What makes me interested in “memorable” encounters even where it may not be the primary goal is that these factors seem to be the same factors that control how interested I am in going through game content. It was disappointing that I never really felt induced to go back and fight all the lumbering giants wandering around XCX after beating the game, and I’m almost sure that it’s because the combat isn’t memorable.

I feel like a lot of the interesting story missions in DW8 also emphasized mechanical differentiation — but it could go only so far when most of it reduced to “reinforcements appear from X location”. There’s something to be said about the maximal depth of reactive and proactive play as determined by genre. Soulslikes can clearly go both ways (Dark Souls for reactivity, Nioh for proactivity), but my impression is that Musou as a *concept* is severely limited in both (I will write about this more in my “why all JRPGs are garbage” post). This makes the notion of a RTS Musou much more interesting!