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For a long time, gamers have been complaining that they can get through RPGs
just by hammering on the X-button and using the fight command. Developers have
tried in various ways to combat this tedium. The most common method used is to
try to add some novelty to the fight command. This is a mistake. What battles
need is not more interactivity, but more strategy and challenge.
When I first played Final Fantasy VIII I had a lot of fun using the R1 button to
get critical hits with Squall's gunblade. I had even more fun doing his
renzokuken limit break. I liked the way that timed button pressed felt a bit
less monotonous than just hitting the attack command. Unfortunately, I had
little comprehension at the time that little novelty was a sign of boring things
to come.
Although it was released before Final Fantasy VIII I got around to playing
Xenogears in later 1999. The battle system had the seemingly novel idea of
letting you use three different attack strengths to hit enemies and, with the
right combination of strikes, you could string various hits to form
ultra-powerful and impressively animated deathblow attacks. At first this made
the battles seem very interesting and exciting. But Xenogears is a LONG game,
and unlike Final Fantasy VIII it isn't loaded with multiple methods of character
growth or a mini-game with the depth of Triple Triad. Instead, I got to spend
nearly sixty hours learning more and more deathblows. While the deathblow
animations became more and more elaborate and damaging, acquiring more of them
didn't give me any more strategic options in battle. Your options were
essentially hit, hit hard, and hit harder. The near uselessness of ether
attacks, the only command in Xenogears's foot-based battles outside of the
classic attack, defend and item commands, made the game little more than a
celebration of watching the same, lengthy deathblow animations over and over and
over again. While the game offered a somewhat more intriguing mech battle
system, the sad majority of the gameplay was this repetitive, shallow pattern.
Xenogears was an early offender, but numerous games have followed suit. The
Legaia series depends mostly on the attack command. Its unique spin is that you
enter a combination of d-pad inputs to form various "arts." While this can be
fun in the short run, by the time I reached the end of Legaia 2 I had found that
the battles took forever to watch as my characters engaged in the same long
strings of impressively animated attacks over and over and over again.
There are several other styles of overemphasis on non-standard fight commands.
There are the timing based button presses of Legend of Dragoon's Additionals or
Shadow Hearts' Judgment Ring. There's the semi-real time, super easy combat in
Final Fantasy X-2. But none of these changes serve to make the gameplay any
deeper.
Now, compare all of these rather standard RPGs with the simple yet deep battle
system of a Grandia title. Like the above titles, the Grandia system doesn't
have a standard fight command. You have the option to use a high damage,
multi-hit combo attack and a single-hit, moderate strength critical strike. But
unlike the above examples, the choice between combo and critical attacks means
more than just hitting and hitting harder. The key to this is that the Grandia
system uses a variable is unique to that series: the IP gauge. The IP gauge
sets all of the PCs and enemies icon on a line that moves between waiting,
command input, preparation for an attack and the attack itself. Some attacks,
like combo strikes utilize no preparation time at all. Other attacks, like
critical hits or most special attacks, take a certain amount of time to charge.
Combo attacks do more damage, but critical attacks can slow and even cancel
enemy attacks. While Grandia and Grandia II were rather easy titles, the more
challenging Grandia Xtreme frequently forces the player to decide between taking
the defensive approach to trying to prevent enemy attacks or to get off as much
damage on the enemy as possible. Sometimes, when an enemy is about to use an
extremely powerful attack and there's nothing to do to stop it I even found
myself using the generally useless "defend" command to reduce the massive
damage. Unlike in titles that use a similar amount of timing like in Final
Fantasy X-2, the IP gauge gives you an opportunity to accurately guess at the
timing of enemy strikes and deciding whether or not it's in your best interest
to disrupt them.
Many RPGs have used variations on this setup to their advantage. In Final
Fantasy X, Tidus' delay attacks have similar properties to critical strikes and
in Suikoden III focusing your attacks on a spell-casting enemy have a chance of
disrupting attacks. Games in the Star Ocean and Tales series utilize a more
action driven approach in which you control one character and have the option to
issue commands to his AI driven partners.
It's also important to give the other commands more value. In the early days of
RPGs, magic attacks were significantly more powerful than standard attacks.
Lately, magic attacks don't feel like a valuable alternative and tend to be best
saved for major battles. There needs to be a better balance between using
magical attacks and standard attacks. Further enemies need to be tough enough
for players to consider using magic attacks, but not so tough as to force
players to level up endlessly. I recently played Final Fantasy IV Hard-Type and
the occasional need to call in a summon monster of a powerful spell gave the
long dungeon crawls more of a sense of suspense as I found myself worrying about
running out of MP before I reached a save point. That feeling of running on
empty is all too rare in modern RPGs where the focus seems to be on mastering
the fight command to do impressive attacks rather than to force you to make
decisions about your resources.
But clearly, there needs to be more to RPG combat than just introducing yet
another twist on the attack command. Strategy, not flash must be the driving
force in battles. As games in other genres focus more and more on storytelling,
the RPG genre needs to do more than just tread water. It needs to expand and
deepen their battle mechanics and give the battle engine, one of the tent-poles
of the genre, the focus it deserves.
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