Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) is something that has been popping up a decent amount in the video game world recently; games that automatically, or through player input, adjust the difficulty to make games easier or harder to play are appealing because they make titles usable by large ranges of the population. I realized this past weekend, while going nuts with the cgcmarathon, that it’s been around for a while and that the ORIGINAL Final Fantasy, a Dungeons and Dragons inspired 8-bit classic on the original NES, had a great self-DDA system that let the user choose how hard they wanted the game to be at the very beginning of the game! The only problem is that it isn’t clear at all that is what’ s happening, since it is the “party select” screen, and doesn’t give any hints about how hard it will make the game.

So how does Self-DDA work in Final Fantasy? Let’s examine, with this easy to reference formula.

How to determine game difficulty in Final Fantasy based on party make up

When choosing your party in Final Fantasy, there are six characters to choose from. I’ve assigned them numbers here based on their usefulness:

5 – Fighter:Can soak up damage, dish it out consistently throughout the game, and is cheaper than the mages.
3 – Black Belt: Cheap and damage dealing at higher levels, this character loses points for not being able to take a hit and for being relatively worthless in battle until around level 10 or so.
2 – Thief:A slightly less useful version of the Black Belt, except he never really gets good.
3.5 – Red Mage:Can deal damage, wear some armor, and knows both white and black magic spells to boot. A bit cheaper than his white and black variant counterparts.
1 – White Mage:Can’t take a hit, can’t deal damage, very expensive and his healing isn’t super helpful. This guy (girl?) sucks.
2 – Black Mage:Also can’t take a hit but at least can occasionally deal damage. Very expensive.

Modifiers:
-3 – No Magic: If you’ve got no mages in your party, subtract 3 from the total points. Magic is generally less useful than attacking but has a knack of pulling you out of a hard battle here and there.
-3 – No Class Change: Not getting the rat tail and doing a class change makes the end game harder as there will be weapons, armor, and magic that your characters can’t use. The end of the game is somewhat easier than the beginning though, so it’s not as damming as you might think.

Once you’ve made your party, add up the total number of points from your four characters and check against the list below. The difficulty level assumes that the player has a basic knowledge of what to do in the game but is by no means an expert who knows all the game’s secrets.

16+ points: Easy, grind free playing. Just walk through the game and kill anything in your path!
13 – 15 points: Medium difficulty, it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge.
9 – 12 points: Hard, and you’ll have to grind at points, but doable.
8 points or less: Grind-tastic. Enjoy your hard game full of pain, disappointment, and failure.

That’s it! Pick your party and you are ready to go, knowing that you have defined how difficult your game will be.

My “I want to take it easy and not have to grind at all” party? It’s these guys.

The party I played with during the CGC Marathon was probably the worst one possible. SCREW YOU, ALL WHITE MAGE PARTY!

There aren’t that many statistics on WiiWare, PSN, and XBLA sales out there, and it is very hard to draw a straight comparison between the different platforms. Simon Carless gave a great talk at GDC where he summed up his findings on the state of sales, but we wanted something a little easier to read at a glance.

Enter Dave Nelson, our resident Sloanie (MIT MBA) who took the time to dig up some sales stats on all three platfroms. For good measure Dave threw in some figures on Steam and iPhone sales too, just for comparison’s sake. The work is great, so we thought we’d post it here. Great job Dave!

Full chart is available here, after the jump.

DISCLAIMER: We don’t promise these numbers are right, so take them with a grain of salt. If you want the real numbers go to the companies and ask them!