Achievements and Trophies

[VeloZer0]

. He's not actually that hard, he's just tedious, time consuming, and cheap.

You just described the extent of "difficulty" in every role-playing game ever made, good job

Making a boss over powered with lots of cheep moves has always seemed like a design crutch to me. This is usually because your party has a whole bunch of cheep advantages over random encounters.

That was fixed in Disgaea 2 . If you do more than 100000 damage, the game just prints "100k".

Yes, but 67845k is also no hell to read. Especially if 4+ of them pop up on the screen at once.

Two things here.

First off, the bolded part is how banks make a lot of cash. When they round away a penny from you, you say, "Oh, it's just a penny." Do you know what 1,000,000 pennies add up to? TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS >:0
Case in point, I'll take that 50 or 5 xp that wouldn't have existed in CoD4 because it will add up, and it's neat to do the things that get you it.

Next, switching from 999 to 9,999 had a big difference. It allowed the experience curve to be manipulated. Same with FFX. It allowed almost layered gameplay. Sure Braska's Final Aeon is tough at a lower level. But once you can deal 99,999 per hit he's easy. However, by that time you have to deal with Nemesis/Penance.

Also, what Mirage said about Disgaea.

If you round the numbers it works out even in the end. Many games truncate the number at the end, but that only results in you loosing 0.09% of your damage going from 99999 to 9999, and 0.9% going from 9999 to 999. A small price to pay for actually knowing what is going on. (For the record, I feel 9999 isn't too high, but equally good as 999).

This over inflation in games isn't caused by them wanting to add more detail, it is caused by them wanting bigger numbers, because I focus groups said they liked them. If you look at the combat formulas as the series progress they start moving from (when you break it down) [stat]+[stat] to [stat]*[stat] to [stat]^3. This isn't adding detail, it is just making a steeper and less linear curve.

To me this over inflation is a gimmicky way to make the game feel substantially different from the beginning of the game. This is something that should be done by forcing innovations in tactics through a well designed encounter and leveling system. If you take FFT as a case in point, the way I usually build my party, I hit most of the damage I want to do a little less than half way through, and for the rest I spend on developing mobility, 100% chance to hit, ect. And by the time I reach the end of the story, it is like a completely different game with the new abilities and tactics I employ. Compare and contrast Disgaea, where you are using the same moves and same tactics for most of the end game, but the damage keeps going up and up and up. One keeps me interested for long periods of time, one does not.