The RPG-ification of AAA titles has been going on for so long that it’s almost strange to see the rare game where you aren’t collecting some resource to get stronger and improve one attribute or another. The motivation is obvious: It gives a sense of progression, expression, replayability, and allows players to trade skill for time. It seems hard for AAA studios to release games that are difficult because challenge could dissuade players looking for a cheap power fantasy, but don’t have the time to invest in mastering the games they play. Publishers want the widest possible audiences so they want to know that players can continually make progress and enjoy the game, not get hung up on sudden difficulty spikes. Can’t get past a boss or this mission is too hard? A short little grind should suffice.
Time, being a player’s most valuable resource, should not be taken for granted, which I think most developers are aware of. This is why enemy difficulty often scales with player level rather than becoming DPS checkpoints, and why games like The Division try to fill the map full with various EXP-awarding activities and new guns, and games like God of War carefully control the player’s power level at every step of the journey. “Grinding is just bad game design,” you might read on forums and social media. “Good” games use their RPG mechanics to give you as much power as you need, when you need it.
This does not appear to be how Nippon Ichi sees the world, but I have to take a slight detour for those unfamiliar with their works. Readers familiar with them may skip the following section.
Incredible Power Levels
Disgaea 6 had this trailer that introduced a new level cap. RPG’s rarely go above 100, but this cap was 99,999,999. If you look at the experience calculations for a Disgaea game, you’ll find that the first 100 levels use a standard exponentially-increasing EXP requirement for each level, but then they switch to a different expression and then another later on. Most RPG’s have to cap EXP so low because it would become exuberantly expensive to continue leveling up. Even if there is no cap that players might realistically reach, the content must end before this happens.
But Disgaea doesn’t stop there, it has reincarnation. Much of the end-game of a Disgaea entry is spent reaching max level. Then you reincarnate. This reduces your unit’s level back to one, but retains some of the stats from its previous life. You max its level out again and then reincarnate again.
This is all, by the way, required for post-game content. The final, final boss is always Baal, an incredibly difficult encounter where only the strongest teams can even make it past the first turn of combat. And it takes, as you’ve probably guessed, a lot of grinding. Grinding to get to max level, reincarnating, and grinding some more.
Reincarnation and grinding are essential features in most of the Nippon Ichi games I’ve played, including: Disgaea, Makai Kingdom, Labyrinth of Refrain and its sequel, etc.. It’s just a company that loves the grind.
Grind Is Good
On its surface, Nippon Ichi’s philosophy seems a step in the wrong direction, but the popularity of their franchises speak differently. Players of most RPGs will talk about the story, characters, and world, perhaps viewing combat as a way to space out the more interesting elements of the game, but players of Nippon Ichi games will talk about the gameplay and achievable power levels, saying “the game doesn’t really start until the post-game.” They’ll talk about ways of gaining thousands of levels worth of experience very quickly after a reincarnation, how to create OP builds, how to use the game’s built-in cheat functions to gain money and experience quickly, etc..
Grind in a Nippon Ichi game isn’t the activity done between story beats, it is the game. Their stories aren’t generally that bad and are full of humor, but they’re not the main attraction.
They accomplish this feat in two ways:
Unparalleled depth.
Seemingly endless content.
Depth: It’s Prinnies All The Way Down.
One of the first concepts players get introduced to in Disgaea is throwing your units around. A unit can only move a number of tiles according to their movement stat, but a unit can pick another up, throw it, and then the thrown unit can move much further. But prinnies are special. Each unit has an “evility” that might trigger at specific moments or add stats, and the prinny evility is to explode when thrown, dealing damage proportionate to health.
Nippon Ichi has a knack for introducing concepts and immediately turning them on their heads. In Labrynth of Refrain, you learn that to unlock doors, you need keys. Simple enough. Also you can break many, often most, of the walls in the dungeon, subverting the key/door dynamic. In Phantom Brave, you can pick rocks, bushes, and all sorts of stuff off the ground and use them to defeat enemies. Also you can carry them back to base and materialize new units from them. In Disgaea, you’ll want to constantly be equipping better gear, but also each item has a whole “item world” to explore and the item’s stats improve the deeper you go.
This depth allows Nippon Ichi games to sometimes be puzzles where you have to find out of the box solutions to strategy problems and sometimes be joyous grindfests where you figure out the most efficient way to increase in power to get beyond a challenge. Most of the time, the player gets to decide which way they want to handle the game. When I first played Labyrinth of Refrain, I had to think very carefully about my team compositions, but in playing its sequel I better understood how to use the stockpile system to keep overleveled throughout much of my run.
A particular moment in Disgaea 5 I keep coming back to in my mind: I was on this map with a bridge over a poisoned water river. Each turn in the river, units will take damage so obviously the bridge is the way to go, but the enemies on the bridge were a bit too powerful for my team. Then it occurred to me I could pick them up and throw them off the bridge to have them take poison damage while my team waited out the battle to clean up the remainders. It’s the kind of thing I could see players going onto forums and saying “cheese discovered in level, trivializes challenge, please fix,” but at the same time the feeling of discovery in that moment was strong enough that I remember it so many years later and the game wouldn’t feel so special to me were it not for the cheese.
More and More Content
Disgaea 5 was the first Nippon Ichi game I actually bothered to finish. I, like many RPG players, often lose motivation towards the end and the massive amounts of time these games can take can make completing them difficult. It can mean not playing new releases from other studios or simply require more free time than we have.
So I saw the ending credits and jumped right back in to see this post-game that people were always talking about. Imagine my surprise to find it wasn’t just bonus challenge levels, but that the story itself kept going, new mechanics were still being introduced. Less content and longer between story intervals and far more grindy, but where the post-game of most games can feel like clean-up work, getting the last few collectibles and viewing scenes you might have missed, the post-game of a Nippon Ichi game is still just the game.
To many, that may seem daunting. RPGs are already hard to invest into because of the time commitment and the idea that one might not be able to finish makes starting seem pointless. It’s an understandable perspective, but these games really push the “destination is the journey” angle.
I have heard game writers in GDC talks lament that only a fraction of the people who play a game they work on will see the story conclude and how they write with this in mind, but as a designer the idea of players enjoying a game I worked on for the pure joy of its mechanical interaction or the aesthetic pleasure of interfacing with the controls is what motivates me. I made a toy box and it’s there whenever you want to pick it up and I hope that it never stops offering good experiences.
Perhaps that’s one of the reasons devs are enjoying making roguelites so much. They offer potentially endless experiences without the need for enticing players with intricate stories or designing finite galleries of content, they can randomly generate content infinitely and players can keep coming back to the same game and frequently find the experience at least a little different from before.
Well, before roguelites were much a thing, there were endless dungeons and Nippon Ichi found a good formula for it.
Conclusions
Nippon Ichi’s philosophy has been a personal inspiration and I adore their games, I love the grind. Players are often right to criticize games for being overly-grind focused when they trap players into repetitive and unfulfilling loops, becoming more work-like than play-like. Well, the criticism probably still stands against Nippon Ichi’s titles, but the difference is in how Ichi’s titles are built to continue to reward players for the act of playing itself. When the core thrust of player motivation is on a steady IV drip of story content then how unfulfilling the core gameplay is only becomes more apparent when the story slows down. But when the gameplay itself is what one draws pleasure from, none of that matters.
Embrace the grind. Love the grind.
