https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/05/my-friend-totoriol

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/10/05/my-friend-totoriol

It’s not even a tutorial!  Like, it one of the first things you have to do is raise money by playing minigames BUT you can’t make enough money just by playing all the mini-games once.  No, you have to grind by playing terrible minigames over and over.  And your reward is long cut scenes between characters that will almost certainly vanish forever after you get through this section.  

You actually don’t need to grind for money—I think you just need to play one, and then talk to the right person. But you can also advance the story by grinding money enough.

The intro bit is in fact super dumb, but it also “is” a “tutorial”.

On some level this is exactly why elixirs are in the meme.

Elixirs aren’t so powerful that they’ll win a battle single-handedly. If they were, they would be much less common.

But they are slightly better than many of your other healing options. They guarantee a full heal. And they restore MP and HP at the same time, which can be very valuable. (I don’t know how you play, but in boss battles I often run my casters out of MP. Sometimes several times in a row.)

So they’re useful, but not insane and never necessary. That means at any given time, you don’t need to use them.

But especially by the end game, they’re available enough that you’ll have many. And you’re not in the habit of using them, and you don’t use them, even when they would be useful. You’re fighting the final boss, and you need to heal and restore MP, but it doesn’t occur to you to throw an elixer, because they’re not part of the option set you have in mind.

More purely rational play would throw elixirs pretty much every time you hit the case where they’re useful. Because, as you say, it’s not that often, and you generally get enough elixirs to throw them whenever you’d get use out of them. But people still don’t.

Which Final Fantasies did you find yourself running your casters out of MP in routinely? I found it was actively difficult to do so in a single fight for most of the game in 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12 (MP wasn’t a thing in 8, of course). Maybe FF4? It’s been a long time since I played, but I recall MP being pretty scarce in 4.

I know in 5 and 9 I ran out of MP regularly. I probably would have in 6 too if osmose weren’t so incredibly fucking broken in that game.

I mean, I mostly didn’t run out of MP, but that’s because my entire combat strategy was built around MP regulation. In 9, I generally kept Freya in the party just to cast the “everyone in the party gains MP back” spell every turn. On the final battle I couldn’t get away with burning every turn that way, so I threw a bunch of elixirs.

In 5, you can easily drop like 2-300 MP in a single turn, with something like Quick-Bahamut-Bahamut. (Even without time magic, there are lots of ways to drop well over 50MP in a turn.) To the extent you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re playing around the resource scarcity. In a battle where you want to pull out the stops, it really does make sense to just dump all your MP and elixir back up.

(Sure, there are other options. You can osmose. You can ether with one character and cure3 with another, or something. But those are all trading away tempo to save elixirs. And the whole point is, you don’t need to do that, you have plenty of elixirs.)

In 7 I genuinely don’t think I ran out of MP much. 7 is not a game that really leans into magic use in my experience. But I bet you could build an effective character around like Ultima spam that would be effective and benefit from elixir use. It just makes more sense to build around physical attack.

(I haven’t played 10 or 12 yet; they’re on the list. Plan to buy a PS4 after the PS5 comes out.)

Okay, but how much of what you just mentioned is relevant to the first, say, 75% of the games in question? Not saying that endgame strategy isn’t important too, but it does seem like most of the ways to rapidly trade MP for advantages in battle are basically endgame-only, and aren’t relevant to the majority of the time one actually spends playing the game. (Not to mention that often by the endgame you have enough elixirs that the hoarding instinct is kind of gone anyway; “what if I only have 20 instead of 25″ doesn’t really have as much urgency to it.)

Also, several entries in the series (6 and 10, off the top of my head, but I think there’s another one or two as well) have endgame gear that drastically reduces MP consumption, making the whole question irrelevant for anyone who has it equipped.

Huh, I’ve always thought of this as primarily an endgame meme. (“But you can’t buy ethers!” “This is the final boss!” “I only have 37 of them!”) If you find that the hoarding instinct is gone in the endgame, you’re pretty unusual.

Like, certainly there are lots of situations where it’s not worthwhile to use an elixir. But once I started letting myself use them, I found plenty of places where it made sense to just throw one, rather than trying to conserve MP, or juggle whether I wanted to heal or get more MP.

I will say that this is partly a mindset thing; this sort of thing also probably makes me more willing to just dump giant nukes on everything. (And obviously the meme isn’t just about elixirs; most players in most games under-use consumables relative to optimal play.) But in the specific example, yeah, giving myself permission to just use ethers when it would be convenient definitely changed my play, and I definitely use them.

