I’m not sure where it started exactly, but at some point, a video game was made with an item or ability that had some kind of drawback to its use. My earliest memorable encounter with such a thing was with the cursed belt, an item in the first Dragon Warrior game on the NES. Here was an item with no redeeming qualities, and it was even called cursed belt, as if you couldn’t tell there was something amiss with it. You pulled it out of a treasure chest, put it on, and it wouldn’t come off until you had it professionally removed.

Before I go any further… minor spoiler warning for Metroid Prime 3.

While RPGs are obviously the best place for such a concept, there are other instances that have also worked well. While playing Metroid Prime 3, it occurred to me that the PED suit, which is a suit that allows you to channel phazon through your suit and weaponry to enter “hyper mode” and do a phenomenal amount of damage to your enemies for a short period of time while consuming your life energy, is the modern analog of this. More specifically, it’s like the Sacrifice spell from Dragon Warrior III, which kills the caster and all members of the enemy’s party.

I mentioned this during last night’s podcast as well, and pointed out that it’s one of those things that really can change how you play a game. It turns out that like me, when Paul has a limited resource to fuel something, such as arrows for a bow or bullets for a gun, he will use that thing less, or not at all. I never used the Sacrifice spell either, because the loss of the one character felt too steep a price to pay, even if everyone in my party would be killed the old fashioned way in that battle. Part of that hesitation has to do with the fact that most RPGs don’t give you any experience points at the end of a battle unless you’re still standing.

The same goes for magic in general in the Final Fantasy games. I’ve had to reteach myself how to play these games while playing Final Fantasy III. I would enter a battle in the game and refuse to use magic on the enemy, figuring that rather than wasting what precious little MP you’re given in the game, I would keep fighting to level up my physical strength, using brute force to fight my battles. Unfortunately, the game’s difficulty level is too high for you to do that, meaning you either use magic in most battles just to eliminate the enemies quickly, or they kill you all in a few rounds. This forces you to manage your magic very carefully, and always allow enough MP to escape the dungeon and flee for the nearest town when you find the battles have depleted your resources.

I found myself toe-to-toe with a serious enemy in Metroid Prime 3, and wasn’t coming close to winning the battle until I started pumping energy tanks into my PED suit. Interestingly, I only had enough life to do this twice during the battle, and when I finally took the enemy down, I only had one point of life left, and the battle hadn’t even taken a minute. If this is the kind of intensity I can expect in all the battles in this game, I’m concerned that I may end up having to rely on the life-eating PED abilities far too heavily. How long before I have to use the PED suit just to make it to the bosses?