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Ash

Any remotely playable role-playing game has a basic grasp of economics. That's a very scary and dangerous word to throw around in the real world, but in fantasy it's a much easier concept. Economy is the balance of obtainable money and purchasable items in a virtual world. 

When a game economy is good, players work at gaining money at a reasonable rate. Absolutely necessary items come in different price points, like potions and medical herbs in Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, respectively.  In these systems, it's very easy to get money to buy low-level healing items. While they're not ideal, they are useful in a pinch and are cheaply acquired. These varied prices free up hard-earned cash for equipment upgrades or whatever your money is better spent on.

When a game economy is bad, obtaining even the most basic necessities is tremendously difficult. Ash, an RPG available on all iOS devices, suffers from this problem. From the very beginning, battling is a grueling affair. Your party is weak against constantly blocking foes and oftentimes end up on death's door after just a few rounds. When you do win a fight, the spoils amount to a meager one or two gold.

 

One or two gold is fine if all the items you need to stay alive in such a dangerous environment are easily procured. In Ash, they aren't. A basic healing item runs 56 gold. If you only get a small percentage of that amount from a single — already difficult — fight, is it worth wasting what healing items you do have in effort to buy more?

Healing items are not the only overpriced elements in Ash. Inns, weapons, and armor all come at an exorbitant rate. In this situation, the player is forced to choose new equipment over healing items or staying an inn over anything else.

This can quickly make a game unplayable, especially when random encounters are too difficult to win easily. Ash's entire combat system is tedious and flat: requiring you to swipe at an enemy  to attack. Most attacks from either side are blocked, meaning fighting wears on for a very long time. When hits do connect, damage to the party members far outweighs what they can respond with. This is a perfect cycle for frustration and rage quitting — definitely the latter in my situation.

While discussing this game with a friend, I was accused of just not "getting" what this game was. He defended Ash as a nostalgic RPG that draws inspiration from the hard games of the 8- and 16-bit generations. But my dislike of Ash is directly related to how terrible the economy is. While the character art and world are generic, they are largely forgivable.

Hamstringing a player with limited funds is not. Proper game economies are growing, shifting things that let players gradually gain more money and afford increasingly more expensive items. Starting even the most basic items off at a high level while giving players absolutely nothing in return is fundamentally bad design and makes for a largely unplayable game.