Batteries add nothing positive to the game

[Meat]

I know this isn't going to be received well, especially by people who think "but SMT did it" is a good excuse.

The entire battery mechanic could and should be removed from the game. It doesn't make the game more interesting, more fun or more challenging. It's strictly a source of annoyance.

So what does this mechanic actually do?

It discourages exploration.
Because running out of batteries means you're basically lost and useless, you're encouraged to move as little as possible, meaning you end up running directly from anomaly to anomaly and only "exploring" by making constant repetitive trips.
Because batteries cost (a lot of) money and you can't seem to carry more than a tiny number of them anyway, you're also encouraged to avoid battles until you're near an anomaly. So, instead of naturally leveling as you explore dungeons, you end up neither exploring nor battling as you go. You're encouraged to repetitively walk back and forth near anomalies for experience, money and team building.

Let me preempt the "git gud" comments by emphasizing this: batteries don't make the game harder. This isn't a hard game. It's an annoying game that forces grinding in the most mind numbing way.

EDIT: It seems, despite me saying it clearly, that people still don't understand that this is not about difficulty. I'm not complaining that batteries make the game too hard. They don't. They don't add anything resembling an interesting challenge. You don't have to "reassure" me that the whole thing can be easily ignored because of this or that tactic or trick. That just makes the mechanic even worse. What's the point of it if it's so easy to ignore?
My goal here is to criticize the mechanic for being badly designed and badly implemented. The game is not hard. I haven't died at all in the whole time I played it and only ran out of power deliberately when stress testing the mechanic.

[Meshric]

Can't you just turn enemies into items and get free batteries off them?
That said, I loathe how it disables your minimap

[Mahoroa]

Let me guess: You're struggling exploring in the Palace of the Earth Spirits. This is indeed a skill issue. You have several options to maintain battery life. Option 1: Bring less sleepers in your party. I do not know the exact formula, but having more sleepers in your party consumes a larger amount of battery life for every step taken and their level probably plays a role in that equation. Option 2: Buy Handheld Batteries. Very self-explanatory. Option 3: Hi-jack sleepers and farm batteries. I am pretty sure Satori has Handheld batteries in her drop pool. Option 4: Buy the battery life upgrade from the terminal. You're likely not this far into the game, but this will help eventually. I can assure you the phone battery mechanic is a non-issue after clearing Chireiden.

[Meat]

Nobody is countering my claim that the mechanic adds nothing positive. If the best you can do is assure me that it's a non-issue, what is accomplished by having it in the game?
It adds nothing, it doesn't make the game more fun, having more or less battery doesn't affect anything in any meaningful way.
If it works at all, it only discourages you from dungeon crawling in this dungeon crawler.
If it's easily cheesed and ignored, why the hell is it in the game?

[🎃 Claire 🎃]

It adds tension to the game. Some of the most memorable moments to me in this game, and the entire etrian series, are when I'm stranded, I NEED to get home, but I can't. In etrian, this is when the party is almost defeated, and you learn you forgot to buy an ariadne thread. In this, it's when your battery runs out, and you're out of consumables. You might be in perfect condition yourself, but you're alone in the middle of the dungeon, and you have to get out. This can be accomplished by just warping out, but there were those times where i was woefully unprepared, and forgot to restock my items, and I had to use my memory to try to get out of the labyrinth and back to safety. Even the losses during these moments are fun to me, because there are so many "what-ifs" that I can almost never say the gameover was unfair.

[Meat]

Mahoroa above us says you have a skill issue, if you ran out of batteries at all.

Maybe it would be better if the game was more committed to this mechanic. It feels like the game was built first as a normal dungeon crawler then the battery stuff was just thrown on top without any thought or proper integration.
If the goal was to add tension maybe the batteries should more deeply linked to battle performance and exploration as well having more functions and interactivity than "you have it and the game runs as normal or you don't and the game doesn't run at all"
Maybe some skills cost power. Maybe some skills recover it. Maybe higher or lower power affects certain stats or skills. Maybe running out isn't an instant "you're f***ed" so you're not encouraged to use repetitive cheesy tricks and actually allow yourself to dungeon crawl in this dungeon crawler.

Etrian Odyssey doesn't encourage cheesy tricks and dull grinding. At least not to this ridiculous degree. In EO, you can fully explore a dungeon floor if you prepare well enough and handle battles efficiently. Etrian Odyssey creates tension with FOEs and traditional resource drain (HP and MP). It doesn't need a f***ing step limit.
This game here just goes "you can't walk too much or everything stops". It's not clever or deep.

[Meshric]

I agree in the sense that there should be more radiation areas. To make it more of a danger. Likewise poison is pretty damn useless.

[🎃 Claire 🎃]

Originally posted by Meat:

Mahoroa above us says you have a skill issue, if you ran out of batteries at all.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mahoroa that it's a skill issue. It's not an unfair situation the game is putting us in, it's something that we understand the rules of and can prepare around. Losing battery and being stranded is a skill issue, it's part of the game that needs to be managed and thought of.

[Meat]

I never said it was unfair. I explicitly said the battery doesn't make the game harder. It makes it annoying.
I haven't died in the game yet and, because of all the dull ways in which the game makes you play, I only ran out of power deliberately to test what happens.
It doesn't add challenge or anything remotely interesting. It only makes you play in dumb ways that make it dull.

[Steel the Kyōkotsu]

The lack of battery life is an incentive to visit the anomalies and save more often. It's not really that much of an annoyance if you're using all the mechanics at your disposal.

You're going to struggle with something until you start using *everything*.

Boss killing someone? Swap them out for someone who resists/blocks/absorbs the damage type.

Enemies clearing your buffs in standard fights? Prioritize killing them first.

