Quests!

[Rufus]

Originally Posted by Tyhm

Despite that I somehow have lots of hearts and a L2 sword, the baddies seem to have doubled in durability to match...and my shield apparently has a weakness for arrows...and the arrow machines can't be set on fire to make a constant flamethrower, though I suppose that was always a little cheesy...

That's actually a really good point and I didn't look at it that way until now. On Graal in general I have always seen baddies at face value with their difficulty levels depending on their generic archetypes, such as the cute little frogs to a barbaric Lizardon. I don't believe that this kind of difficulty curve makes for good design though.

The level progression does currently indicate difficulty, with more baddies of higher "skills" being swarmed in areas as you progress, but having certain types indicating difficulty is not really a good way of making dungeons original, nor does it encourage a consistency in the common enemy specific to the dungeon you're in. The different quests should work on a difficulty curve showing an increase when you gain more assets and resources such as hearts and items to deal with it, so with this quest being one of the forced first, it probably shouldn't be as hard as it is like you said.

I believe that in addition to the raising difficulty as the player progresses, the enemies should reflect that, yet be different in aesthetics, abilities and types per-quest which would hopefully make the quests feel a little less generic. Sardon might have hired some heavies to guard his tower while enslaving some Lizardons that aren't going to question his ethics to place in the more top secret areas, that's cool. To then go and make the Lizardon race seem more powerful further down the line as an enemy, even though they can be enslaved by the first boss, it kind of looses its viability. This kind of depth in baddies wasn't implimented in the old Classic quests though, but I do believe it's probably more possible to do now than ever before. Well, maybe not with this team.