I’m going to ask you all to accept the fact that Dragon Quest/Warrior was the first console role-playing game as we know it today. There were other games that approached the idea, but DQ/W was the first to hold many of the conventions that we hold so dear^[1]. As anyone who played the game well remembers, the game had tons of random encounters.

For those of you not “in the know”, a random encounter is the basic term for how one enters into battle into most RPGs. You’ll be trotting merrily through the forest, or cave, or whatever, and the screen will flash, swirl, break, whatever. The battle screen will then pop up. There is no warning of the encounter, no way to avoid it. If you’ve got a 1 in 4 chance of encountering a monster each time you take a step and you’ve taken four steps, guess what, buddy? It’s slime-killing time.

In the original Dragon Warrior, and by extension the entire NES library of RPGs, random encounters were necessary. You physically could not have that many sprites on screen at once without major flickerage. Showing the enemies onscreen would cause so much flickering as to make the game virtually unplayable. So I’m fine with random encounters there.

But as to why the tradition continued into the SNES and later eras, I’m at a loss to explain. I guess it’s because the RPG genre is not one that is known for innovation. Admit it—it’s not. The two most popular RPG series—Dragon Quest/Warrior and Final Fantasy—base their reputation on their consistency, with arguably slightly more innovation appearing in the Final Fantasy games^[2].

That’s the only reason I can pin to the reason this tradition has continued. Troll the message boards at Final Fantasy Online^[3] sometime. People have mused that that the next installment^[4] shouldn’t include random encounters. They’ve been blasted for daring to desire to break with tradition. “Final Fantasy wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy without random encounters!” they say, and just because every other Final Fantasy has had random encounters in it, then every Final Fantasy in the future shall have random encounters. It’s ludicrous. We can animate every strand of Tidus’s hair, but the screen still swirls around and launches us into battle without any warning.

See, games are getting graphically more realistic every day. We’re getting into a deeper simulation of a reality than the old Nintendo games did. While Spira is obviously not Earth, the graphics are closer to what Spira would look like were it real. There are sections of the game—particularly in the videos—where the characters look almost exactly like live actors instead of merely polygons.

When you have a random encounter—when you’re going through an empty corridor and an enemy just blinks into existence in front of you—it breaks that simulation of reality. If you’re not going to go the whole way—if you’re not going to create the most detailed simulation of reality possible—then there’s no point to it. You might as well keep making games with 8-bit sprites

The thing is, the game Chrono Trigger eliminated random encounters back in the days of the Super Nintendo, and that was with using sprite graphics, which, no matter how well-done they are, will never look as realistic as polygon graphics can. Not only did it eliminate random encounters, but it also eliminated separate battle screens, which I also think is a good idea and I haven’t seen it implemented in any other game^[5].

In Chrono Trigger you’d be walking around and would see, say, a wild beast drinking at a lake, and if you wandered too close to it, it’d notice you and a battle would begin. Or you’d be walking through the forest and a monster would jump out of a bush and attack you. Whatever the form the encounters took, there was always a rationale for how you entered them. And instead of switching to Battle Mode, the characters would go into attack positions right on the field screen and the attack options would pop up.

While separate battle screens still exist, other games have taken the idea of representing enemies on the field screen^[6]. Chrono Cross, the sequel to Chrono Trigger, has of course done this, but interestingly enough, it still switches to separate battle screens^[7].

The dungeons in Xenogears were excruciating because of the insanely high random encounter rate—in some areas you could barely take a step before going into battle, and it really slowed down the already terrible pacing. Xenosaga proved they learned from their mistakes—enemies crawl around the dungeons and you don’t have to fight them until you’re absolutely ready. Unless, of course, they chase you down. One brilliant section towards the beginning pits you against a group of invincible enemies; you’re actually forced to avoid confrontations.

I have one problem with showing enemies onscreen when you switch to a separate battle screen and it has to do with that simulation of reality I mentioned earlier. The enemies seen onscreen are less enemies than they are representations of parties of enemies. You see a Vermicious K’nid bouncing around the screen. You touch it and when you get into the battle screen, you’re facing a group of three Vermicious K’nids and a Heffalump. Remember when Tifa and Barret would materialize out of Cloud’s pocket? It’s the same concept. If you’re going to show enemies onscreen, and here I repeat myself, go the whole way.

One last point I’d like to mention is that Earthbound might have had the single greatest idea ever. You know how it’s really annoying when you backtrack to earlier areas because of the random encounters? The enemies are too weak to put up a proper fight, and the experience you get from the battles is negligible. The enemies become annoying because fighting them slows you from getting to your objective without any real benefit. Earthbound fixes this problem, and like Chrono Trigger, is the only game I can think of that implements its solution for the problem it sees. If you encounter a low level enemy (they’re shown onscreen in Earthbound as well), the game automatically assumes that you’re going to defeat it and bypasses the battle, giving you what little experience the enemy carries. Backtracking in the game is minimal—it’s pretty linearly divided into areas—but the few instances you need to are made much less tedious than they would be were you to have to fight each and every single battle.

Random encounters need to be given an indecent burial along with the nameless, non-speaking hero. I’m glad to see a trend towards showing the enemies onscreen. We need to go further along that route—the Chrono Trigger route—and put more effort into creating a more seamless, more realistic world.

Footnotes

1) http://www.gamespot.com/features/vgs/universal/rpg_hs/nes1.html Return

2) About the most innovative Final Fantasy was, of course, Final Fantasy VIII. They took away our MP and gave us the Junction/Draw system, remember? VIII is without a doubt the most criticized installment of the series, and I don’t doubt that its poor reception is one of the reasons that IX was conceived as the grand returned to the old style that it was. Return

3) http://forums.ffonline.com/ Return

4) We’ll be on XII next. XI (the online one) is out in Japan and is on its way over here to the US of A. Return

5) At least, not in any non-action RPG. Games such as Kingdom Hearts and .hack do not switch to separate battle screens, but they are not turn-based. Return

6) Yes, yes, I know, this was also done in Zelda 2, which was years before Chrono Trigger. Don’t bug me. Return

7) Cross uses pre-rendered backgrounds and switches to polygons during the battle screens, as opposed to Trigger which used sprite graphics for the entire game. This is probably the reasoning behind the two different modes. In more recent games, however, pre-rendered backgrounds have gone out of fasion, so there’s no real need to have a separate battle screen. Return