Level Limits

Sorry for not posting this earlier (I forgot) but the poll results for last week's Blazing Games poll were 100% for working on Coffee Quest Revenge until the 1.0 version is ready. As the few readers of this Blog already know, I am playing Paper Mario. Now that I am back to work, I will be limiting the amount of time I play to roughly an hour a day, so it will be a while before I finish the game. That being said I did run into one element of the game that I absolutely hate and in the future will ensuring that my own games will not have this major flaw.

The game started off fairly easily so I was just following the plot not building up my character other than through normal solving of the game. Then I hit the Dry Dry Desert, where I found the game a bit too challenging for my liking. For that reason, I decided it was time to build up my character. While I explored the desert, I was fighting all the monsters in an attempt to build up my character. This worked real well and I got to the point where the monsters were no longer a burden but I wanted to build up my character a couple more levels anyway to make the future areas a bit easier. After gaining a level, then went into combat and noticed that I never got experience. There are level limits in the game! Once you have reached a certain level, you no longer gain experience (star coins) from defeating a monster. This means that unless you need money, the fighting of low-level monsters is pointless. I should point out at this time that the money is capped at 999 coins, so once you reach that, picking up extra coins does nothing!

While I have no problem with games that reduce the amount of experience from defeating easier monsters, eliminating it is just wrong. None of my RPGs do this so I am not being a hypocrite on this subject. I must admit, however, as a lot of my RPGs do not have re-spawning monsters (something that most of my future RPGs will have) the lack of new monsters acts as a way of limiting how much a character can be built up. This is a bit different as you at least will always gain experience when you defeat a monster, so none of the fighting in my games is pointless.