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watching a playthrough of Ys 3 and thinking about how Japanese 80s RPGs all expected the player to tank tons of damage, resulting in the need to grind super hard to become basically invincible
like yeah there was lots of grinding but the specific reason is that you're simply expected to get hit by bottom tier monsters for 25% of your level-2 HP, and getting good enough with the movement and combat to avoid it is basically not an option
obviously this is expected in turn based rpg combat but for me at least action RPGs seem like they should allow you to avoid most damage. Later on this became true - if you don't want to get hit in Secret of Mana you can play conservatively and do okay
to be clear I'm thinking about literally the earliest action RPGs, like Hydlide, and at the time nobody had any templates to operate off of. Zelda might have been one of the earliest games to offer the option to take very little damage through careful play
Ys apparently took this very seriously because even Ys 4, released in 1993, did combat through the same "lol idk just walk into them" approach and from what I've heard you have to line this up pretty tight if you don't want to take damage
maybe I just notice it because honestly I never could get myself to accept turn based rpg combat either. it's just hard to accept that I can play as hard as I want and I'll still have to watch my characters stand stock still while they get hit by level one enemies
my particular flavor of power fantasy isn't compatible with watching a level one rat swing at me and do one damage against my 1200 hp. I'm the warrior of legend I shouldn't have to get hit unless I'm fighting God
it's really, like, a blemish on my record to get hit in most videogames, to me. I don't like it, and if there's simply no option to prevent it from happening iiiiii kinda don't want to play the game
i-frames make me feel unaccomplished
