Games with interesting combat systems

Banner Saga

This has a round robin combat system. Which means the enemy must get a turn after the player gets a turn. So if you have a lot of ally characters on the board, and the enemy has only a few very strong characters, those very strong characters will get a lot more turns and bitch slap your people. You are effectively punished for killing off enemies too quickly or not in the right order. Sounds fun?

The Last Remnant
I refuse to elaborate

Grandia 2 is still the best turn based ever made. Timing your own attacks to cancel enemies is just the best and most strategy vidya has ever had.
Many games have a similar system, such as HoMM 5, but rarely as exploitable as Grandia.

Temple of Elemental Evil is the best D&D rendition ever (and guess what, it also has elements of turn denial like Grandia). Having your move points and attack point fused into one big action bar is brilliant. Either move a lot and have one attack or don't move and get more. And use and abuse positioning to get opportunity attacks every time someone moves in your reach.

does not sound particularly interesting

I liked RAGE's focus on fighting erratically moving enemies that have armor plates you can shoot off.

I've tried to replay that game several times only to realize that I'd already read up on how the combat works before and just forgot because it's nonsensical.

Yeah, Last Remnant is one of the shittiest JRPGs I ever tried, and I did try a few.

More like legend of da troon

old gen monster hunters. The fact that just by positioning yourself correctly is the whole combat it still manages to be extremely intriguing and incredibly addicting.

Every interesting real time combat system worth talking about uses the same core of animation/hitbox/hurtbox driven gameplay that souls, monster hunter and fighting games are built on. The fundamentals are pretty much solved and everyone is just arguing over the details

The Caligula Effect has a really unique combat system that could’ve been awesome if it were made by more talented developers. Too bad the execution was pretty bad but that kind of sums up every FuRyu game

Othercide has a cool grid turn-based mixed with a point action system that only depletes half bar at minium at a time, mening if you take a few actions to stay under 50% Action Points you get to take your next turn twice as fast.
Also, cool ahestetic, waifus, no healing, good reset mechanic.

damn this looks really cool thanks for showing this anon anyone know if the PC version is fucked up? That seems to be the case usually with Japanese games on steam

still

you're saying that as if old monster hunter is interesting despite this fact, and not because of it.
the more iframe slop we get, the higher my opinion of mh2-mh4 becomes, and it was already pretty damn high.

works just fine for me but idk if they changed the faces or anything for the hd rerelease like square did for ffx and kingdom hearts

Cool thanks anon

Banner Saga

Cool game but fuck having damage tied to health.
Almost 0 strategy associated other than bringing varls and russing the biggest enemy on the field.

I finished Resonance of Fate last week, great game unlike any other, and I dread to think we'll never get anything similar.
I'm currently chipping through Knights in the Nightmare on the DS. It's a tactical RPG mixed with bullet hell mechanics: you control a wisp with your stylus and must instruct your units while dodging enemy attacks.

So undertale?

Everyone is jerking off 33 for parrying during the enemy turn when Worldless exists.

ctrl f Valkyrie Profile

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only game I played through all the way without ever knowing if I was doing things correctly

parrying is not interesting. it's game design training wheels.

wish I still had my ds to try this game

Fags, roasties and coomers can't connect to stick figures.

it is in Worldless, try it.
I know, buy an ad, but I'm here jerking off the game for free.

so tell me then how it makes it interesting because pressing the designated block/parry button at the correct time is not, and that's what it looks like. mgsr has the only tolerable parries imo, oh and maybe the offset attacks in wilds which function via the same principle

What game do we blame for the influx of parry shit in every action game for the past decade(+?)?

no E33 is even worse lol.
in legend of dragoon you hit the button when your sword makes contact with the enemy.
in E33 they're just randomly placed QTEs that don't align with anything.

Them stickwomen look kinda thick tho...

the obvious answer is sekiro, but parries just being another form of roll slop, except more shallow because it doesn't even compromise your positioning and even rewards you with higher damage output than if you had avoided the attack via positioning is a symptom of the dark souls 3fication of video games. actually, maybe it was Bloodborne

Abstract shapes

maybe if they'd been bothered to make actual character designs the game would have done better.

Enemy can either do magic or phisical attack of white or black type, recognizing the type of attack and blocking with the corresponding guard charges your shield/absorption you can use as a special guard to instantly end the enemy's turn and deal a good chunk of damage.

