Episode 3: Let's Take It Easy

 Piloting Glorious Flesh

Episode 3: Let's Take It Easy

(Episode 3 was originally titled Episode 3: Choose to Live, however due to circumstances in my personal life that essay has been delayed to a later date.)

I enjoy difficult video games.

That’s not really me bragging. It is more a plain factual statement. I feel difficult video games can do a lot of things that easy games simply cannot do. Difficulty can be an important tool for setting a tone or texture to your game experience. Difficulty in itself is an enjoyable experience. There is a feeling that you can get from a hard game stonewalling you for hours until you FINALLY put together the run where you beat the challenge.

However… I now have a new appreciation for playing on easy.

To be clear I have never had an issue with Easy Modes in difficult games. Typically I would never pick them. Shin Megami Tensei is one of my favorite franchises and has had easy modes for a long time now and it has never bothered me. The much discoursed ‘Dark Souls Should Have an Easy Mode’ debate is silly and I think most people would get over Easy mode being included after the week the game came out. There are many reasons I feel I would never pick those myself on a case-by-case basis, but generally I have a preference for a challenge.

But at last I had to put away my pride and preference and pick Easy Mode. The game that finally made me kneel: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Now FF7R2 is not a particularly hard game, but I just could not play it at a high level at all due to some outstanding circumstances in my personal life taxing my brain. I got hard walled by the final boss of Chapter 2 for about an hour and had to concede. It was a frustrating experience. I do not blame the game, in fact after my issues with Final Fantasy 16’s lack of difficulty I was relieved that they had a game that could tell my zombified corpse who also refused to do any of the extra curricular activities in the open world NO.

I used to have an issue with people talking about video game difficulty in the context of accessibility. I still hold firm the opinion that difficulty is likely less important to most people in terms of accessibility than other options like freely mappable buttons, options to make text easier to read, visual options to help with colorblindness, etc. However, recent events in my life really highlighted to me how difficulty can interact with being in distress. I have a relatively privileged life so it was easy for me to overlook what game difficulty might be like for someone with rougher circumstances than me. Trying to muscle through a hard boss while feeling distressed and grieving is just not an enjoyable experience I would wish on anyone, especially if playing the game could be a much needed escape.

I still enjoyed FF7R2 on Easy. I don’t think a high level of difficulty really adds much to the FF7R2 experience other than asking you a higher level of mastery of the game systems and giving the player an incentive to do side content. I do feel like I didn’t get a full appreciation of the gameplay because I went through with the game asking so little of me. Still a breezy experience still just feels at home in FF7R2. Something just felt right about being tucked in and letting Kazushige Nojima tell me a bedtime story about the cute twink and his extremely hot girlfriends.

That all said… I still plan on eventually replaying FF7R2 on at least Normal. Both due to the difficulty situation making me feel like I didn’t fully appreciate the gameplay, but also to go wrap up the optional content. I had a much more mixed feeling on the game than most people seem to and instead of arrogantly assuming I’m an enlightened genius for thinking FF7R2 is a mere 7/10, that perhaps I have missed out on something from the experience other people had.

…Well there is some story stuff I could complain about, but no spoilers of course.

This experience did make me meditate more on easy video games in general. A lot of people will wax poetic (myself included) about how difficult video games can better communicate an oppressive atmosphere. The apocalyptic worlds of SMT, Dark Souls, Armored Core, etc. feel a lot more convincing if you really could die at any moment. The same can be said of the opposite. As fun as some Kaizo romhacks or particularly demanding Mario Maker levels can be, an easy breezy experience fits Mario much better. Super Mario Wonder is a very easy game, but I didn’t feel like a lack of difficulty outside of a few optional post-game challenges really took anything away from that immaculate experience. Super Mario World was my first video game, and while it took me a very long time to beat it all by myself I’m not sure if I would have the love for video games I do now if SMW stonewalled me and I’m sure the same could be said for… well ‘SMW’ now.

