@Anand

I also recently enjoyed this prescient essay from 2007 that explains how arcades were the perfect breeding ground for good game design, and that removed from that context, a lot of otherwise meaningful games end up feeling pretty inane, whether from the lack of a social reason to master them or the designers paving over that hole with the meta you describe. But now we have the internet, and a lot of the beauty of arcades is re-emerging as performative speedrunning, online leaderboards, and VR communities.

@Secret_Tunnel
That was an interesting article. The degeneration part applies to our conversation. Super Ghouls'n'Ghosts was kind of a poor example, but he acknowledges that.

One of my nephews used to play games on the NSO apps and save after literally every action. It was utterly horrifying to me. Like watching a puppy being tortured.

It took Dark Souls to ease the new generation in and codify things, but save-anywhere is a choice that a developer REALLY needs to consciously consider the pros and cons of. Like lettuce on a sandwich. It's a vestigial oddity. Not always better, and usually MUCH worse. And, if it IS included, who is the developer balancing for? The save-scummer or the paragon of humanity who only saves after every level?

Ammo and other limited consumables also need to be carefully evaluated for their effect on player behavior (hoarding). Along with acceleration buttons in arcade racing games. And fucking skill trees. And symmetrical diamond-shaped button layouts! Whyyyyyy...

I admire Sakurai's method of breaking down what's fun about a genre and then trying to recreate that fun without being beholden to genre norms. Question everything! Because everyone else does it is not a good enough reason.

On-screen cursors to select menu items in console games and multi-second button holds to select something... brr...

@Anand

Similarly, the dungeons in Shiren that allow carry-in items are a bummer. Total antithesis of the game's spirit. Serpentcoil Island is good about not making this stuff too gratuitous, but it still irks me that 100% completion is gated behind this grind; it's wild that other entries in the series made it a core emphasis.

@Secret_Tunnel
Like the notebook in Chants of Sennar, it's probably a necessary concession to survive in today's market. You instantly lose a huge swath of the gaming audience by not having any kind of progression/persistence. (Or by having time limits.)

But, yeah, I did kind of hate that incremental item improvement system in the previous game. Serpentcoil does have the runes, and such, but the game doesn't really make it that easy to cheese them.

And I'm glad that Chunsoft always includes hardcore dungeons where items are unidentified until tested.

@Anand

I'm still disappointed by the gacha system in WarioWare: Get It Together... but if it lets them preserve the core arcade purity, I'll take it. Better to marry the difficulty renaissance with avoidable addictive metagaming than unskippable dialogue!

The Training Path of Inference was a really great onboarding to the item identification system. I wasn't too sure about unidentified items at first, but that dungeon made me see the fun in it.

Unidentified items and dark hallways really make the first 31 floors feel like a tutorial. I can only imagine what a shock these postgame dungeons would be if you'd been grinding good items on top of that, haha.

@Secret_Tunnel
Yup, dark hallways are freaking nasty. It makes me understand the tension people described from combat in the first X-Com. When you pop into a room and encounter a powerful enemy (or two), every decision is life or death.

It also kind of makes Handy Move unadvisable. A shame, since I love Handy Move! The later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons had a mode that would just auto-explore levels until you ran into an enemy. An interesting QoL thing, but it's probably a bit too much automation.

ALTHOUGH, if you could set up gambits and programs for characters, set multiple loose in one or more dungeons, and just watch the results from an omniscient point of view, that could be cool. Adventurer's Guildmaster Simulator!

@Anand

Even just given the hunger meter and item management, Handy Move would be a death sentence. Press a button in Shiren without intention many times in a row and you're toast!

I've seen people say that the spatial element of Shiren is extraneous, and that deckbuilders are the more pure form of roguelike, but that's really discounting how much complexity Shiren's spatial problem solving compresses in an intuitive way. I tried Slay the Spire a few weeks ago, and I could only read so many card descriptions before it got to be too much.

@Secret_Tunnel
Yeah, I don't think the chess-like aspect of Shiren could be eliminated without fundamentally changing the experience. But are there really meaningful choices in the actual room-to-room non-combat exploration besides "once you've found the door, take the hunger/enemy risk and keep exploring"? I guess there are breakable walls in this one...

Handy Move doesn't always behave in exactly the way I want, but it's a nice tool in low-stress areas/floors.

I haven't really dug too deep into deckbuilders, as of yet, with the exception of Ring of Pain (for whatever reason). The combat in that game does have a spatial element, even though the only form of navigation is branching path selection between levels.

@Anand

The edge cases are what make it interesting. You have Porky, Pumphantasm, and a few other monsters who can affect you when you think you're safe, depending on where you are in the room. So if you want to break open a pot or use a shop, you need to consider where the safest place is to do that. Do you use an earthmound staff to block the entrance? Do you then hole up in a room with only one entrance and risk getting blocked in, or stay in one with multiple linking hallways and risk getting flanked? What items do you have that could handle either situation? The way the enemy power scales faster than your own in later floors makes you really have to squeeze every drop of an advantage you can get from seemingly minor considerations like this.

As far as deckbuilders go, I really enjoyed Inscryption, though that has more going on...