Meant for

I now vaguely remember Eternal Sonata

KitN is real time, not turn-based. You're in control of the wisp 100% of the time and must touch units to have them charge their attacks/skills while enemies move about and shoot bullets. That's just a surface-level description that doesn't go into unit behavior, equipment you must collect during fights (there's no exploration or shop) and a stat transfer system.
It also released on the PSP and got a remaster on the japanese Switch eshop, if you don't want to use emulation.

Do the lightning attacks affect the enemies more if they're standing in water?

remaster on the japanese Switch eshop

oh shit, but I'm guessing that's japanese only.

also the problem is that those remasters might not really mirror the experience the games were designed for. i played the world ends with you on switch because I didn't have my ds anymore and it wasn't the same.

I believe there's a resistance up/down effect because I know you can't apply Burn to enemies standing in water, but I'm not sure the exact effect for lightning
It's also raining which makes clothes and things wet but all of the small details get murdered by webm compression so you can't see how obscene it looks

Is Expedition 33 more difficult than Resonance of Fate? I found Resonance difficult initially but once you know the mechanics it's pretty easy

I wanted to say monhun but figured it was too much of a plain action game to fit here.
I've tried the older ones but Worldborne is what clicked with me for various reasons. I don't disagree that the LS was indeed plenty of iframes and was pretty damn easy, but the rest of the gear was legit, they really nailed the combat tight, like a complex formula. Late/postgame has you going from finding the best action for an opening, to having the monster at your mercy for how experienced you are fighting it. And making the wrong move has them punish you, even to the point of them fairly comboing you to death.

The devs also brought Riviera and Yggdra Union (all from the Dept. Heaven series) globally to the Switch and they're some of the few games you can entirely play with touch controls. I don't know if they did the same for KitN and why they're keeping it JP onry for now.

PC version works perfectly fine.
Enjoy giving guns tacticool attachments.

This.

Game title?

I wish I had played TWEWY when it was new. It had one of the most unique control schemes when it comes to touch screen controls

No Rest For The Wicked

Neat. Does the game look like it's going to internally implode considering the director's meltdown online or is it ever going to exit Early Access?
I'm near the start of act 2 and unfortunately I don't think so.
I picked hard, mainly what happens with hard is that normal enemies get to two/three shot you, normal bosses get to two shot you, and optional bosses get to one shot you. So you think fuck yeah the game wants me to get good all the time, but having gone through all sorts of optional bosses before truly starting act 2 the game seems to have gone really down in difficulty. But who knows maybe the rest of the game will go wild with super bosses who have really complex attack strings, I kind of felt that way with Dualiste and he wasn't an optional boss.

the game has zero vision to begin with, all it can do is look pretty, and only on the surface because practically it sucks with how often there is shit in the foreground that doesn't properly get phased out and then obstructs your vision

I love stranger of paradise beat em up style with rpg class switching like you wouldn't believe

I love TWEWY but I could never get 100% comfortable with the dual screen battle system,

It's probably been discussed to death already, but Xenoblade 2. Its combat system is legit brilliant, there are so many parts that individually do their own thing, but also interplay and layer on top of each other.

Auto-attacks lead into arts, which lead into specials

But also driver combos and blade combos

Which both combine for fusion combos

Blade combos provide extra damage and effects, seals/debuffs, and orbs

...which lead into chain attacks and full bursts

But fusion combos also flow into chain attacks and result in huge damage with or without orbs

Fusion combos have two different types that do different things

DoT is a whole other things that you can set up with fusion combos, and stacks damage with everything else

There are like 50 different ways to play the game. It's honestly kinda impressive how well fleshed out and cohesive it is, and the next game feels like a step backward with how tacked-on some of the mechanics feel.

stop saying beat em up where it does not apply because there's no meaningful cc or enemy interactions in this game beyond the basic action game ones and maybe the fact that you can use fire to explode bomb guys

Grandia 2
Riviera: The Promised Land
The Last Remnant

Had good combat systems IMO.
Most other JRPGs I tried were dissapointing.

one of the most shallow combat systems ever made actually. it makes people think it's smart because of how the simon days things synergize like how you link arts from auto attacks or later arts into other arts, but there are actually zero meaningful interactions

but at least it's not as braindead as torna (which unsurprisingly the average xenoblade 2 tard thinks has better combat even though all strategizing around the orbs is completely absent now)

