Re: [暗黒郷物語]トビ姫 -Inter Breed-
Launching:
Pretty much true as far as breeding is concerned.
Game:
I actually don't know what MGS stands for.
I personally don't consider visual novels to be a game, so yeah, I'm bit biased. (Probably very biased).
My measure of game-ness depends on how much control I have over the characters, so visual novels get the cut. It doesn't mean I don't enjoy them, but at the same time I don't get as invested in it as, say, a Civ game.
Alternatively you could say that all forms of media do one thing, and that is to tell a story, and as a result I don't consider a form of media where it *only* tells a story to qualify as something...more.
It could be worse:
I don't like using this argument either, but a lot of times when someone has an idea for an improvement it falls into the trap of "Well I want this for myself, therefore it is balanced."
This trap matters a lot less (if at all) for single player games, since every suggestion is made to benefit the player, and there's only one of them, but at the same time...this is why games are becoming more "casual" nowadays; the reward is comparatively easier to get to in order to satisfy the player base faster, and honestly that's what you're looking for: An easier time to get to the end.
Nothing wrong with that, because fuck grinding.
Fuck grinding with a long spiky auto-rotating pole. I might be biased. I dunno.
Frustration:
There's really two kinds of frustration: The idiot game design frustration and the "Oh god I was SO CLOSE" frustration.
The first kind is pretty easily seen in some old-school games (like, say, Daikatana, just to go after the easiest target).
The second kind is more Dark Souls esque, where the game is...I heard someone call it something like "brutally fair" or something. Don't quite remember (again, going after the easiest target).
I would say that this game is pretty intelligently designed; at no point did I feel like the game unfairly took a victory from me or did I fail to receive something I should have otherwise received...calling it a cheap difficulty increase is a little...I dunno. Everything can be regarded as a cheap difficulty increase (like, say, the presence of stats and levels) so it's not much of an argument.
It's usually pretty hard to distinguish between what the game has done wrong though, and what counts as "idiot design" relies a lot on what is considered "good" design by modern standards.
Forgiving Game:
I thought I made a huge discovery when I first figured out you could do the whole air-attack business (and then I went back to read the first post and I was like oh

)
End:
I'm no longer playing it for the same reasons. Good game, good mechanics, but skimpy on actual content.
(If this post doesn't seem to make sense, I'm not exactly fully focused on making a...I dunno, something something)
I guess what we can ask is..."if we implement this mechanic, what will it give the player?" (this being any mechanic, really). Most people who design a game don't take "Because they'll stop playing our game faster" as a response.
And if your response is "Well then I can go and play something else more fun" then maybe you should be doing that more fun thing to begin with. ._.