately hone in on weaknesses in the human psyche (tl;dr skinner boxes, but the predatory design goes a lot deeper than that and more sinister). There is also a huge misunderstanding by players about what constitutes "value" in a game - retards will really infinite grind on shit like Siralim for hundreds of hours getting absolutely nothing out of it, but will bounce off of games with higher density of gameplay (WWAs, SaGa-likes, true roguelikes, "classic" DRPGs, etc) because the moment one of these games so much as bares a tooth at them, they're out and head back to the dopamine farms.
Because garbage like this sells (and moreover, because it keeps players AWAY from other competing games for longer) it will take a major event for developers to move the fuck away from it.
>>3774831
>it's very ironic that you criticize Clair Obscur in the same post
How is it ironic to level criticism at a JRPG where the whole selling point of the game is that the player can bypass the gameplay if they press [button] at the correct time? To me, this isn't "real" JRPG gameplay and doesn't push the genre in a healthy or sustainable direction. It's great for reeling in non-fans and fake fans for a very short while but there is a low ceiling for "true depth" in any turn-based strategic game that offers you easy ways to skip large portions of the gameplay.

>>3774967
> The most popular CRPGs on the market are all about absolutely min-maxing your stats and overpowering the living fuck out of enemies.
Actually they seem to be about fucking bears

>>3774723
What recent JRPG are you even thinking of when you say this?
Like, maybe Fantasian?

>>3774972
>SaGa-likes

Got any recent ones?

Or really any that aren't actual SaGa?

>>3775018
Hat World comes to mind

>>3775018
which SaGa sub-series?
There's ones based on GB SaGa (The Secret of Varonis, False Skies) and Romancing SaGa (The Genius of Sappheiros, Hat World) but none that I know of for Frontier or later.

>>3775018
The only good SaGa game is The Last Remnant. Do not progress the story before exploring and talking to everyone.

>>3775019
I keep hearing about that, and it does intrigue me. Does it play on the Steamdeck?

>>3775028
If I had the option, Frontier, but it's not like I didn't like the GB games or Romancing SaGa. I'll check those out, thank you.

>>3775018
Legend of Legacy, Alliance Alive

>>3775049
>Does it play on the Steamdeck
No idea at all. It works on windows. The game is made with rpgmaker (though to be clear - modified to the point where you wouldn't recognize it at all) so if you can run that probably.

>>3775049
I recall someone getting it to work there back when the translation came out.

>>3774723
By their very nature, RPGs have an inverted difficulty curve. The further you get into the game, the more options you have in your toolkit. There are ways to reduce it, but they rarely end with a pleasurable experience.

>>3774698
Its more like they generally have to balance under the assumption of the worst possible scenario instead of the best. In the older days, no one would know any better but now in the modern era where its trivial to look up any OP build, it becomes very easy to break games.

>>3774695 (OP)
You're supposed to learn the combat system and how to take advantage of it as you play, not just hit Fight every turn and hoard items.

>>3775083
Legend of Legacy is fun. They made a remaster as well which adds QoL and looks good. I played it on 3DS and liked it. No real story at all but the gameplay and progression was solid and entertaining if you liked SaGa Frontier. I fucking LOVED SaGa Frontier so...

>>3775083
>>3776253
FuRyu shovelware.

>>3774695 (OP)
Generally because we japanese are higher IQ than you.