Baten Kaitos: Monsters don’t drop money, you have to take their pictures and sell those. Not very interesting, except that you can only pick up one magnus at the end of a battle. So, sometimes when you take a picture, the monster also drops an interesting magnus, and so you have to choose between picking up the interesting magnus (which is worthless in terms of currency) or the picture magnus (which gives you the flexibility of currency but is otherwise worthless.) Other than that, there’s not much going on RE: the economy
Secret of Evermore had 4 different currencies. The game was split into four regions that were all essentially time periods. Whenever you arrived in a new region, you had to exchange your old currency for the new - oftentimes this meant that all the money you had saved up was worth way less. Nobody in medieval times still traded in animal talons, for example, so they were mostly worthless.
Two things that make this interesting. First, once you get the airship, you can travel backwards and exchange your currency again. Now your money is worth a lot MORE, since something that costs 40 gold in Area C might only cost 40 talons in Area A, which is a pretty huge savings. This was important because the spell system was actually based on buying ingredients, so things in Area A were still mega valuable if your spells used those ingredients. It was often worth going to special places to buy ingredients to use for your spells.
The other thing is that the final area was futuristic and dealt in credits, which were actually the most worthless currency. Everything in the future was mega expensive and could cost tens of thousands of credits. IIRC, it was actually worth going back one area to grind for gold and then exchange it to credits, as the exchange rate was much more favorable in this direction.
ALSO there was a marketplace where you could buy goods and exchange them, and make some serious money. It was pretty neat.
This is awesome. It’s too bad the game started in a weird mud hell otherwise I might have actually played it long enough to get to the point where it became this cool
Something I just remembered: GTA5 features a stock market in which you can invest. It reacts to your missions, so before you seriously damage some company, you can buy up its competitor’s stock and watch it shoot up after you damage your target, then sell high for big $$.
Yup, the assassination missions you do with Franklin work like this and if you save them for after you’ve completed the main story and your characters are all millionaires you can use the stock market + those five assassination missions to turn them all into billionaires.
The DS remake of SaGa 2 added a black market slime, which would keep the items you sold to him across playthroughs, so you could buy them in subsequent games. In theory, this meant that you could start games, rebuy your stuff early and just breeze through the game, except that a) he sold things at, I think, a something like three times their original price, meaning that you can’t buy the best stuff without having to skimp elsewhere, and b) since lots of stuff has limited uses, it makes no sense to try to get it early. It still has its uses, but much like the rest of the game, the system can’t be used thoughtlessly, which is good.
GTA5 has a separate stock market that reacts to what other players are doing as well. So if people are buying guns, Ammunation stock goes up. This was before GTA online, so it’s not even stuff you have to do online to affect it. Kind of interesting
Oh, let me also take this opportunity to talk about the Kingdom of Loathing. I know it’s online so it doesn’t really count, but it’s interesting.
Something like 10 years ago, the KoL economy crashed because someone figured out an infinite meat bug. Oh, meat is the currency. They patched the bug but they didn’t have a good way of figuring out what meat was obtained by bugs vs. legitimately, so they couldn’t just take away the money. Instead, they created a bunch of worthless but incredibly costly items that, IIRC, you could display on your profile page. People ended up spending lots of money competing for worthless vanity items, and the inflation was reversed. I thought it was pretty clever.
