IENANENPANLBCMO
Does that mean anything to you?
It refers to FFVII, and specifically to a challenge of playing the game with the following conditions:
Initial Equipment – You can never change a character’s armor or weapons from the stuff they come with.
No Accessories – You can never use accessories. If a character comes with one equipped, it has to be unequipped at the first opportunity.
No Escaping – Obvious.
No Physical Attacks – does not just refer to “attack”, but also to anything that is a ‘physical’ type attack, including items such as Grenades or command materia such as 4-Cut.
No Limit Breaks – take a guess.
Command Materia Only – You can only use command materia. And obviously quite a few are ruled out by other rules.
You can’t actually do this challenge from the start of the game, because you have no way to hurt enemies until you can start learning Enemy Skills. In essence, it’s an “Enemy Skills Only” play. Anyway, it’s an extreme example – my point is to highlight how a self-imposed challenge can add life to a game, or possibly change it entirely. I’m good – very good – at FFVII, but I sincerely doubt I could do this challenge without tearing my hair out until I’m as bald as Dr. Robotnik.
I have done other challenges in other games though. Sometimes games encourage something in particular, but don’t necessarily require it. You can usually shoot or slice your way through what is ostensibly a ‘stealth’ game such as Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, or Hitman. Playing through stealthily is usually better rewarded is all. Imposing the challenge on yourself can make things a lot more exciting though. Sometimes this is a fairly loose arrangement for me – such as only ever going to war in Europa Universalis when I have a realistic casus belli and suchlike. Sometimes it’s a bit more extreme, like the time I played Civ IV and was not allowed to have more than one military unit per city (Funnily, happiness problems were larger than military ones for the most part). I can be especially enjoyable in more freeform games such as Dwarf Fortress, where there aren’t any real tangible objectives in-game, and making your own
In RPGs, because I grew up on some truly spergy, grinding-centric games, it’s really hard for me to limit my levels or anything. But I did a Pokemon play where I only used my starter Pokemon, that was interesting when I came up against stuff he was weak against.
Are any of you fans of particular challenges? Have you played through anything with challenges? Do you have any particular ones you’d recommend to others to enhance their enjoyment of an otherwise-completed game?
Excellent timing. I’m literally, as-we-speak, in the midst of the Four Job Fiesta challenge of Final Fantasy V.
The details can be found here: http://www.letsplaying.com/FF5FF/
And it’s adding quite a bit of spice to one of the few games I am simultaneously good enough at to sleep through, and enjoy enough to take on challenges in.
(My set are Black Mage, Time Mage, Geomancer, Samurai)
I (and a few other Blog Azeroth twitterati) are currently in the midst of participating in the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta (or FF5FJF). Details are here, but the tl;dr version is:
– You may only use Freelancer until you get your first job from the Wind Crystal.
– Once you get the first set of jobs, you send a tweet to @FF5ForFutures with the #reg hashtag to start, and a bot picks a Wind Crystal job for you. All your party members immediately switch to that job (with a small exception for White Mage – you can continue to use one Freelancer).
– At the second set of jobs, you once again send a tweet with a key hashtag and the bot picks a second job. One party member must be the job from the first crystal, and one party member must be the job from the second crystal, and the other two can be whatever.
– At the third set, you get a third job chosen for you. Now you need one of each of the 3 assigned jobs in your party, and the 4th person is whatever.
– At the final set of jobs, you are assigned a fourth job, and you must have one of each of those jobs in your party at all times – though it does not have to be the same character at all times (for example, if you have a Beastmaster, White Mage, Samurai, and Ranger in your party, you can swap which characters are currently the White Mage and Samurai, but you couldn’t change them both to the same job).
– Those four jobs are the only jobs you’re permitted to use for the rest of the game.
So far it’s proven to be an interesting challenge, and it’s actually a lot of fun. It’s going to be more difficult later – FFV has several sections that are designed around the idea of you mastering a mix of magic and physical attacks. Luckily the worst offender (Fork Tower) is pretty much skippable unless you need to pick up more than eight of the legendary Sealed Weapons, or two of the most powerful spells in the game; since my job roster actually cuts me completely off of mages of all kinds, I actually don’t have to visit Fork Tower at all…
… but I might do it anyway, just for giggles.
Interesting. The only thing like that I’ve done that I can think of is in WoW, levelling a Holy Priest, with no damaging shadow spells but SWP. So the only things you can cast to do any damage are Holy Fire, Smite, and SWP, which all do terrible DPS. And wand.
This was back in Vanilla, before the LFD tool let you jump into a dungeon instantly. And before they nerfed the EXP needed to level up. And before dual spec. So it was all mostly questing.
It was on an RP basis, because the shadows spells were all evil, and a good Holy priest would never use evil spells.
Questing was difficult, but fun. A lot of healing myself though, lol.
FFTactics SCC (Single Class Challenge).
Get to your selected Job before Dorter. Everyone must be the selected Job. No one may use abilities (A/S/R/M) outside of the selected Job.
There’s more to it than that (level caps per chapter, primarily), but that’s it. I love doing a SCC for a random job every year or so just to keep my FFT skills sharp. Some of them are absolutely brutal (BLM, Archer, fucking Calculator), some of them are pretty relaxed (Chemist, WHM), and others have a good bit of “oh god how” and then a evening off endgame (Samurai, Mediator, etc). Great fun.
The latest one I’ve read about is the WoW Ironman Challenge:
The Rules
1. Use only white/grey items.
2. No spending talent points. No specialization at level 10. (Regular skill training is fine.)
2. No Primary or Secondary Professions other than First Aid.
3. No means of XP boosting (No Recruit-A-Friend, No Guild, and obviously no Heirlooms)
4. No consumable bonuses (food, potions, elixirs, etc) – Rogue Poisons allowed
5. No enchants.
6. No Groups. (Since clarification was requested: That means no dungeons, no Dungeon Finder, no battlegrounds, no anything that puts you in a group and no grouping up with people to quest or anything.)
7. No Death Knights.
8. No Glyphs
My favourite challenge has to be the Halo: Reach LASO weekly challenges, where you have to compete a level on Legendary (The hardest difficulty) with All Skulls On. The skulls introduce various effects ranging from making the enemies have double health, to turning off your minimap, having your shields only regen if you melee an enemy, and having to restart the level from the beginning if you die. LASO challenges are crazily difficult, but have massive credit payouts if you manage to complete them.
I have no commentary to this except to say that you have excellent taste in villains, and therefore Pike is permitted to keep you.