Silence, Rebirthfaggot.

rebirth is not a good video game, and also you're making yourself look like even more of a clown with your zero effort response. how am I supposed to trust you that you have any idea what you're talking about? pro tip: you don't. you just respond to impulses

There's a fair few. Another example is elemental boss and using his own instant ability to clear his elemental mines. Quite often enemies are weak to the instant abilities they use against you like bars with the air tornado. Beyond that there's just an incredibly fun offense/defence game going on even without considering classes and all the synergy autism you get into post base game

To add to this I'd argue that sop has a better boss roster than nioh and is the real highlight. Every boss feels fair except the tentacle nigger

but there are actually zero meaningful interactions

...?

the director's meltdown online

It'll be fine. Mahler is just a drama queen who is emotionally invested in the game and is in the CEO position after they went independent so he has nobody above him to tell him to shut up
The whole funding palava was just a message on discord from Mahler, who talks about the game on discord with the players all the time, but was picked up by the gaming media who treated a discord message like a press statement. He then lashed out at media shitrags for turning it into an announcement after they all just ran the discord message without even asking him for comment. Everybody in this story is retarded but one of them is a talented designer making a game he wants to play and the rest of them are transvestites with women's studies degrees employed by Californian media as a daycare system for the dysfunctional children of the wealthy

at least you didn't say xenoblade 3 which really is just about shoving the square block in the square hole

The thing you should have read is that you need to disable all the skills you don't want to see your characters use.
And just like that your healer heals, your mage mages and your warriors do special attacks.

No idea if 2 is better, but while the first game had a good combat system, it was also easy as shit and you needed to hold back to not outlevel all of the content.

Gloria and Blaze never ever

Bless, love how the combo system alone enables at least 4 different strategies around them. DLC also introduced (a dumbed down but still cool version of) overdrive from X, allowing you to play around with blades that aren't particularly strong in chains but can dish out solid DPS with arts and lv3/4 specials,

Looks cool, but I'm sure that wont get old after 5 minutes.

Keep LotD out of your tranny obsessed mouth. Your toxic zoomer nonsense isn't welcome here.

what you're looking at isn't actually cutescene attacks, they're actually in real time. the positioning element keeps things fresh.

that said, the game is 80% combat so I wouldn't blame someone for thinking it gets repetitive, but I don't think it's because all you do is look at panty shots during cutscene attacks

parasite eve 1 for obvious reasons
phantasy star portable 1 for focusing on positioning instead of clutches like dodging and blocking

for focusing on positioning instead of clutches like dodging and blocking

always makes my ears perk up, I'll check it out

Oh yeah I forgot about Overdrive. I loved how it propped up weaker blades, while being a strong alternative to chain attacks. Between Overdrive and Fiora's crit boost skill, almost any blade can deal solid damage, even ones like Electra that have awful crit rates, no damage boosts, and slow arts with long cooldowns. You could say that power creep didn't REALLY leave any blade behind.

This game gave me choice paralysis. Especially in the labyrinth. Picking one job is easy, picking a supplementary job to help my first job and what affinities to invest in has me going through online spreadsheets to think of the most fun, effective build I can devise

i nearly 100% that game, the other game in recent memory was driver san francisco. Really had a good time with it. On the opposite spectrum, psp2 was dogshit and i never got farther than what 15% of the story. Sure psp1 is a bit easier and more forgiving because the game doesnt expect you to evade every single attack but the gameflow is really good. Perfect combination of diablo stat based combat and 3d environments.

resonance of fate

interesting combat

Nigga all you need to do is criss cross at the start, you made a triangle, hit Hero Run and you literally won most of the fucking game. This combat isn't interesting, it's shockingly more shallow than it looks. I remember for years niggas would say "Oh you gotta fucking be a geometric WIZARD to play this shit!" and uh, you don't. You wanna solve Resonance of Fate? I just told you how but here you go.

Grab whoever is on the left of your center character

Make them run to the far right so their run crosses the right character's line, gain a point

now do the same for the right character, far left, gain another point

hit hero run

Congratulations, you now have a fat triangle to get the most time out of it and you have beaten the game. So deep. What a fucking joke.

Games that are action games with neat gimmicks and approaches

Wonderful 101, you control up to 101 heroes who can all unite to form weapons. You can control how large the weapon is which makes it deal huge damage.

