Then again, neither does a lot of RPG conventions and idiocy. You can take an explosive hit in FF VII, lose 9999 HP and die, but you can just Life or Phoenix Down back up, but Aeris can’t be healed from a stab wound? Really? (Also, ducks can’t talk)

I like the Dragon Quest series because it knows that when the player wins, the game doesn’t lose. So it follows that it’s not so bad that the game doesn’t punish you all that much for losing. RPGs are such time-consuming affairs that having to re-earn all the experience points up to the boss again is absolutely unnecessary. It seems hypocritical of me to praise a game helping me out when I love MegaTen’s brutal difficulty, but look at it this way:

I like that the MegaTen games contain some tough-as-nails battles that are hard to win. I don’t like redoing HOURS of work because a lucky Hama or Mudo hit my protagonist and I didn’t have a homunculus on me. It might get too easy if I were to keep all my XP and items, but it would still prevent redoing hours of work or playing extra-super-cautiously. It’s a strange and difficult balancing act for me, but it probably stems from me wanting to have a difficult experience, but not at the expense of repeating hours of work that I’ve already done, especially considering how much less time I have for gaming as I get older.