This article was originally posted on March 5, 2010. We’re reposting it along with a bunch of small changes to update new thoughts on the game’s difficulty. Enjoy!

Difficulty adjustment (usually picking easy/medium/hard) is great as for making games appealing and usable by everyone. Really awesome games will adjust difficulty quietly and without being seen, either through dynamic difficulty adjustment or through choices made by the player. This past weekend I realized during the cgcmarathon that the original Final Fantasy, a Dungeons and Dragons inspired 8-bit classic on the original NES, had a great choice based difficulty adjustment system that let the user choose how hard they wanted the game to be at the very beginning of their quest! The only problem? That it isn’t clear at all. All of the critical decisions get made the first few minutes of the game at the “party select” screen, and there is no indication whatsoever as to how crucial these choices are or what the impact of the choices will be.

So how does difficulty adjustment work in Final Fantasy? Let’s examine, using math.

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. When you pick your party, just add up the value of each character.

5 – Fighter: Can soak up damage dealt by enemies, dish it pain consistently throughout the game, and is cheaper to equip than the mages.
3 – Black Belt: The cheapest character to equip and deadly in the second half of the game, this character loses points for being relatively worthless during the first half as he can’t take or deal much damage early on.
2 – Thief: A slightly less useful version of the Black Belt, except he never really gets good. The ninja upgrade isn’t really that much of a boon, and he remains the weakest fighting character.
3.5 – Red Mage: This guy can deal damage, wear some armor, and knows both white and black magic spells to boot. He’s very powerful in the early game, and while he gets weaker later on he still holds his own. He’s somewhat cheaper to equip than the other mages.
1 – White Mage: Can’t take a hit, can’t deal damage, very expensive to have in your party and counter intuitively healing isn’t super helpful in this game. This guy (girl?) sucks.
2 – Black Mage: Also can’t take a hit but at least can occasionally deal damage. Very expensive.

Once you have your total for the characters in the group, subtract these modifiers if they apply to how you are playing:

-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.
-2 – 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.

Got your total? Great! Check it against the list below to see how difficult playing through Final Fantasy will be. 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. Grind will be inevitable at some points.
9 – 12 points: Hard, and you’ll have to level a bit to get past certain 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!

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!

We’re taking part in the GAMBIT Complete Game-Completion Marathon in two weeks, it’s a fund raiser with all proceeds going to help the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. Over one weekend we’ll be spending tons of time playing some crazy games and trying to get people to donate to the cause. Here’s what we’ll be up to!

Games: It’s the Three Ring Circus!
1. Final Fantasy, All White Mage Run (NES): We will complete the entire Final Fantasy with the worst party possible, four white mages. No partial credit here; we only get points if we finish the game and defeat Chaos.
2. Mega Man 9 Challenge Run (XBLA/PSN/WiiWare): Mega Man 9 is a ridiculously hard game with 50 insane challenges that make the game that much harder. We will attempt to finish AT LEAST 40 of the 50 challenges, with extra credit for each achievement beyond 40.
3. Mario Kart Extravaganza (SNES, N64, GameCube, Wii): We will play through every 150cc cup in every console Mario Kart game. Our success will be based on the LOWEST trophy level we get; thus if we get 19 golds and 1 silver then our performance is rated silver. We will be trying for all golds!

Bonus: While we play we will blog, pontificate, and generally do interesting stuff in front of the webcam for people following online.

Extra New Bonus! World famous Fire Hose artist extraordinaire Jacques Pena will be making incredible video game art of the games we are playing and taking requests during the weekend. Contributors who donate a certain amount (probably $100) will be getting free one-of-a-kind art as a thank you! Details coming soon.

If you want to donate go to our page on Partners in Health, or just click on the big thermometer up top!

Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!

On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.

That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.

The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!

Dungeons and Dragons is something that I’ve always wanted to play, but in shame have never really gotten around to it. Sure, I’ve played variants like Final Fantasy (the original) and Baldur’s Gate II, and last summer I even played around two minutes of an awesome campaign headed up by Josh Diaz at GAMBIT, but I can’t say that I’ve honestly ever spent time with it.

Well, no more! I’m planning on starting a new campaign using the new 4th edition rules. And I need people to join me! 4-6 people, specifically. So I thought I’d have some fun and invite you, loyal Fire Hose blog reader, to play. Want to join? Here are the requirements:

• Must live in Boston/Cambridge
• Must be free on Monday nights, from 7-10pm
• Must be super awesome, and have fought dinosaurs before
• Ideally we’ll have a mix of guys and girls, game developers and non-game developers

If you’re interested shoot me an e-mail! You can use my super secret address of my first name at firehosegames.com to profess your desire to join, and if you make the cut we’ll get you set up.