I know this game has its hooks into me because I spend the whole day thinking about how I am gonna defeat Space Pope and finally end Chapter 11 after…11 hours are you kidding me??
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Pope gave me the Einhander to fly back to Cocoon so I could do Oops All Skill Checks. Pretty sure I am saved before the Chapter 12 boss. Ready to wrap this thread-bare plot where three things have happened.
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Good luck with the final boss. That’s where I ducked out
FF13 froze during the ending.
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so did vanille and fang
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I’ll write something about finishing FF13 but I’ve moved on to 2.
This is a lot more Kingdom Hearts than expected.
I was a little sick of the battle system by the end of 13 so going right into another game of it is making me wary.
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thinking about the genericization of FF2’s menu layout in later releases:
alas
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posting adjacent to scratchmonkey’s Four Job Fiesta thread:
how do we feel about Active Time Battle
also is there a consensus “best” speed to set. it seems like it differs per game a lot, like in FF7 i recall it raises the speed of battle for everyone (requiring faster reflexes for the player) but in the SNESFC trilogy it seems to just make the enemies faster
i couldnt actually tell the difference between Wait and Active when i was younger and i still feel stupidly unable to get it now. Active just basically means you’re racing to pick your menu options, right?? whereas Wait will sit there and let enemies wail on you until you open a menu. Idk it doesn’t have the best feedback for a longstanding turn-based RPG combat system, gotta say
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ATB is bad, menuing doesn’t magically become fun with the addition of time pressure
first thing I do in every ATB game is set it to Wait mode because fuck scrolling through dozens of spells while getting attacked
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That’s probably because wait doesn’t kick in till you’ve selected something from the top-level of the menu, usually.
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that’s been kinda my sense of it. i think i see what that’s going for in cases like Sabin’s Blitzes and uh… uhhhh probably some Limit Breaks idk
i at least nominally try to engage with games as designed but ATB has always made itself semi-optional, i dunno how to think of it except as a very weird difficulty slider
Like i can see how the very flexible FF menu customizability and memory cursor option could turn battles into something slightly more quick-paced and rhythmic where you’re like, dialing in combos. but it’s never congealed for me
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13 is the only ff game with good atb (in the more difficult fights or when going for fast times) because at its best it’s a purely menu-based realtime action game. i’ve actually had surprisingly compelling experiences with atb in the ff7 hardtype mod but it seems mostly unintended by the original square devs. menus are good actually and they don’t need QTEs of any sort, ever, but i’m open to certain forms of realtime menuing if it’s done with dynamic intentionality, as rarely as that has ever happened.
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im thinking about the button-based menu from Super Mario RPG and the symbol-based menu from the Lufia series and how neither of those have ever been crossed with an ATB-style combat system where you have to do battles with rapid menu selection as like a rhythm game. what the fuck cmon
combine that with the rhythm combo system from Mother 3 and i do believe you’d have the best non-tactics turn-based vidcon combat. Uhhhhh ™ ™ ™
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the mains things i like about ATB are (a) how speed affects the turn order (which, yeah, this can easily be done without ATB) and (b) the feeling of antsiness you get when a spell is taking its sweet time being cast
the rolling HP meter in Mother 2/3 is a better way of implementing real-time pressure into a turn-based system imo
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it is probably the best that DnD style casting speed has been implemented into turn-based combat for that reason alone, like you really feel the pressure when your black mage is powering up a battle-winning Flare and you’re trying to protect her
(and then zeromus just kills her because of AI routines god fucking dammit)
i think rolling HP is a good idea implemented so-so in Mother 2/EB cuz of how fast the odometer moves until you’re at about 150+ HP, but it’s used perfectly in Mother 3 where it scrolls much more slowly but lets bosses use potentially TPKO attacks much sooner. the best fights in that game present a tension between combo attack DPS and keeping your party alive that’s a gamble on the player’s part, how long will you try to keep up the attack vs your party’s HP steadily ticking down in real time
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I feel like one of those weird indie RPGs has to do something like this but heck if I am gonna find the one that does.
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its in my dream RPG design doc. so i assume it’ll show up in price of flight at some point
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honestly, if i moved out of NYC to New Zealand, you would never hear me say the words “NYC Mayoral Election” again
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