i just want cool monsters and player-characters that don’t make me feel they were written and drawn by someone with their hands down their pants
10 Likes
maybe this is unrealistic, but when it comes to game design specifically i try to accept each work on its own terms first and i’m cautious about lists of injunctions and expectations… i’m interested in how irritants and things i don’t want in games can produce something interesting if those “negative” textures of experience are treated as value neutral at first and assessed in terms of a work’s internal logic rather than as part of a feature checklist. of course eventually i might decide that i just hate something about a game, and i definitely have strong tastes and preferences, but i don’t want to be prescriptive about stuff like random encounters for instance, which i’m generally disinclined towards but which feel completely coherent and necessary in many of my very favorite games.
21 Likes
i want sick tunes mostly
fought it for years but i just have to concede that jarpegs are my favourite genre. most of my enjoyment nowadays is actively trying to break them and i particularly enjoy games that are simultaneously accessible and easy to bumble through but also have enough depth for creative ~ fucking about ~ e.g ff7 or uh… any dragon quest
re: my custom title, the way romancing saga punishes grinding feels like a gentle nudge to do other things with my time in these worlds and figure out the most efficient ways to deal with combat and what all of the available tools actually do
feel like it’s a genre with a few real standout Aesthetic Experiences as well, i mean nocturne and panzer dragoon saga… fuck…
and yes this is cringe but that definitive ‘12 years old, christmas 1997’ experience of playing ff7 or more recently playing dragon quest 11 - a game which feels very sincere and nice without being twee or condescending or paternal during a very bad time in my life kinda sticks with me
quote this when i sneer at 45 year old americans crying at the zelda theme i guess
yeah whole lot of “let me tell you about saga…” posts in this thread
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jrpgmafia
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I was offhandedly talking with my coworker about Sea of Stars, and his immediate reaction after pulling up some screenshots was “This looks so derivative!”
So, point #1 is that God already made Earthbound/Undertale/ChronoTrigger/etc. While riffing on the classics is always fair game, your elevator pitch should not just be “[game x] again.” Have some original thought. Come up with a new idea for a cool protagonist, instead of relying on stale archetypes.
There are lots of different ways to balance combat, dungeon design, and resource management, but whatever you do, please be aware of it and consider how it factors into a holistic experience.
Most anti-grinding measures are sins. Just let people overlevel if they want (if leveling is even part of your game).
Please have more than one default battle theme.
Anyhow, all of these points are moot because I barely play vidcons, let alone Japanese Ringo Photography Games.
6 Likes
well, isn’t everyone pronouncing it
Jay Arr Pee Gee
… right?
anyway, really have to praise RPGs that provide mechanics you don’t necessarily have to use if you don’t want to. A lot of tri-Ace games do this, they let you progress up to the final boss(es) without using some of their systems at all, which is something you have to understand/recognize to enjoy it. After a few titles, you start to enjoy the challenge to figure out how to pry the game wide open, and that’s half the fun of these games!
4 Likes
it has to have a bunch of special moves with their own cutscenes that look SO COOL but not TOO many because i need to see and hear the same ones so many times that for the rest of my life ill be walking along doing my day and ill hear “PIRATES OF OLD… … … … DEFEND OUR CAUSE!!!” “PIRATE’S WRATH!!!” “COME ON… … … … … … … … … … DANCE FOR ME!!!” in my brain and i’ll go “damn that was SO cool” and this’ll happen every day, forever
14 Likes
all the special moves need names and all the names of moves have to have a cohesive theme that’s unique to that series
10 Likes
Jar Pig
I just want a cool place to explore with some fun weirdos, and ideally to be able to play dress up with them. Maybe some interesting objects to find.
3 Likes
if a fighting game preferences thread pops up someone just copy and paste this post but replace the quotes with “HERE’S MY SUNDAY BEST!!! PHOTON CANNON!!!” “LETS GO BUB!!!” “MAXIMUM SPIDER” instead
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Jurr Puh Guh
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OH YEAH a main character has to have a mental breakdown
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It’s the malign influence of @dogs lol. She can’t say jrpg like a normal person and its rubbed off on me
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I wish someone would make Parasite Eve again… Drives me nuts that nobody ran with that combat system and iterated on it
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hybrid heaven is almost the best game
it is not, though
7 Likes
I really wanted to like sea of stars, but holy hell does that game suck. couldn’t make it more than 5 hours.
- There must be a Team Rocket, who you have a minimum of four encounters with, and ideally significantly more than that.
- If the world has multiple countries, each country must have at least 3 cities with some thematic/aesthetic link. The themepark city is exempt and can be a city-state.
- Weapons & Armor should have locked stats and drop/purchase locations. No scaling stats or rarity boosts.
- Difficulty should be a spectrum with about 5 points of range, where 1 is you can get through a fight at the minimum possible resources through perfect manipulation of every combat system, and 5 is being able to brute force that same fight with grinding levels and mashing attack.
- If a damage number appears it should be meaningful. You should see “4000” and think “Yes, I’m 4000 closer to their HP being depleted”, not see a cascade of 400s as a character rolls through a multi-hit combo. The latter is only acceptable if every attack in the game is 1-3 hits, and then the most powerful move is 17 hits.
- Mandatory battle transition effect, mandatory battle summary screen. Both must stop the action. If the battle summary screen doesn’t stop the action, then the fight isn’t over, and the entire zone is now one fight, so you should get a summary screen when you hit a loading gate.
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Oh this reminds me
I love the spark/glimmer system in SaGa games. Nothing is as exciting in a battle as seeing a little lightbulb appear over a character’s head and they perform a cool new move, and then that new move is permanently available thereafter. All games should do this.
Unlimited Saga, because of its poor reputation, never got copied by anyone but it has a million great ideas and systems where any one of them could inspire a whole different game.
12 Likes
there are a number of rpgs id love to play soon… digital devil saga 2, breath of fire dragon quarter, various saga games, vagrant story, panzer dragoon saga, baroque even tho its not a “jrpg” is obvs under a slightly larger umbrella, maybe like a few diff ff games ive never finished, shadow tower abyss as another weird cousin rpg…
knights in the nightmare!!
i dont know what would really be the connecting thread between those games if there even is one beyond a certain affinity for tabletop gaming -inspired rpg systems and mechanics, but i think i often find it appealing how rpgs push you towards understanding their rulebooks based what actually surfaces on screen (rather than learning the rules and then playing like a tabletop game)
7 Likes
i want more “dungeon towns” a la Zozo in FFVI, or any number of places in the SMT games (Nocturne of course does em best with places like the Ginza Mall and Asakusa)
Towns should their own hub of adventure and danger and secrets! not a glorified shop menu, as again seems to be the stale easy to copy tradition from NES era RPGs and Wizardry clones
9 Likes