(And as an aside, generally you don’t want to use the MP economizing equipment if you can avoid it; the other endgame accessories are super powerful. You get more punch for equipping other crazybroken equipment and just using the damn elixir. As much as I was obsessed with MP reduction as a kid.)

On some level this is exactly why elixirs are in the meme.

Elixirs aren’t so powerful that they’ll win a battle single-handedly. If they were, they would be much less common.

But they are slightly better than many of your other healing options. They guarantee a full heal. And they restore MP and HP at the same time, which can be very valuable. (I don’t know how you play, but in boss battles I often run my casters out of MP. Sometimes several times in a row.)

So they’re useful, but not insane and never necessary. That means at any given time, you don’t need to use them.

But especially by the end game, they’re available enough that you’ll have many. And you’re not in the habit of using them, and you don’t use them, even when they would be useful. You’re fighting the final boss, and you need to heal and restore MP, but it doesn’t occur to you to throw an elixer, because they’re not part of the option set you have in mind.

More purely rational play would throw elixirs pretty much every time you hit the case where they’re useful. Because, as you say, it’s not that often, and you generally get enough elixirs to throw them whenever you’d get use out of them. But people still don’t.

I suspect trying to play a game while keeping a running commentary going makes it more difficult to use other parts of your brain, including the part for reading and the part for retaining information

This is fair. People who are streaming are having to juggle extra thoughts and that can make it harder to keep track of stuff.

rustingbridges

the issue is, so much of the time you really don’t have to, and it ain’t worth it

This, on the other hand, is utterly incomprehensible.  (1) Why are you playing games with a bunch of text you’re not reading?  (2) Reading and remembering text is easy and free.  Lots of puzzles are genuinely hard, but “noticing the words that were on the screen” doesn’t seem like it should be one of them.

I mean I tried the sequel LOTR Ubisoft-alike because it was free on PlayStation and it was just so clearly second-rate. Or like, 1.5th. Like not an AAA game, maybe AA.

And that included the writing and direction, I guess they think these things need a story to stitch the segments together but I ended up skipping every cutscene entirely, and then dropped into the mission if I didn’t have objective text or an arrow on screen or an obvious path to take (be it like thru a cavern or “you have a new item and a particular special object type in front of you, use one on the other”) then after like 15 sec there would probably be an audio cue of your character remembering what to do

And isn’t that shit awful?

I mean, it’s not much worse than having to watch badly acted cut-scenes. Can we make a rule that all cutscenes need to have text-dialog replacements?

But I don’t want reminders popping up in the middle of my gameplay, you told me the objective already, you don’t need to tell me twice.

(I mean, clearly you need to tell many people more than twice. But it’s just a completely different way of relating to in-game text than I have and it baffles me. The text is the exciting part!)

(Also baffling: not knowing exactly where you have and haven’t been on the map. Also baffling: not checking the map every couple of minutes to make sure you’re not missing details.)

On some level this is exactly why elixirs are in the meme.

Elixirs aren’t so powerful that they’ll win a battle single-handedly. If they were, they would be much less common.

But they are slightly better than many of your other healing options. They guarantee a full heal. And they restore MP and HP at the same time, which can be very valuable. (I don’t know how you play, but in boss battles I often run my casters out of MP. Sometimes several times in a row.)

So they’re useful, but not insane and never necessary. That means at any given time, you don’t need to use them.

But especially by the end game, they’re available enough that you’ll have many. And you’re not in the habit of using them, and you don’t use them, even when they would be useful. You’re fighting the final boss, and you need to heal and restore MP, but it doesn’t occur to you to throw an elixer, because they’re not part of the option set you have in mind.

More purely rational play would throw elixirs pretty much every time you hit the case where they’re useful. Because, as you say, it’s not that often, and you generally get enough elixirs to throw them whenever you’d get use out of them. But people still don’t.

Which Final Fantasies did you find yourself running your casters out of MP in routinely? I found it was actively difficult to do so in a single fight for most of the game in 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12 (MP wasn’t a thing in 8, of course). Maybe FF4? It’s been a long time since I played, but I recall MP being pretty scarce in 4.

I know in 5 and 9 I ran out of MP regularly. I probably would have in 6 too if osmose weren’t so incredibly fucking broken in that game.

I mean, I mostly didn’t run out of MP, but that’s because my entire combat strategy was built around MP regulation. In 9, I generally kept Freya in the party just to cast the “everyone in the party gains MP back” spell every turn. On the final battle I couldn’t get away with burning every turn that way, so I threw a bunch of elixirs.