Chaos Legion, typical action game except you control a legion to fight with you.

Astral Chain, extremely similar to Chaos Legion but better executed

the combat SYSTEM is very interesting, it just doesn't stick the landing

Wonderful 101, you control up to 101 heroes who can all unite to form weapons. You can control how large the weapon is which makes it deal huge damage.

ultra kino but across 4 play through attempts I have never beaten it. think the furthest I've gotten was just after wonder pink joined

Between Overdrive and Fiora's crit boost skill, almost any blade can deal solid damage, even ones like Electra that have awful crit rates, no damage boosts, and slow arts with long cooldowns.

Eh idk about that. Specifically Electra might be better at chains and only with a setup involving stacking fusion combos on topple to get damage caps on her first and second special, grab aggro, and you should be able to hold it for enough time to set up another chain.

If by "interesting" you mean the concept of "using real time character interaction in order to find ways to become stronger and synergize together" is interesting, then sure. I can agree. But the actual system itself is not. Is it unique? I wouldn't even say that. Far as I know, the concept of "building up damage and then dealing it in one blow" was literally already done with Dissidia by Square on the PSP, and that game is nearly infinitely more interactive and has an ACTUALLY interesting combat system compared to this shit. There is no "system" in ROF, just a couple of mechanics slapped together thinking they somehow make something of an idea of "gameplay".
Also the Bezels themselves are way too dimensional and have too big of a drawback once you lose them all that it's literally more like just finding out a way to use them all before you run out, because once you do, you may as well just pray and hope you saved right before hand or grab a real gun and do HP damage on your head.

W101 is a good idea except the draw gimmick only really works on Wii U and using it in other ports just felt really clunky and out of place. The actual combat itself felt a bit short and seems the game was much more focused on retarded maps and setpieces through them instead of actually refining the gameplay, and not to mention the dozens of fucking retarded mandatory minigames...
Never played Chaos Legion, but heard it was okay.
Played Astral Chain, DMC5 does it infinitely better. Too shallow in AC. Then again, the entire game is too shallow.

nigga you fucked up
the setup you described doesn't work

It involves something similar to it. Looking back at it I think it was actually the center character you started with since you can go either direction and then you can choose whoever to make the triangle. It's been like... 3 or so years since I played it, and I've had a horrible sleep schedule for the past 6 months. Bear with me, I promise I'm not making it up.

nah, as a matter of fact, the gimmick feels much better with the stick, especially once you get good and they essentially become command inputs

I'd rather just have a command or button for styles instead. I don't think I recall, but there isn't even a mechanic for drawing them perfectly, just the size of it. If they had that then sure, it could be worth it. But it just felt tedious after a while. It costs meter anyway, and there's a size cap, so they may as well have made it a regular input to make it flow better.

nah I think it's a good trade off where if you don't have enough time, you'll have to make do with a smaller weapon. it's actually a dynamic that is so clever and exists in no other action game, because no one's ever even thought of it

Nothing comes close

Because it's retarded and nearly impossible to conceive.

give me one reason why it's bad to reward the player for properly capitalising on openings or punishing them for not doing so

Besides super hot are there any FPS games with unique combat systems? I'm struggling to think of others that are more than just a gimmick weapon or level.

This and Press Turn

Children of the Sun

You are talking about two completely different subjects here, so if you wanna move goalposts just because playing "Drawn to Life" in an action game for a few seconds tickles you autism pickle so much, I'd rather you just leave the thread if you're gonna be biased.

Hyper Demon, which in my opinion is the best fps ever made, while I also recognise that not every fps should be like it. It's the most modular fps I've ever played

I'm not, because that's exactly what the command input nature the drawing essentially is, leads to.

umm leave if you're gonna be biased

first day as a human?

I once tried making a system just for the sake of it where you only play with the mouse, so mouse click to walk and run, to aim/shoot, reload, pick up weapon... the reload would work by using the mouse wheel while aiming and pressing the right combination for each reload.
It seemed to work well enough. A bit too gimmicky but it would also work well for slower paced combat and enemies. A change of pace.
It's just a side project so it won't evolve much from this anyways

that's quite cool, unfortunately the average person thinks when a game limits them it's because if a game design oversight "Umm wtf why can't Leon move while aiming and shooting in og RE4!?"

