


Part of the beauty of the Chrono Trigger New Game+ was precisely that you could breeze your way through the linear early game. If I’m going to need to complete this character’s sidequests in order to get the levels I need to beat the Dark Lord, blowing him off to get the special ending could lock me out of getting any ending at all because I won’t be able to kill the final boss.įor games with multiple endings, scaling up difficulty on New Game+ is, in effect, defeating the purpose. This is especially true if the story elements interplay with the gameplay by providing combat and exploration bonuses, like extra companions in Fallout 4 or paragade points in Mass Effect. This, in turn, encourages players to play it safe and try to optimize success, even if doing so is boring. This is no more true than in New Game+ modes that increase difficulty the distance between levels becomes bigger and you have to grind even longer just to stay on top of the main story quest. Rarely do modern RPGs scale at a linear level to the player, the way SNES classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI did most require the player to pause their story progression in pursuit of extra experience points to stay on top of the level curve. Some New Game+ modes increase difficulty to keep this early section fresh, but this just means you have to spend even longer on this part of the game that offers no choices that affect the ending - which is why we came to do a fresh playthrough in the first place. But there’s a disconnect that arises when the game then demands that the player repeat the early game, which is totally linear and often contains lots of story exposition you already know. But today I want to talk about the original New Game+, the one that trivialized the gameplay in order for the player to freely explore alternate endings on their own terms.Ī lot of modern RPGs have multiple endings, encouraging repeat playthroughs. More contemporary iterations on the concept have altered and tweaked the idea, with more notable versions, like the Legend of Zelda series’s “Hero Mode” and Borderlands “True/Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode” scaling up difficulty on a second playthrough. The first recorded instance of the term “New Game+” was in 1995’s Chrono Trigger, where the option carried over almost all of the player’s progression, leaving them horrendously overpowered.