In 5, you can easily drop like 2-300 MP in a single turn, with something like Quick-Bahamut-Bahamut. (Even without time magic, there are lots of ways to drop well over 50MP in a turn.) To the extent you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re playing around the resource scarcity. In a battle where you want to pull out the stops, it really does make sense to just dump all your MP and elixir back up.

(Sure, there are other options. You can osmose. You can ether with one character and cure3 with another, or something. But those are all trading away tempo to save elixirs. And the whole point is, you don’t need to do that, you have plenty of elixirs.)

In 7 I genuinely don’t think I ran out of MP much. 7 is not a game that really leans into magic use in my experience. But I bet you could build an effective character around like Ultima spam that would be effective and benefit from elixir use. It just makes more sense to build around physical attack.

(I haven’t played 10 or 12 yet; they’re on the list. Plan to buy a PS4 after the PS5 comes out.)

On some level this is exactly why elixirs are in the meme.

Elixirs aren’t so powerful that they’ll win a battle single-handedly. If they were, they would be much less common.

But they are slightly better than many of your other healing options. They guarantee a full heal. And they restore MP and HP at the same time, which can be very valuable. (I don’t know how you play, but in boss battles I often run my casters out of MP. Sometimes several times in a row.)

So they’re useful, but not insane and never necessary. That means at any given time, you don’t need to use them.

But especially by the end game, they’re available enough that you’ll have many. And you’re not in the habit of using them, and you don’t use them, even when they would be useful. You’re fighting the final boss, and you need to heal and restore MP, but it doesn’t occur to you to throw an elixer, because they’re not part of the option set you have in mind.

More purely rational play would throw elixirs pretty much every time you hit the case where they’re useful. Because, as you say, it’s not that often, and you generally get enough elixirs to throw them whenever you’d get use out of them. But people still don’t.

Which Final Fantasies did you find yourself running your casters out of MP in routinely? I found it was actively difficult to do so in a single fight for most of the game in 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 12 (MP wasn’t a thing in 8, of course). Maybe FF4? It’s been a long time since I played, but I recall MP being pretty scarce in 4.

I know in 5 and 9 I ran out of MP regularly. I probably would have in 6 too if osmose weren’t so incredibly fucking broken in that game.

I mean, I mostly didn’t run out of MP, but that’s because my entire combat strategy was built around MP regulation. In 9, I generally kept Freya in the party just to cast the “everyone in the party gains MP back” spell every turn. On the final battle I couldn’t get away with burning every turn that way, so I threw a bunch of elixirs.

In 5, you can easily drop like 2-300 MP in a single turn, with something like Quick-Bahamut-Bahamut. (Even without time magic, there are lots of ways to drop well over 50MP in a turn.) To the extent you’re not doing that, it’s because you’re playing around the resource scarcity. In a battle where you want to pull out the stops, it really does make sense to just dump all your MP and elixir back up.

(Sure, there are other options. You can osmose. You can ether with one character and cure3 with another, or something. But those are all trading away tempo to save elixirs. And the whole point is, you don’t need to do that, you have plenty of elixirs.)

In 7 I genuinely don’t think I ran out of MP much. 7 is not a game that really leans into magic use in my experience. But I bet you could build an effective character around like Ultima spam that would be effective and benefit from elixir use. It just makes more sense to build around physical attack.

(I haven’t played 10 or 12 yet; they’re on the list. Plan to buy a PS4 after the PS5 comes out.)

Okay, but how much of what you just mentioned is relevant to the first, say, 75% of the games in question? Not saying that endgame strategy isn’t important too, but it does seem like most of the ways to rapidly trade MP for advantages in battle are basically endgame-only, and aren’t relevant to the majority of the time one actually spends playing the game. (Not to mention that often by the endgame you have enough elixirs that the hoarding instinct is kind of gone anyway; “what if I only have 20 instead of 25″ doesn’t really have as much urgency to it.)

Also, several entries in the series (6 and 10, off the top of my head, but I think there’s another one or two as well) have endgame gear that drastically reduces MP consumption, making the whole question irrelevant for anyone who has it equipped.

Huh, I’ve always thought of this as primarily an endgame meme. (“But you can’t buy ethers!” “This is the final boss!” “I only have 37 of them!”) If you find that the hoarding instinct is gone in the endgame, you’re pretty unusual.

