De_Narm

Some games I replay a lot, but always on a fresh save. I think I've finished Dark Souls about 10 times without ever touching NG+.

Notable exceptions are:

• Nier Automata, although you kind of have to if you want the whole game and it still brought down the experience for me.
• Chrono Trigger, for the quick kill on Lavos. I did not play much of the NG+.

Who cares? Just like most things your average programmer relies on, they are written by smarter or at least more specialised people to make your job easier. They have learned to write memory-safe code so you don't have to.

Fits in nicely with the recent article about conservative men having trouble dating. Maybe don't antagonize women?

Performance problems aside (menus take ages to load in), I like the game quite a bit. There is just so much stuff: 120 characters, two additional fighting systems for special events, a card game, a bayblade minigame, a castle/town upgrade system and probably much more - I'm not even halfway done. The combat is quite auto-attack heavy and therefore simple, but keep in mind I'm olaying with double MP cost for all abilities (one of the additional challanges to tweak your own difficulty, like the ones in Dragon Quest XI).

As for the EXP thing, there are a few things that happened to align for me. EXP works like this:

• Each level requires 1000 EXP.
• You get EXP based on level difference between you and your enemies. There is a maximum value of EXP a single enemy can give to usually prevent what happened to me - I think it's about 1000 for most enemies.
• If you get say 3000 EXP, that's 3 level ups. Remaining EXP does not get adjusted upon each level up. That's great since you can recruit 120 characters and if you miss someone at first, it does not take long to catch up if you want to use them.
• You fight with 6 charaters. EXP is split between them, meaning you get more EXP per character if only e.g. 2 of them survive.

Now, what actually happened to me is: I fought a unique mini-boss encounter with 5 enemies. I was overall underleveled and got wiped twice. The third time however, I won with only my weakest character still standing - he was 8 level below my team average. He got about 1200 EXP for the level difference * 5 enemies * 6, since only he survived, resulting in about 35 level ups.

You might want to know that FF Tactics and FF Tactics Advance are different games entirely, unlike FF V and FF V Advance for example. They couldn't even keep a consistent naming scheme for ports/new games within the FF franchise.

Now, depending on who you ask, only one of these two is good. I firmly believe FF Tactics Advance is the better game, most ofher people will sing the praise of FF Tactics.

Having played both, just between you and me: FF Tactics has so much jank, I couldn't finish it despite FF Tactics Advance remaining in my Top 10 since release. It has an awesome story, but there are just so many battles you simply have to restart over and over because the NPC you should be protecting dies before you get a single turn in. And don't even get me started on the two occasions you get prompted to save your game inbetween two missions - soft-locking your game if you cannot win the second one.

And, SRPG fans are firmly separated by perma-death. Some think the genre needs it and FF Tactics has it. Others, including me, dislike perma-death and FF Tactics Advance doesn't have it (with few exceptions).

Eiyuden Chronicles

Despite playing on the highest difficulty with all extra challanges, it's quite chill right now. Due to some quirks in how EXP works, one of my characters shot up 35 levels in a single fight. While he is lvl 55, everyone else - including my enemies - are around lvl 28.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I'm a sucker for SRPGs. But Golden Sun is up there for sure.

I don't think this ever happend to me. I started on the GBA and to this day every single RPG I played on there holds up - might be specific to the genre. I never played much else.

Become a bad programmer and be thankful you won't have to further maintain your code instead!