Main character getting bodied constantly? Get a sleeper with the resistances you need for the area you're in, and do an affinity transfer.

Need to powerlevel a low level sleeper? Need items/money? Don't just add sleepers to your party, convert them into resources when you hijack them...

Don't want to go through the effort of redoing a favorite sleeper's skills? You can save their EXACT setup in the Database, and resummon them for a fee.

You have all the tools you need to play the game. You can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but it's going to cause you problems in the long run...


Have I made my point yet?

[o_O]

I actually love mechanics like this. Binding a resource or currency cost to movement can make things feel much more engaging; every decision has some amount of risk/reward or gameplay consequence, even if it isn't immediately apparent.

If a player is struggling with battery consumption the game provides options. It's not always necessary to walk around with a full party summoned. There are battery upgrades available from the terminal, items that instantly return you to the previous save point, and at least one grimoire that disables battery drain entirely.

If anything I think the game might be slightly too lenient with the battery mechanic; recharges are free and it's extremely rare to even use one of the consumable battery items, at least in my experience. Personally I would've preferred it if battery drain was a more frequent concern, but not everyone likes that level of restriction. The developers found a good balance imo.

[Kitsunin]

I think the battery mechanic is not big but is more positive than negative. Early on it teaches you that it's worth hijacking sleepers into items, as experimentation will make you realize Satori becomes a useful battery. Later on, it's not really a problem, but it encourages you to save often and conserve movement.

I don't find it annoying to manage.

[Brandon Sky]

Every early SMT game had MAG(netite) be the exact same resource. The EXACT same resource. You wanna easily keep your more powerful demons summoned for when a fight breaks out? Shell out more MAG. Or keep weaker demons or temporarily go solo to conserve it when you're strong enough. By the mid to late game, you're constantly maxing out your MAG from most random encounters giving you way more than you consume.
This game's solution, quite clearly, is to start you with that maxed out counter and ask you to conserve that as much as you can. Not only that, but there's less slots to burn when your party 90% of the time is 2 humans and 4 demon slots.
You are not a team of humans like most dungeon crawlers. It also does not discourage you from natural exploration, it discourages you from running back and forth in a loop grinding endlessly when now you don't gain your demon fuel back from standard fight rewards. Every good dungeon crawler will have mechanics to stop you from spending an hour grinding in the same area (Mystery Dungeon games kicking you out, Persona 3 with Death, Etrian Odyssey making you weave between FOE's to escape).
This kind of resource is only a pain early on when you don't have easy resources to recharge. That's the point. By the time combat gets harder, you're less and less worried about your resource consumption outside of battle and more during it.

[Meat]

Originally posted by Brandon Sky:

Every early SMT game had MAG(netite) be the exact same resource. The EXACT same resource. You wanna easily keep your more powerful demons summoned for when a fight breaks out? Shell out more MAG. Or keep weaker demons or temporarily go solo to conserve it when you're strong enough. By the mid to late game, you're constantly maxing out your MAG from most random encounters giving you way more than you consume.

I don't know if any of this is true as I haven't played SMT games. It's also irrelevant. We're not talking about SMT. We're talking about Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia. It doesn't matter how SMT did it. It matter how this game does it. And it does it poorly.

Originally posted by Brandon Sky:

This game's solution, quite clearly, is to start you with that maxed out counter and ask you to conserve that as much as you can. Not only that, but there's less slots to burn when your party 90% of the time is 2 humans and 4 demon slots.
You are not a team of humans like most dungeon crawlers.

You're just describing the game. You're not telling me how or why it's not terrible.

As I explained, the issue is that "to conserve that as much as you can" translates to "don't walk, don't fight, don't have fun. Otherwise the game itself will shut down"
I feel like this is worth emphasizing. The game wants you to limit yourself to weak parties and minimal movement. If you don't do that yourself, the game snatches it all away from you by force. Whether you're the one doing it or the game is the one doing it, either way you don't get to engage fully with the better parts of the game which are the exploration, the skills, the team building, the battling, etc.

Now my favorite part:

Originally posted by Brandon Sky:

It also does not discourage you from natural exploration, it discourages you from running back and forth in a loop grinding endlessly when now you don't gain your demon fuel back from standard fight rewards.

You're just saying the opposite of the truth without justifying it. The game DISCOURAGES natural exploration and ENCOURAGES you to run back and forth in a loop grinding endlessly.
Did you forget that exploration is exactly what drains your battery? The optimal solution is to neuter your party and avoid battles when you want to progress then, right before a boss fight, repetitively grind in a single hallway near an anomaly so you don't run out of battery in the process.

Originally posted by Brandon Sky:

Every good dungeon crawler will have mechanics to stop you from spending an hour grinding in the same area (Mystery Dungeon games kicking you out, Persona 3 with Death, Etrian Odyssey making you weave between FOE's to escape).

Funny you say that. Because this games does not have a mechanic to stop you from spending an hour grinding in the same area. Anomalies and the battery (which I should call the "step limit" since that's what it amounts to) encourage that exact behavior.
And what the hell are you talking about? FOE's don't stop you from grinding in EO. Those games have plenty of safe areas for you to run around in circles grinding. And that's not a problem because EO also doesn't encourage you to only do that.

Originally posted by Brandon Sky:

This kind of resource is only a pain early on when you don't have easy resources to recharge. That's the point. By the time combat gets harder, you're less and less worried about your resource consumption outside of battle and more during it.

Once again, telling me about how the mechanic becomes irrelevant, so I ask: "Why even have it?"

[SharkyNebula]

I thought it was funny how you couldn't look at the map after running out of batteries the one time it happened in palace of earth spirits. Not that big of a deal imo.

[o_O]

I'm confused OP, do you feel the battery is too restrictive or not restrictive enough?