Like, certainly there are lots of situations where it’s not worthwhile to use an elixir. But once I started letting myself use them, I found plenty of places where it made sense to just throw one, rather than trying to conserve MP, or juggle whether I wanted to heal or get more MP.

I will say that this is partly a mindset thing; this sort of thing also probably makes me more willing to just dump giant nukes on everything. (And obviously the meme isn’t just about elixirs; most players in most games under-use consumables relative to optimal play.) But in the specific example, yeah, giving myself permission to just use ethers when it would be convenient definitely changed my play, and I definitely use them.

(And as an aside, generally you don’t want to use the MP economizing equipment if you can avoid it; the other endgame accessories are super powerful. You get more punch for equipping other crazybroken equipment and just using the damn elixir. As much as I was obsessed with MP reduction as a kid.)

Huh. I’ve mostly seen it as a meme about the whole course of the game: you get an elixir, and you’ve only got one, then you get a few by mid-game but you still don’t really want to waste them, then it’s the final boss fight and you have 37. Puzzling.

As for MP reduction gear: it depends on the game. Isn’t gem box/economizer pretty much the preferred setup for your main caster in FF6, e.g.? I don’t recall there being much in the way of other strong caster relics, and 1 MP cost winds up saving you a lot of turns recouping MP on quick/4x ultima casts. As for FF10, gear can have as many as four abilities on it, and the ultimate weapons for both your main black mage and your main white mage/summoner have 1 MP cost on them, so it’s not like you’re looking at much opportunity cost there.

Can’t speak about FFX, since I haven’t played it. Still on the list!

For FF6, there’s some very good caster gear that people just don’t notice; Earrings are early-game equipment and still great in the endgame, since they’re like a 25% damage boost. Or you can get immunities, or you can boost magic evade, which is crazy broken.

In general I think it depends on your optimization target. (As optimization always does!) If you’re overleveled, you’re hitting quad-nine on every attack, and then gem box/economizer makes sense as a way you can just do that all the time. (And you can rely on the one character with that combo equipped and not worry about what the other characters are doing.)

If you’re trying to no-grind finish the game with a low-level party, which is the way I generally try to play, then you actually want the extra damage and defense, and giving up a slot to gold hairpins or economizers or whatever is costly.

I suspect trying to play a game while keeping a running commentary going makes it more difficult to use other parts of your brain, including the part for reading and the part for retaining information

This is fair. People who are streaming are having to juggle extra thoughts and that can make it harder to keep track of stuff.

rustingbridges

the issue is, so much of the time you really don’t have to, and it ain’t worth it

This, on the other hand, is utterly incomprehensible.  (1) Why are you playing games with a bunch of text you’re not reading?  (2) Reading and remembering text is easy and free.  Lots of puzzles are genuinely hard, but “noticing the words that were on the screen” doesn’t seem like it should be one of them.

Why are you playing games with a bunch of text you’re not reading?

because I want to play the game

it’s very possible for a fun game to also include great reams of text I don’t care about and don’t need to consume in order to play the game. I’d hardly call it free, as I value my time

So part of this is about the kind of games I play, and to a certain extent the kind I’m talking about. I play turn-based strategy games, text-heavy RPGs, and adventure/puzzle games like the 2D Zelda games. “Read the text and figure out what you’re supposed to do next” is the game.

(And definitely part of what I’m interacting with is people where that’s not their primary genre. And part of it is that I think this has become less common as time has advanced, so younger/newer gamers don’t think of that as a primary gameplay mode.)

But also, in this context, I don’t think of reading as taking up time. I’m going to read the text faster than most games let me scroll through it. If they put the text on the screen, I almost definitely know what it says. Reading on this scale just…doesn’t seem like a time-bound activity to me?

But it’s most confusing when I know that the player has read the words, but isn’t processing them. “Go to the lake at the river’s source”. Goes to lake at the river’s sink.

And honestly, part of this is that I’m the opposite of ADHD. If I have a stated goal, it’s really hard to knock me away from that; if I’m in the middle of a task and get temporarily interrupted, I will be genuinely uncomfortable until I can get back to finishing whatever it was I was doing. So if the game says “Go to the eastern shore of the lake”, and the player says “okay, I need to go to the eastern shore of the lake”, I kind of viscerally don’t understand how they can forget that that’s where they’re going.

There’s a textpost going around that says something like “I like video games because they let me live out my greatest fantasies. Like being assigned a task and then completing that task.” And I didn’t get it when I read it. I thought the joke was about how games are super mundane and just have you doing the exact same thing you do in the rest of your life.