9/04/2024, 8:00 AM
ah, the modern trend of crafting systems. ever since the boom in popularity of minecraft, crafting systems have been a staple of many modern games. and i think they SUCK ASS. who doesn't love spending 40 hours grinding to get all the items they need to make a brand new shiny thing that'll help them beat one part of the game, and then immediately become obsolete? okay, okay, maybe i'm exaggerating a bit. but i've never really liked this huge trend of every single game having some sort of crafting system for some reason. i find the very concept to be inherently grindy and time-wasty, and i've never really seen a game pull it off in a way i genuinely like. today i've got three subjects i'd like to look at, one bad, one tolerable, and one genuinely good. so let's begin with our first example.
i've gone on record saying that i'm not exactly the biggest fan of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and there's a lot of reasons for that. it was rushed and released in a barren and incomplete state, the writing is pathetic and boring, there's only one upgrade to the shop... the amount of customization is impressive, but honestly takes away from the aspect of "when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade." instead of making lemonade, you give the lemons right back to life, and life is just like, "oh ok, fine." and there's one huge part of ACNH that really sticks the nail in the coffin for me. the dreaded crafting system. ugh, this shit sucks. so in earlier AC games, on your first couple of days you'd be working towards getting new tools so you could get more money and get more done in different ways. this would incentivize you to check back every day for those first couple days, and it made actually getting those tools a lot more impactful. ACNH just throws this all out the window and says "what if you could skip that and make them all yourself?" but that would be unbalanced if you could just make all of them yourself, so they had to think of a drawback. so what did they do? they made every tool break after a certain amount of time. in earlier AC games, the axe tool would always do this, but there was a reason for that. it was to discourage cutting down trees, and made it so you only did it when necessary. here, there is absolutely no reason why tools should break. they introduced a new problem so they could "fix" it with their new feature. and because you never know when your tool is about to break, since there's no visual indicator or counter on how many uses it has left, you end up needing to carry around multiple tools at a time if you want to always have one on hand when you're bug hunting or reorganizing flowers, which takes up precious inventory space. and this is just in relation to the tools, because i take big issue with crafting furniture. you have to get these special little crafting recipe cards to learn to make new furniture, you can't just make it all out the gate. seems simple enough. but the issue arises when you want to make something specific that you have in mind, and you know what you need and how to make it, but your character doesn't know how to make it, since you haven't unlocked the recipe. and the way you get these things is dumb too, it's completely random. you can sometimes get them as gifts from villagers, sometimes you get them from bottles that wash up on the shore, sometimes you get them from balloon presents. but it's completely random which one you get, and you can get duplicates for some god forsaken reason. which just wastes your time even more. i guess it's to incentivise you to trade recipes with other people? but i don't wanna do that man. i just wanna fucking... get my stupid ass table. and during holidays or events, what would be just a simple gift item in earlier AC games from an event animal is now another stupid ass crafting recipe. which you have to get all the right items for, which takes even more time, and it's just... really stupid. i hate this aspect of New Horizons, it's so bad. the game has a lot of great ideas, i think the added detail in all the furniture and allowing you to place furniture anywhere you want around town is pretty cool, i think the posters are a great evolution of the portraits from earlier games and give each villager a little more individuality, i like the pattern designer (even if its clothing style options are annoying and super limiting at times) and overall, the game does look really good. but it just has all these little annoyances and asterisks on every aspect of it that just annoy the hell out of me. and the crafting system is the worst part of it all.
sorry i kinda went off the rails there. New Horizons brings out the worst in me. let's get back on track and talk about something a little more tolerable. Terraria! aka objectively better and more fun Minecraft. i've always been a huge fan of Terraria, i think it's full of charm and has a lot of great ideas and fun mechanics. it's also the game that has one of my favorite portrayals of yoyos used as weapons. (second only to Bridget of Guilty Gear) and in my over 10 years of Terraria experience, i've come to tolerate its focus on crafting. it's really just sort of something i put up with so i can get back to the fun part. (playing the actual game) its extremely rare enemies and drops are pretty annoying, and it does get really grindy at times, but unless you're playing modded Terraria it never gets THAT bad. i do think that it has some good ideas though, such as having certain bosses drop items and materials that you need to craft new tools that are needed to progress futher, such as Eye of Cthulhu dropping Demonite, which is necessary to make Demonite tools, which let you mine through Demonstone and access new bosses you couldn't previously. i also really like the Tinkerer's Workshop, a crafting table that lets you consolidate accessories and make room for new ones. it's a fun time experimenting and seeing what the game allows you to mix together. but while i couldn't imagine Terraria without crafting, it isn't something i'm always praising or thinking about as being the best part of the game or whatever. however, there is one series where i think that does apply, and what's funny is that it started WAY before this whole trend of crafting in videogames.
as im sure any observant peruser of my site probably noticed by now, i'm quite a big fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series of JRPGs, and there's one aspect of them that always keeps me coming back for more. sure, the stories and characters are always great, but i think their take on monsters and party members has to be my favorite part of every game in the series. because far before Undertale made the idea of talking to monsters cool (note: i love Undertale, don't take that the wrong way) SMT was having the player not only negotiate with demons, but having them recruit them and fight alongside the player as a party member is always so cool and adds so much to each encounter. it's like if Pokemon was cool and was allowed to say "Damn." besides being able to recruit demons, however, let's say that you have a couple of demons you had gotten in the early game, but now that enemies are getting stronger you don't really have a use for them anymore. what should you do with those guys? you don't wanna just get rid of them, you've had them for a while and are pretty attached to them. well, reader, let me introduce you to the Cathedral of Shadows, where demons gather! here, you can fuse any two demons in your stock (as long as they are compatible) into a new, more powerful demon. this can lead to so many new possibilities, as well as addressing one of my main issues with crafting systems as a whole. in most games, most items used for crafting have no other purpose besides being used in a recipe. in Megaten, the "ingredients" for the fusion are other demons that can be used in battle, or for skills like healing or navigational magic. they're multi-purpose, serving function in both fusion AND battle. so yeah, while you may want to recruit a demon because it's good and you want it on your team, you might also want to have it because it fuses into something good. and when that demon starts to get outclassed by stronger foes, it doesn't just go to waste. you can just fuse it into something new and better! not to mention, any demon you fuse can also pass on its skills or stats in some way, making you think about which specific demon would be best for fusion. and its when you start diving through the online fusion calculator to see what the best fusion chain to make the powerful demon that you want that it starts to get really fun. i think all crafting systems should be more like this, giving the player uses for items or other such commodities outside of just their face value use cases.
so what did we learn today? well, crafting systems are evil, Animal Crossing New Horizons sucks, and Shin Megami Tensei is awesome.