I really like RPGs. I tend to favour JRPGs more than Western ones, because to a certain extent I am a completionist, and I tend to get too involved in the sidequests of western RPGs, which ends up diluting the experience of the main story line for me. I’m not saying that JRPGs are necessarily better, just that their more linear structure appeals to me more, in general.
One of the big gripes I keep reading about JRPGs is the monotonous combat systems. I spend a lot of time brainstorming ways of making JRPG random battles more interesting and less samey. One of the major conclusions I’ve come to is that player involvement is crucial. If all you have to do is keep the A button down while the game selects ‘Fight’ for you and autoselects the first target in the enemy group, chances are you’re not going to be very involved in the game. Therein lies the brilliance of combat systems like the ones used in Valkyrie Profile, The World Ends With You, and Star Ocean: The Second Story.
So I was thinking about how I would design a combat system to make it more interesting than just selecting commands from a menu, and came up with the following idea:
Like in the SNES Final Fantasies, each character has an ‘action time bar’ that fills up. When the action bar fills up, the character can perform an action in battle. How fast the bar fills up is determined by a number of factors, of which the major ones are a certain stat (agility/speed/reaction, or whatever), weight of equipped items, and status effects (Haste, Slow). The major difference is that the bar is interspersed with ‘gems’ that light up when the action bar reaches them. Each gem represents an ‘action’, and different characters have different numbers of gems, based on job, level, etc. So, for example, casters might start with one gem, and at the most get two or three at higher levels. Melee characters will also start with one action gem, but will eventually work their way up to maybe 5 or so.
A character can be selected to undertake an action any time they have a lit gem. Most basic actions use up 1 gem: attacking, casting a spell, using an item. The game doesn’t have the usual ‘defend’ command that a lot of JRPGs have. Instead, different classes get different defensive reaction abilities (dodge, block, parry). When a character is attacked, if they have a lit gem, they can choose to take a defensive action, indicated with a Quick-Time like button icon flashing on the screen between the time the monster declares its attack and the time it takes it to perform the attack. Perhaps when the monster initiates an attack, battle-time stops or slows down, giving the player a small window of time to decide whether they want to expend an action defending or not.
As characters gain in levels, they acquire abilities that may require two or more action gems lit to perform. For example, a martial artist might have a special combo ability that uses up two action gems, but which allows for a sequence of attacks initiated with different combinations of button presses. Casters might get extra powerful spells that take longer than normal to cast, and require two actions. And so forth. Certain characters, of the classes usually associated with tanks for example, could also get special defensive abilities that allow them to intercept attacks directed at allies, and then perform their own defensive actions, at the cost of extra action gems. I forgot to mention that when an action is undertake, the time bar is reset to the previous gem, or is placed at the equivalent progression point, but one gem further back, if that makes any sense.
I’m thinking this mechanic would probably not apply to monsters, except maybe story battles, mini-bosses and bosses. This would probably need a good amount of prototyping and testing, but the idea is to make boss battles more interesting without bogging random battles down with ridiculous amounts of dodging and parry on the part of monsters. At the same time, the action gem system could probably apply to monsters in varying degrees, with more powerful monsters having more than 1 action gem, and accordingly stronger attacks that the player has to watch out for and keep some action gems free in order to use defensive reactions.
Thoughts?
May 13, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Interesting. Sort of an ATB system with more granularity and interactivity. The trick would be making it interactive without being annoying.
I like the idea.
May 14, 2009 at 12:48 am
Agreed. What would you construe as ‘annoying’? I could see it becoming really tedious if you constantly had to skip your characters’ first actions to save them for defense, which would actually slow combat down further from the current ‘tape down the A button’ grinding.
May 14, 2009 at 7:35 am
A system like this seems built around tactical choices and patience, but the active nature of it leans to the frenetic. Valkyrie Profile works because you have one button per character (with a D-pad modifier in some cases), and Star Ocean works because you only control one character at a time. They have simplified their combat so that it can stay quick paced while still being interesting.
This kind of a system would need something similar to keep players from getting bogged down, just looking at the bars to nail the timing. (And if the party is too big, having offense and defense options for each character could require a lot of controls.) Also, if the characters have ATB gem triggers that don’t sync up with other characters, that’s another potential snag, as players have to pay attention to a lot of different timers. It runs the risk of turning into a control memorization/timing minigame, feeling more like a Dance Dance Revolution riff than tactical combat. The non-bar visuals would also have to be designed to assist in the recognition and execution of tactical choices, rather than distract from them.
I like the idea, and I don’t think those concerns are unsurmountable, it would just need some tuning and testing to see how much information you can bombard the player with and not break the fun.
May 14, 2009 at 11:57 pm
A lot of good points, Tesh. The way I envision it, the focus is on the patience and tactics. You watch the bars fill up, when the character you want to use has enough gems for the attack you want to perform you select them (the game could then pause for you to enter commands, or it could keep running, as is the case with all of Square’s ATB system games). You select your action, the target, and it resolves. When it’s an enemy’s turn to attack, it moves up to the character being attacked, and while it does you might get button prompts above the heads of the characters who can perform defensive actions, or a bullet-time type of thing during which you select a character to perform a defensive action (if they have active gems). When the window of opportunity closes, the attack resolves, with defensive actions resolving before the attack proper lands. Like you said, testing would be required to see how much information the player can process and keep track of without becoming overwhelmed.
The idea came about after reading a post somewhere where the writer was making comparisons between RPG combat and fencing, where in the latter most of the ‘fighting’ is actually the back and forth of feints and counterfeints while each participant looks for a weakness in the other’s defense. I was thinking it would be interesting to try to build something like that into a combat system, and was thinking that maybe feints would be attacks that had a chance of lowering the enemy’s defense, but did no actual damage, opening them up for the next attack or something. There would be timed button presses involved, during the attack animations, and if you did really well you got the option of following the feint with an actual attack that dealt damage, without requiring a second action. But then I started thinking about how to implement defense, and came up with this instead. There might still be something in that other combat system, but it would probably have to be tailored specifically to a more limited type of combat (maybe like the duels in Suikoden).
June 3, 2009 at 8:13 am
[...] tie it in with the action gem system I detailed in the first ToRPGCS, perhaps the triggering of one of these actions requires and expends an active action gem. This [...]