Pokemon games are also games that I’ve dearly loved since the first generation. While I will play with my own little restrictions to try and make Pokemon a more engaging experience as an adult, those games need to be fairly easy. Obviously Pokemon is huge with children and more casual video game players, but tonally Pokemon shouldn’t be too resistant to the player. The game being easy also allows for a lot of freedom in how to build your team so you can beat the game with any combination of your favorite monsters. I would also extend this to other Pokemon games outside of the RPGs. I really loved Pokken and it had some really interesting ideas on how to translate a Pokemon fight to a Tekken-esque fighting game, and it had relatively simple inputs. The Pokemon TCG also reflects this even in the modern day. While high level play can be filled with a lot of complicated interactions and match ups, the fundamentals are fairly grounded and simple compared to something like Yu-Gi-Oh which just completely alienates anyone from picking it up with its insane complexity.

Pivoting back to Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIV has an interesting dilemma with difficulty. FF14 is an online service game that needs to keep an sizable and active player base for the game to even function. Dungeons and trials need to be regularly populated with new and old players for everyone to have as smooth a process going through its LENGTHY linear story. We’ve seen the game become easier and easier over the years in ways that are at times welcome when you aren’t wiping to a dungeon that you are running for daily, but at other times not such as the homogenization and simplifications of the design of the game’s various Jobs. However, raiding, the game’s premiere endgame content, has kept its edge. Ultimate raiding is some of the most fascinating challenge content available in any game. Ultimate raids are a series of long grueling multi-boss gauntlets that demand near perfection from a group of 8 people in their coordination and damage optimization. The juxtaposition of the game’s normal content and its endgame can at times be dizzying but the game serves both casual and hardcore players well.

I think my own personal favorite example of expression through difficulty is the absolute master class that is the Kirby franchise. Kirby on its surface is a deliberately easy experience. Kirby has multiple mid-air jumps allowing them to float over dangerous pits. Kirby also has a full health bar and an arsenal of power ups to deal with enemies. Kirby has a nice and fluffy tone for his adventures in dreamland and the gameplay reflects that. However the final act of Kirby games tends to up the ante. As Kirby’s various adventures will inevitably lead him coming face to face with cosmic horrors beyond mortal comprehension. Kirby games master this drastic shift in tone and pair it with an escalation in challenge to match. This is especially true in the post-game challenge content such as boss rushes which really sell the feeling of Kirby versus the cosmos.

So yeah, there’s a lot to be gained from having a pretty wide variety of gameplay experiences when it comes to difficulty. Difficulty should be less viewed as a measurement of quality and more like a tool that can help dictate what kind of experience you want to create. And I think it's a good lesson to learn that sometimes you need to appreciate easy games or playing a game on an easy mode. There are also games that approach difficulty in a more nuanced manner that we aren’t traditionally used to considering like Celeste’s steep challenging climb that demands near perfection from screen to screen, but gives you such short challenges that they don’t feel as intimidating to throw yourself at for a while. The new SaGa games are somewhat an RPG equivalent to that paradigm where you are given shorter individual encounters or occasionally chains of encounters rather than a full blown dungeon so wiping and picking up the fight again doesn’t feel quite so punishing. Thinking of games purely in the sense of ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ feels inadequate. A game can be hard in ways that feel unfair or poorly designed, a game can be easy and beatable by children that’s a masterpiece.

Sometimes it's just the right time to take it easy.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth: 7/10*
*Score based on an Easy Mode playthrough where I skipped all side content

Next Time on Piloting Glorious Flesh
Episode 4: A Banquet for Cannibals

With the upcoming release of SaGa Emerald Beyond I have felt inspired to go back and revisit the original SaGa trilogy (otherwise known as Final Fantasy Legend 1-3). Appropriately this will be a series of 3 handheld size micro-reviews of each game. Eat Your Foes! Change Yourself! Chainsaw God!

A wiseman once spoke to me in a language I do not speak, but in words I could understand. “Abandoning your uniqueness is equivalent to dying. So don’t write generic lyrics based on other concerns. Write what YOU want to write.”

See You Next Mission, Flesh Pilots