Is anyone else sick of the trend of putting the good parts of combat post-game or on hard mode? (FF7R, Disgaea etc.)
I want to see if anyone else has noticed this. There's a trend in modern JRPGs, going back roughly to the early 2010s, where the actual depth of the combat system is gated behind post-game content, Hard Mode, or a New Game Plus loop. FF7 Rebirth and the Disgaea series are the two easiest examples to point at.
FF7 Rebirth is the cleanest case. The materia synergies, the late-game weapons, the build variety that the combat team clearly spent years designing, none of it really matters in the main campaign. The campaign is tuned so that nothing you unlock is ever allowed to actually feel strong. Every reward gets neutralized by a harder encounter two hours later. The real sandbox lives in Hard Mode, which bans items, locks MP recovery, and only exists after the credits roll.
Disgaea has the same disease in a different shape. The story campaign is a warm-up tutorial. The real game is in the item world, grinding to level 9999, reincarnating characters, chasing optional bosses that exist in a completely separate difficulty universe from anything the narrative ever asks of you.
Compare this to the original FF7. Knights of the Round was optional, took real effort to get, and once you had it you could walk into the final dungeon and flatten Sephiroth in a cutscene-length animation. That was the reward. The mechanical payoff and the emotional payoff happened in the same moment, inside the story, before the credits. You earned the right to be a god, and the game let you be one, in the narrative the game spent 60 hours building.
Modern design refuses to let that happen. And when you trace the logic of how a player is actually supposed to engage with these games, it falls apart. The process is: play 60 hours of a story-driven RPG, finish it, then voluntarily restart and play it again under stricter rules to access the combat system the developers actually built. The second playthrough is where the materia matters, where the build choices matter, where the encounters are tuned to the kit. But the bosses you're fighting are bosses you've already beaten. The story you're walking through is a story you already know. The emotional weight is gone because the narrative spent itself the first time. You're being asked to engage with the mechanical climax of the game in a context the game has deliberately drained of meaning.
That's the part that doesn't track. The reason combat systems feel good in the first place is that they're paired with stakes. Knights of the Round mattered because Sephiroth was waiting at the end of the same save file. The fight you were preparing for was the fight the story had been promising. The mechanical investment and the narrative investment compounded in the same direction, in the same playthrough, toward the same moment.
Hard Mode inverts this. The mechanical investment happens after the narrative investment has already been cashed out. The fight you're preparing for is a fight you've already won, against a boss whose defeat no longer means anything, in a mode that exists in a kind of narrative vacuum tube. The game is asking you to care about the combat for its own sake, divorced from any reason to care, after spending 60 hours training you to associate that combat with story beats that are now in the past. It's not a difficulty problem. It's a sequencing problem. The good stuff is in the wrong place in the timeline. You can't put the climax of the mechanical experience after the climax of the narrative experience and expect the two to reinforce each other. They don't. They cancel out.
And then there's the audience problem nested inside the process problem. The pitch only works for players who enjoy Hard Mode as a play style. If you don't, there's no path to the full combat experience at all. You're not being asked to invest more time. You're being asked to play a different kind of game, with different fundamental assumptions about resource scarcity and risk tolerance, in order to access the design the developers consider their actual work. That's not a difficulty curve. That's a bait and switch.
The fix here isn't complicated. Every piece of combat content, every materia tier, every weapon, every synergy, every challenge fight, should be accessible during the main campaign regardless of which difficulty the player picked. That is the entire point of having difficulty settings in the first place. Difficulty is supposed to scale how punishing the encounters are, not gatekeep which mechanics the player gets to interact with. If a player on Normal can't access the full combat system, the developers aren't offering difficulty options. They're offering one real game and a stripped-down demo of it, and asking the player to guess in advance which one they signed up for. Easy, Normal, and Hard should all be the same game with different damage numbers. Whether a player wants a relaxed tour or a white-knuckle gauntlet is their call, but the toolkit on the table should be identical. Is this just where the genre is now? Or is there a reason this design pattern keeps spreading that I'm not seeing?