Just like real life, sometimes the best things in games take a lot of hard work before the investment pays off. And just like in real life, sometimes this sucks. In this article, Adam Perry figuratively dissects the Magikarp and the pitfalls of designing one.
Anyone who was introduced to the Pokémon franchise in its first installment will probably remember a man who offers to sell you a MAGIKARP for five hundred Poké-dollars. If you had no outside exposure to the creatures, you might have reasoned (as I did) that anything with "magik" in its name had to have some pretty cool powers.
Nowadays, it's common knowledge that Magikarp is a joke: when you first obtain it, it has only one move, and that move does nothing. Much later, it will eventually learn one of the weakest attack moves in the game. Later still, it evolves into Gyarados, a powerful sea monster who remains one of the best non-unique creatures in the series even fifteen years later. The creature's metamorphosis from weakling to powerhouse is perhaps emblematic of the series as a whole, both in the sense that the game universe is filled with monsters that the player is encouraged to love even if they first seem worthless and in the sense that it takes you a long time to get a creature you can actually use competitively. (The series would later revisit this pattern in an even more annoying fashion with Feebas and Milotic, where it takes you more work to produce a generally inferior monster. Gotta catch 'em all!)
The Magikarp pattern shows up in a surprising number of games. Final Fantasy III DS has the Onion Knight class, which is objectively terrible until you reach level 90, after which its stats skyrocket to unbelievable levels. The same class was added to the War of the Lions remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, using similar mechanics. Final Fantasy VI has the Cursed Shield, which transforms into the disgustingly powerful Paladin Shield if you wear it through 255 battles (unless you had the misfortune to equip it on Gogo, but that's another story). Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin has a cream pie and paper airplane as joke weapons that become massively powerful when you maximize their level. Dragon Quest III has the Goof-Off/Jester, who turns into the game's most powerful class later on.
Clearly, someone out there really loves this design pattern.
Let me be clear: a Magikarp is something that is either useless or detrimental, but suddenly becomes much more powerful once the player has performed a mundane task. Ideally, the game will force you to use the thing while performing the mundane task. Dagger in Final Fantasy IX isn't a Magikarp: all you have to do in order to unlock her powers is advance the plot. Dan from Street Fighter isn't a Magikarp: he never actually becomes powerful. The trainee units in Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones are sort of but not really Magikarps: they start out behind the curve, but have a steady increase in power as you use them.
You may be expecting at this point an explanation on why the Magikarp pattern is so awful. Secretly, though? It isn't. It's definitely misused, though.
Let's talk about economics for a bit. Our key term for today is "opportunity cost." Wikipedia defines opportunity cost as "the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative that is not chosen." For example, in Warcraft, the opportunity cost of training a footman in your barracks is the opportunity to train an archer instead. You can also think of opportunity cost in a more numerical sense: the opportunity cost of spending $50 on dinner might be the opportunity to buy that $45 game you had your eye on. Opportunity cost is the reason behind the famous economics phrase, "no such thing as a free lunch." The reason is that your lunch has an opportunity cost: you could be doing something else instead.
Now, the opportunity cost of dragging Magikarp around until it turns into Gyarados is a bunch of experience that could go to someone who isn't dead weight on your team. You could have had a Blastoise by now, but you were busy making sure your stupid fish got a cut of the experience from every battle. So far, so good: the player has to decide between a short-term benefit (a stronger, well-rounded party) and a long-term benefit (one very powerful creature), right?
Well... sort of. The problem is that experience is not a finite resource. The player is free to wander around Viridian City beating up Caterpies until Magikarp reaches level 25. This is extremely tedious, but still possible. In doing so, the player incurs a different opportunity cost: the opportunity to be much further ahead in the game. But there is no in-game consequence for staying behind: the player's wasted time means something in the real world, but it means nothing to the game.
At some point, we have to be satisfied with this tradeoff. After all, the least risky strategy in almost any RPG is to beat up slimes outside the starting city until you hit the level cap. The game rewards you for doing this – you will probably make it through the rest of the game without dying – but in practical terms, it's not something that the player will actually do. Players generally come with a built-in desire to advance in the game, and the quickest way to do that is to fight monsters that are worth more experience. That means that at some point, the player will cross the bridge and start beating up drackies.
