Best and Worst Leveling Up Systems

Leveling up and improving characters is basically the staple of RPGs, both W and J. So what are everyone's thoughts and the matter. Who nails it and who falls short?

First off, JRPGs put WRPGs to shame in this category, at least overall. Mass Effect's leveling up, in both 1 and 2, leaves a lot to be wanted. Very little changes level to level and the only reward is eventually evolving the skills. It's possibly the only part of the game that isn't perfect, but it looks like they're fixing that in ME3.

I haven't played many WRPGs, but of the ones I have, Borderlands certainly does the best job with leveling up. Getting skill points becomes addictive and you're literally salivating for the next point.

Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid was an ENORMOUS leap in the right direction. It's one of the first games I can remember where level ups didn't exclusively upgrade your stats. Leveling up took planning and consideration because you had to choose which direction on the sphere grid you wanted to go.

Digital Devil Saga 2 took the sphere grid to the next level:



Instead of having linear paths from one skill to the next, with a branch every now and then, ala FFX, DDS2 allowed a lot more freedom in movement. Certain skills were unlocked by unlocking all the adjacent skills that surrounded it. It was a really cool level up system, which was augmented by the fact that you choose where to put points into your Protagonist's base Stats as well.

I'll be the one to say World of Warcraft has an awesome level up system. MMORPG.

Leveling up auto-trains strength, agility, and other abilities for your class. Most stats were from gear. Build-specific abilities received through where you set points. And weighing point priorities to master your build and then gearing to make yourself ridiculous.

I can't rightly think of a bad leveling system at the moment.. I don't play that many bad games.

quote lucedeoangel

Final Fantasy 8's was terrible. There was no point in leveling up, if it all relies on the Junctions.

Haha, truth bomb. I suppose the same can be said about all of the Final Fantasys, pre-FFX though. What I didn't like in 8 was that you were gimping yourself if you leveled up to early or quickly because you didn't have the best GFs available to pump your stats per level up. That's also true of run through one of Tales of the Abyss

The problem with FF8's was how easy it was to get overpowered if you knew how to abuse it. You could get 3k life within the first hour of the game with careful use of your Guardian Forces and max life halfway through the game, if not sooner. Not to mention even the optional super boss(omega weapon) was made to seem like a mini-boss because of invisibility items. I really love that storyline and the game itself, but you could easily abuse the system.

FF7 wasn't that bad, in my opinion, nor the earlier systems. At least you couldn't so easily abuse it to the point of making the entire game child's play.

I loved the mobility of FFX's system allowing you total freedom over your character at a certain point. The FFX-2 Dress-spheres were also quite a nice concept overall.

I also sort of liked Fallout 3's perk system, It was interesting and fun.

Yeah I have to agree about FF8. Drawing/Junction was a good idea I suppose, but terribly boring to do properly and made the game far too easy. When you're only halfway through the game and you absorb almost every type of magic, and have max life, you know somethings wrong.

I actually quite liked FFVII, leveling up materia and combining them was pretty nifty. But yeah, FFX was a great system.

Something like Dragon Age 2 was really rather average. A few stat points, a skill up. It's been done to death, not terribly bad, but boring.

Diablo II leveling ftw!

On ff8, i can kill omega weapon with 1 attack using irvine and ap or fast ammo... Irvine is so awesome.

I liked the leveling system of ff12 a lot.

Also Tactics, if you really get into it you can really control character growth by choosing specific jobs at certain times controlling stat growths... Very complex but fun.

Id have to say that the worst leveling system i have seen so far would have to be... hmmm... well... I have no complaints about any game that has leveling systems...

PS: lunar a silver star story was the most emotional game i ever played. That games story was just amazing. When i beat it i felt like a friend of mine moved far away or something... I found my self wandering "what do i do now...?"

Am I the only one that likes a simple system? I would have really liked FFXIII's if they hadn't done the stupid barricades in each chapter. Made you like the ideal level, which to me isn't fun. I'm a fan of the simple level up system with a side component (FFVII with materia, Persona 3 with Persona's, etc) and defined stat boosts instead of random. The Sphere Grid was a great system though. After that, the Liscense Board and Crystarium just sucked for me.

To be honest, I've enjoyed all the FF's leveling systems so far, except for FFX's system did basically ruin the story if you overlevelled considering it makes you able to one-shot the final boss

But the Dark Aeons made up for it I suppose.