Naturally, aesthetics are important. If a game visually looks like a faggot game, then it's a faggot game, and it's gameplay is utterly irrelevant. It's trash and it will always be. By contrast, even a mediocre game will be elevated if the creators put cute girls in it. It's that simple.

megaman battle network 3

EX33 on Expert is about as hard as RoF base level difficulty. The big difference is that on RoF if you get put in a checkmate situation your shit is probably fucked. It’s hard making comebacks in the early game.

What a weird question

this is the kind of game where if you fuck up you might lose 2h of playtime

You got filtered

The magic system in Arx Fatalis has you drawing runes to cast spells, each rune has a meaning and there are secret spells you can figure out.
For example when you get the rune for ice you won't get any new spells in your spellbook, you'll have to swap it in to spells you already have such as the one for creating a fire projectile

Since I know almost nobody has played it I'm going to mention The Four Crystals of Trazere(or simply Legend in EU). It's a fairly simply isometric adventure/puzzle game and a lot of the combat is pretty basic(select your man, activate their ability, tell them who to attack or simply let them run around on auto pilot) but for a 33 year old game it has one of the most interesting magic systems I've ever seen and it's why I always spend most of my time controlling the wizard. You can essentially craft your own spells that range from something as simple as a basic fireball that shoots out directly in front of you to full-screen chaos with chain reactions from dozens of projectiles and explosions that will likely wipe out your party as well as an entire enemy army. The core of the system is somewhat basic since you only have so many runes(basically spell instructions) to deal with but with those you can create custom spells to handle realistically any situation and can even mix offensive magic and support magic into a single spell.

I'd argue Legend of Dragoon handles it better than E33 does. The latter just goes more in-depth with it.
I liked Eternal Sonata a lot, especially the way the combat continually evolved and removed more and more training wheels the more you progressed through the game and its NG+ allows you to have the full system right from the start. Unfortunately the game is also broken as fuck and once you figure out the busted shit it can be hard to not abuse it.

I literally beat the main story and postgame. That's how easy it is.

That doesn't even sound like a real game. Basic combat with "sword guy attacks with sword", but it also has a complex magic system that's like scribblenauts or smth?

quest 64 mogs all games ITT

Such a damn shame more devs didn't copy Grandia's combat system. To this day it remains my favorite jrpg combat system.

youtube.com/watch?v=8mWQid78s0E

Looks cool. Upload it somewhere, I want to try it out

quest 64

better than Valkyrie Profile

This game and that one sonic game that let you fight in little arenas were goated

what about this is interesting or unique?
not saying vindictus combat wasn't fun, or good, but there's really nothing about it that hadn't already been a staple of the action genre at the time it came out

Is this on pc? Looks better than what I have.

good fighting systems

I haven't played a game with an engaging and innovative combat system for a decade. Dark souls 1 was great for it's time, hate all you want.

The online and support components.
Having to do action combat with other people while managing some gimmick/tool in a boss fight for less skilled players is something I want to see more of in games.

Looks like it would be good for a horror game, cool shit

This game was the experimental midground that led to Resonance of Fate. They swapped out the Valkyrie Profile combos for drawing triangles and shooting guns, but almost everything else was kept.

So tb with qte?
Why is picrel so good looking? Regarding the triace game, it's not really a system that's thought through. Could've been implemented better, at least in hindsight.

The Last Remnant

Is this the game with the overall level scaling, similar to demon souls world score?

Loved this game, but it has a lot to process. I should replay it at some point since I never got the good endings.
Sting recently released an RTS bullet hell Touhou fangame too, but it doesn't look like it kept any of the artistry or complexity that pulled me into KitN.

i really like how this game's combat system is built primarily around not overextending

even though it's by no means difficult and i've played through it three times i sometimes still get too cocky and eat shit in fights that should be no trouble at all

now that's some unappealing as hell art, wouldn't be surprised if this sold nothing at all, I'll check it out however

Still waiting for the english remastered release...

what you do before battle matters (baiting/grouping foes, pre-gaming damage and status effects, getting pre-emptive strikes)

everything you do during battle matters (position management and manipulation, controlling foes' behavior with on-field traps, switching equipment to gain an edge, and more)

The sheer density of meaningful choices that have both an immediate impact and a resounding impact you'll feel hours later is incredible in Dragon Quarter since you can't out-grind your woes, can't magically make new resources materialize when you start running low, can't heal up at inns for cheap.
Too bad it filtered jarpig sloppers so hard that we will never see another game like it ever again.

