
Let It Die and the memory of a live game
I’ve been thinking a lot about Let It Die recently, for a few different reasons. One of them may or may not be that the voice actress of an anime character I like regularly plays the game on Dengeki Playstation’s Youtube channel. But I digress. The biggest reason is that the game recently got a free update with a substancial ammount new content.
Before I continue, I should explain what is Let It Die for those who don’t know: Let It Die is a free-to-play PS4 game that came out in December of 2016, developed by Grasshopper Manufacture (Killer7, No More Heroes, Shadows Of The Damned) and published by GungHo Online Entertainment (Puzzle & Dragons, and many other online focused games for the Japanese market).

The game has you climb a tower of randomly generated floors in order to find out what’s at the top. Along the way, you will fight a number of different enemies with interesting designs, enemies representing other players that have died in the tower, some very mean but minor bosses and four major bosses, who are also quite mean. Inevitably, you will die over and over and over and over, because the game is very hard. However, Let It Die is a free-to-play game and as such it has a way to make things easier at a cost.
Every time you die you have three options: you make a new character from level 1, losing all your equipment but not your progress throught the tower; you revive your character at the base of the tower with all your equipment, paying an ammount of in-game money that gets more expensive the higher level your character is and the higher the floor you died at but also without losing progress; or you can use Death Metal, a currency that you buy with real money that can revive you on the spot, fully healed, without actually restoring the health of the enemies/bosses that may have killed you.
The use of Death Metal brings a number of problems to the game that are common in free-to-play games. Since the difficulty violently ramps up after certain points, Let It Die has a few walls that you can only overcome by either grinding a lot (and I mean a lot) in order to upgrade all your equipment and get the right items for buffs and debuffs, or spending a lot (and I mean a lot) of money in Death Metal so that you can brute force your way through these walls. This video by SuperBunnyHop goes into this problem in more detail and also explains a few more details about the game and the ways you can spend real money.

Thanks to that issue, the time you spend before getting to that first wall (which happens at floor 16 of the tower) is probably the best time you could have with the game. You’re really relying on your skills while also getting new knowledge and tools to progress. You feel like, if you die, it’s on you and you learn to not make the same mistake again. Once you reach that wall and afterwards, you don’t really get to feel that way for the rest of the game.
In early January, I managed to beat Let It Die. After more than a hundred hours I got to the top of the tower. When my journey was over, I tried to think what part of it was my favorite. I realized that I had as much fun during that initial time with the game, before that first wall, as I had with the last 5–10 floors of the tower, but for complete opposite reasons.
During those last floors, I put to use all my knowledge of the game in ways that I’m not sure I was supposed to. In that time between the first wall and the last few floors, I got very intimate with the many systems of the game, to the point where I started exploiting some of them to be almost unbeatable. I engaged with the grinding in order to prepare myself and abuse different overpowered items in different situations. I knew all the tricks that the game could pull, so now it was my turn to be mean and steamroll my way to the top.

The grind itself wasn’t fun and it took a long time, but those last few floors were the culmination of my efforts and it simply felt incredible. After seeing the end of the game (which is bonkers), I put it down and walked away satisfied, even though I wouldn’t really recommend the experience to everyone.
When the new content came out, I thought about revisiting the game. The trailer for the DLC looked interesting and all of it was free, so why wouldn’t I check it out? Turns out that there was a big reason why I was scared of playing Let It Die again: in those six month since I finished the game, a lot of things changed.
I started investigating what exactly was different, by reading people talk about it in videogame forums and sites like Reddit. I found out that all the items I abused in order to make my way to the top were either gone or now were extremely rare. Some even had trade-offs in order to make them more balanced. The developers also added new equipment that made the one I had obsolete. All of this, as I understand it, makes the grind for the new content take longer that it would, had those changes not taken place.

This is nothing new, though. Games that are offered as a service constantly get new content that makes the old activities seem less exciting, online games have always recieved balance updates, and fighting games have seen new iterations of the same game since the arcade days.
However, this was probably more of a case of the developers fixing things that players weren’t supposed to exploit. That’s not a new idea either, but this was one of the few times when I actively engaged with a game in those ways. The Let It Die that I played, where you could abuse overpowered items without much worry, was, well… Dead.
After thinking about all these changes, I concluded that I won’t be playing the new content that Let It Die has to offer. Do I resent Grasshopper for the changes they introduced? Not in the slightest. Games getting support from their developers is a wonderful thing and really hammers home how far we’ve come from the days when you were stuck with the game you had in the cartdrige/CD, regardless of its state.

The thing is, the feeling I’ve got from all those hours in Let It Die is not something that I’ll be able to feel again with these tweaks. In order to fully experience the new content I would basically have to change my entire playstyle and lean towards an even harsher grinding. That could sour the way I think about the game as a whole.
And Let It Die is a game that I like a lot. It has a very interesting visual style, it has a ton of great music, it has charming characters, and so much more. I’ve decided that instead of compromising that feeling that made me love the game more than I ever thought I would, I’ll let it live on with me as a memory. A memory of something that doesn’t exist anymore.
PS: Of course, this whole experience brings to the table the idea of game preservation and what happens to older builds of videogames when they’re replaced for a version that fixes problems or changes content, but that’s a topic that deserves a level of investigation and research that I’m not sure I can provide, even though I would love to.
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