But sometimes, the tradeoff is questionable. I mentioned the Cursed Shield from Final Fantasy VI. In order to obtain the Cursed Shield, you first need to re-recruit Locke. To do that, you need to traverse one of the game's most difficult dungeons, and since it's a multi-party dungeon, you'll want eight party members who are all appropriately equipped. The requirements are sufficiently high that by the time you're able to acquire the Cursed Shield, the game might not have 255 battles left for you to fight! Moreover, battling with the Cursed Shield equipped is a risky affair: the bearer is hit with all sorts of status effects, most notably Muddled and Doom, and he becomes weak to all elemental attacks. A fourth of your party is uncontrollable and will die at the drop of a hat. (You can prevent most of the status effects with a Ribbon, but there's no getting around Doom, which will unpreventably kill that character after some time has passed.) The result of all of these penalties is that it is really unwise to use the Cursed Shield in a real battle. Anyone who wants to use the Paladin Shield is probably going to fight two hundred and fifty five chump battles on the world map. These battles present no risk to the player – and so we're back to fighting slimes.
Here's where the Magikarp pattern really hurts your game. You don't want to do anything to encourage the player to go back to those slimes. At its worst, the Magikarp pattern is a way of telling your players, "Do something you don't want to do for awhile, then you can have a shiny toy." That's a bad idea; why are you asking your players to be bored with your game?
So let's talk about how to use the Magikarp pattern effectively. It goes back to opportunity cost: in order for a Magikarp to present an actual choice to the player, it needs to cost something. The Paladin Shield has no in-game cost. It consumes no in-game resource to unlock. A player with unlimited time does not need to choose between uncursing the Cursed Shield and something else. If the player had the choice between receiving a Cursed Shield and, say, a Genji Shield, then our theoretical unlimited-time player would still have no reason not to put in the hour required to unlock the Paladin Shield.
Some Magikarps actually do demand finite resources from the player. The Thief in Final Fantasy is dead weight for half of the game, until he finally becomes a Ninja. (He's still more or less outclassed by the Fighter/Knight for the entire game, but let's pretend for the sake of this example that the Ninja is really good.) There is a discrete opportunity cost for using the Thief: he occupies a slot on your team that could be a Red Mage or Fighter instead.
Speaking of the Red Mage, by the way, he's the exact opposite. He starts the game as an all-purpose powerhouse, able to do anything and do it as well as anyone else. As the game goes on, his performance dwindles, and you're often left wishing you had a White Wizard or Knight instead. This anti-Magikarp pattern is known to Fire Emblem fans as the Jeigan archetype, named after a character who starts the game at a very high power level, but doesn't grow much stronger as the game progresses. Why is this a big deal? Because in Fire Emblem, experience is a finite resource. Leaning on Jeigan too heavily means you'll end up with a tremendously weak party before long.
Your party composition in both Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem determines whether you're going to have a hard time early on or later on. A party of Magikarps will give you an extremely difficult early game, but a breezy late game. A party of Jeigans will let you steamroll the first half of the game, at the cost of making the back half almost impossible. (Fire Emblem does not actually allow you to field ten Jeigans, nor does it tend to hand you ten Magikarps.)
The key difference between these examples and the Cursed Shield is that whereas the Cursed Shield is an invitation to kill lowly slimes, Final Fantasy keeps encouraging you to advance the game (even with a party of Thieves) and Fire Emblem forces you to keep moving forward (like it or not). Your party of Thieves may eventually feel pressured to hold off on the Marsh Cave until they beat a few more Ogres, but that's an eventuality that you accepted when you decided on a terrible party. Even your Thieves won't go back to kicking Imps, though. The game pushes you forward by offering greater rewards as you advance, and the opportunity to transform your team into Ninjas is a goal that requires you to advance the game.
The bottom line: If you're considering putting a Magikarp in your game, ask yourself what it costs the player to turn it into a Gyarados. If the answer can't be explained in terms of the game itself, then you are probably asking the player to commit heinous acts of tedium. Don't do that.
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