Legitimately good combat system held back by the shit game surrounding it and redundant spells because the devs were short on time.

Yeah, it was later patched in the original game to be less bad and then reworked for the remake, but I think that's didn't fix it.

But as long as you don't do excessive grinding until later in the game you are fine.

Troubleshooters has one of the best strategy RPG combat systems and I wish it were popular enough that people would steal its AT gimmick.

I had such high hopes for Banner Saga, man. The idea of marching your group of characters (who can all die) through the end of the world over the length of a trilogy was so appealing.

At least the landscapes were pretty to look at.

LoD sucks so fucking much. Man.
It really made me appreciate the effort that goes into mario and luigi/paper mario to make the time hits fun. Seriusly, you can't just slap time hits and expect your combat to magically be better.
Because you jsut turn every combat into a slog.

The first game was pure kino.
For some reason i cant remember anything about the other 2.

I like how each character is specialized in dealing with a certain kind of enemy and you can freely swap them in and out of your party mid-battle

that game had potential, if any game needs a remake it's quest 64 or as it is known in europe, holy magic century, which is a way better name.

Literally no JRPG with juggling is bad besides maybe the first Project X Zone. Endless Frontier? Tales of Vesperia and Destiny DC? Ar tonelico 2? Baldr Sky? TWEWY? Valkyrie Profile? All incredible. If your game has juggling it's ludo. jugglvdo

Did somebody say... Interesting?

combat when farming was too long and annoying, that's where it failed for me as a JRPG.
it's a nice "anime game" tho, and making guns with 12 silencers and 7 scopes was funny

Two basically splits the story into two parties, whoever survived 1 heading to a new redoubt, and then a band of mercenaries who have to escort the body of the bad guy from one to the ocean and toss him in.

Three is just the Dredge are just trying to live too and escape a GREATER evil. and two characters admitting everything is their fault before they fix it with a rushed ending.

W101 kind of sucks to play on the Wii U because you don't get enough buttons to sanely control the liner and control the action at the same time.
A keyboard and a drawing tablet, though?

But as long as you don't do excessive grinding until later in the game you are fine.

In theory perfect, as grind is shit. If you do that, you basically have a set level for each encounter, effectively making the Co cept of leveling purely cosmetic, at least for the stats. Literally an illusion. The sole reason under and over leveled has to be possible in rpg.

if you bump up the difficulty enemy armor starts mattering a lot and you end up running through a lot of your 8th-9th grade geometry just to find valid angles that let you finish battles in a sane time frame without getting absolutely ass raped as soon as you land

Why aren't swapping characters used more often by devs?

swapping classes is cooler

It's DEAD

Hard to integrate, especially in real-time games. Lock-and-key weaknesses risk becoming obnoxious in reflex-test games.
Also hard to balance.

Ruina's card combat was a cool take on the genre. Clashing turned it from less of a deckbuilder and more into a card battler which helps it stand out from the ocean of indie card games

sonic heroes did it

w101 did it

Xenosaga 2 had the skeleton of a good system where you have a stock system to store turns, a boost system to cheat in extra turns, and rolling set of bonuses that cycle each turn between a wild card, crit up, boost up, and exp up to give you an incentive to set up your turns on the right bonus. But the game fucked up the numerical balance and enemies have way too much hp until you figure out what element combo they're 5x weak too so that becomes the focus of combat instead.

I don't get the panty obsession. Everyone wears underwear. Wouldn't you rather that there be nothing at all?

Love Will of the Prescript

it's a heterosexual men thing, you wouldn't get it

It's hotter to leave room to imagine what it's like instead to put it all on clear display.

I will hunt down and slowly kill every single one of you. Yes, the story of Legend of Dragoon was pretty standard for an Asian RPG, but it was excellently written and expressed. The combat also was miles ahead of similar games at the time.

I love Astral Chain but part of me desires that the Chains were AI controlled and the combat from a human perspective were more fleshed out, is the same problem that pick related had, Controlling Cheshire is the biggest downside of this game.

Underrail because of the enemy design. No matter your class there is some enemy type or area that will give you problems.

ToME4 just because of the different damage types, status effects, skills and classes. Getting fearscaped by demons, managing your time paradox and vomiting blight and disease everywhere is just fun.

