TLDR: which games do WEAPON BREAKING without making you want to tear your hair out?
i’m playing through Dark Cloud and had forgotten how tedious the weapon system is. weapons function as “leveling up” instead of using a traditional experience-based system. weapons need to be upgraded, fused, and repaired throughout the game. and a durability system dictates that once your weapon hits 0 durability, it breaks. broken weapons can cost you hours of gameplay if you’re not careful. there’s even the possibility of breaking all your weapons and starting from square one near the end of the game if you’re not vigilant with repairs.
for Dark Cloud, this weapon system is a unique leveling system that differentiates itself from its action-rpg peers. it introduces a level of risk that keeps you alert while making weapons you’ve upgraded-and-maintained feel like valuable treasure. however, this system is also tedious to keep up with as weapon durability decreases quickly and repairs are time consuming.
after hours of playtime, i think i’ve isolated the reason why the weapon system is so annoying: menus. the entire system is menu-based. i often find myself pulling up the menu mid-battle to repair my weapon. there are automated repairs, but these require some setup. if Dark Cloud somehow incorporated more interactive ways (outside of a pause menu) to repair weapons or made weapon durability decrease at half the rate or made a broken weapon repairable (instead of gone for good), this would have gone a long way to reduce tedium.
games like Breath of the Wild are often criticised for similar weapon-breaking systems, and it got me thinking about the fact that i have NEVER seen a weapon-breaking system praised or even vaguely complimented.
are there any games that do weapon breaking especially well, and why?
It’s not breaking, but Monster Hunter’s sharpness system works really well.
Every melee weapon (even the hammer and hunting horn) has a sharpness bar, broken up into smaller colored bars. It goes from the most sharp (purple), all the way down to red sharpness. Every attack that hits a monster will dull the weapon a bit. Higher sharpness will have a higher damage multiplier attached, while lower sharpness will penalize you. If an attack is too weak, or your weapon is too dull and is hitting a tougher part of a monster, then you’ll “bounce” off of it, interrupting your combo or attack flow and leaving you vulnerable to attacks. During a break on the right, you can use a whetstone for 4-ish seconds to sharpen your weapon again.
I like it because as you’re crafting and upgrading weapons, the sharpness is a factor to consider. Do you want a weapon with a ton of green sharpness, or one that has a sliver of blue and then a little green, but it quickly drops to yellow? It also affects your armor choices, because there are armor skills that allow for faster sharpening, or reduced dulling, or increased overall sharpness, or the ability to never bounce no matter how still your weapon gets. And in a fight, you have to pick and choose your targets a little more carefully, and know when to back off to sharpen and come back hitting harder.
This is the only acceptable answer IMHO. If you don’t like sharpening, take a blunt weapon. Make the weapon functional but lose effectiveness. There is some merit in consumables or time gated upgrades but I need to be useful with a broken weapon or the designers messed up and I’m uninstalling.