Magicka for the real time spell casting that is hard to do and easy to fuck up.

The battle network series in general, even BN4 has great combat system, its problems lies somewhere else

dude just build a super specific folder to beat a specific boss

just keep restarting until you get exactly the chips you need for your 1HKO program advances to show up

I appreciate and respect the core ideas behind MMBN but let's be real, the battle system has some hard limitations on what it can do to facilitate actual high-skill play and the vast majority of bosses/superbosses fall to the same cheesy shit because non-cheese and playing straight simply does not work against them.

Why? There'd be absolutely zero point to the games otherwise. It's cool they force you to symmetrically control two different motor cores, more games should do it, an iS: Internal Section or Dyad-ish tube shooter with a well fledged out gimmick that follows the principle would be the tightest shit ever.
Or a shooter. I'm actually surprised Sol Cresta doesn't try making you actually control 2/3 ships at once.

Yeah the cards in BN have the unfortunate aspect of completely taking control away from you instead of enhancing it. The StarForce games are even worse about this.

It's a bit more complicated as the game calculates, battle rank which influences enemy strengt and growth rates with depend on strength differences seperately.

... Why not both?
It's even rare in tb games

yeah it does suck that the post game, getting the sp chips and all that pretty much devolve in you getting lucky with the chips you get on your first turn, never had to build super specific folders though, that was an issue with every game after bn3 because there are less chips to choose from ESPECIALLY in bn4

Would you say more games should have a polished version of this

... Why not both?

it'd be meaninglessly redundant desu

I'd appreciate if sting went back to developing actual games and not just porting them. Or at least port baroque classic to PC/global.

I disagree. Companions that can be customised are awesome.

I just want Blaze and Gloria

yeah true. I was talking specifically about mid battle swapping. swapping both characters AND classes freely during battle sounds like way too much cognitive load for comfort and most of it is redundant

ATB battle system where every action drains a set amount of the bar, buffs and debuffs on a character decay per action taken, you're given a party of 12 but only an active party of 4, and characters tend to have defined roles. Battles as a result involve a ton of party management, making sure glass cannons get in to do damage but get out before the boss can retaliate, buffs get up and stay up where they're needed, and characters with low ATB are replaced by someone who can act sooner. Lots of moving parts, and the boss fights expect you to use them well.

Gloria is fun but not essential. And I think there's a Blaze TL out there somewhere, of admittedly pretty bad quality though.

Eh no, you can only make that system work as a player if you spoiler yourself and read the wiki.

Nothing hurts more than getting an interesting character later, but not being able to advance him in a meaningful way because you grinded too much.

The SaGa series exists, TLR is an offshoot of that series and its BR version is one of the worse out there.

Natural fucking Doctrine for ps3/vita
The game measures distance between your characters, distance from walls, enemies, gives you various bonuses based on those, checks your formation (and there are no formations in this game, you move all your characters manually) and gives various skills and bonuses and penalties based on positions. For example putting your archer behind your shield guy will give him a bonus to defense even if there is no "defend" action.

Are SaGa games actually designed to be interesting or do they just look interesting? What I'm saying is an RPG is nothing without actually interesting design. If anything the more open ended the base mechanics are the better, it's all about how encounters and classes and dungeons and boss fights are laid out and how hard you can push these systems in concert with this purposeful design to actually have some fun. Part of the reason a good deal of JRPGs suck is that they don't try hard enough design wise and hope the computer does its thing. But balancing chaos with intent and making this intent clear and challenging and inherently rewarding seems to be the mark of a well designed role playing game. It's easier to do this in genres like dungeon crawlers or strategy RPGs.

Looks fun, anything I should know about it?

worse out there

only on the original 360 version, they fixed it with the pc release

SaGa's the definition of open ended design so I guess you'd like at least some of them.
Their problem is that the series' creator is a massive tabletop autist who loves to come up with experimental shit that inevitably pisses most people off, for instance the latest mainline game constantly alters the content of the main campaign with every NG+ cycles so you're never repeating the same quests, and that includes the content of the main quest as well.
As for fights, I think it's excellent mechanically precisely because the game is wholly open ended not only in terms of progression but also in terms of character building, there's no hard classes but rather a freeform development system like in FF2 where characters gain stats depending on what you do with them, then there's skill sparking, formations, races that work completely differently from each other if the game features them, it's really good.

WHERE THE FUCK CAN I FIND A RESONANCE OF FATE COPY FOR MY 360 THAT ISN'T FUCKING OVERPRICED TO SHIT IT'S BEEN 15 YEARS

just buy the pc port

uhhh if you make the game harder for yourself then it's difficult bro!

That's absolutely lazy fucking design and I refuse to stand for it. You didn't make me change how I view the game, just forced me to play by arbitrary rules. If the game had actual design for gameplay put into it you wouldn't need to worry about that bullshit.

The combat also was miles ahead of similar games

Every addition just deals damage and gains SP in varying amounts. No status ailments, buffs, debuffs or extra effects of any kind. When every fight is just about spamming additions and items because Dragoon form is weak it becomes as simple and generic as it gets.

I agree that most tri ace games should have one default difficulty, the hardest one or second-to-hardest for ng+ goodies. that'd filter way too many retards though

The combat also was miles ahead of similar games at the time.

It's the opposite, the combat was the definition of mashing X, there's literally no nuance to anything, it's a rhythm minigame where nothing matters but getting the timing of your additions down.
Worst part of all of this is that there's even an accessories that completely automates that part, even Final Fantasy games were mechanically deeper than Legend of Dragoon, there's a lot of reasons why it was and still is considered a kusoge.

No, no qte, action pints are paoints to spend for actions, you get 100 by default, if you spend 50 or less you get your turn twice as fast, if you spend more you get a lot of actions in a turn but you can get anal raped by enemies spawning and taking their turn before you can do anything, and without healing, like ever without sacrificing another character of the same level means you get easily crippled if you use points willy nilly.

Though not really too much different than most top-down shooters, Synthetik had magazine ejection as part of a mandatory two-step process in reloading. Weapons build up heat as well to your benefit or detriment, many secondary and tertiary effects in the game may trigger, and extra difficulty modifiers might require you to be more aware of these mechanics like making the reload window randomized.

Despite adding extra steps it actually flows pretty well. Only its (inferior for other reasons) sequel does per-round reloads for weapons like shotguns.

Not even to mention, YOU expect ME to play that god awful PRESENT GIVING CHAPTER -AGAIN-? ON NINE MORE DIFFICULTIES!? Go through losing Leanne AGAIN FOR A WHOLE CHAPTER? NINE MORE TIMES? You must be out your fucking mind! I'd call anyone who played Zenith in ROF a genuine fucking lunatic who had nothing better to do.

slopyrinth of 2hu

interesting combat system

lol. lmao, even. not even a proper DRPG due to the isometric crap, either. Absolute proof that touhou fans are fucking delusional and will slurp up any slop you put in front of them and give it the +5 "touhou bonus"

The combat also was miles ahead of similar games at the time.

No it wasn't.
The materia is leagues more complex than addition. So was the junction system.
Hell, Vagrant Story would do time hits better by adding different effects to them and being able to change on the fly.
Fucking paper mario would release a year later and figure out that inputs have to be varied, serve different purposes AND BE QUICK for such systems to be fun.

But jesus christ it became way too much by the end where you have to make 50+ decks that counter 50+ enemies each with multiple passives that can also have multiple phases.

desu if it weren't for no pantsu the chapter would be cute. like the ffta snowball fight as a real thing.
synthetik feels pretty tight to play. no idea how they managed the vibe of metal clashing at subsonic speeds so right for a first attempt

i really like how this game's combat system is built primarily around not overextending

Is it? For me it's all about creating distance at the right time and close the gap quickly with perfect opening, rinse repeat. I guess that's the safest way to play because Pseudo is a sticc that can't stunlock anyone in that game..

Also even if you know what enemies are weak to every battle is a massive chore.

Man fuck off. Resonance of Fate is literally the worst game I’ve played in 30 years of gaming. I regret completing that piece of shit game.

It's still way more involved, requiring more thinking and skill, than literally any other JRPG at the time. It's not perfect, but it was pretty fucking good, and like I said, better than the rest.

I'm really just asking because I've been going through a bunch of blobbers lately and I've got to say the dungeon design for Dungeon Travelers 2 is genuinely very tight. Satisfyingly so. Mine fields, trap doors, invisible doors, one-way passes, shortcuts, no melee/magic zones, dark zones, pitfalls, geometric map messages... There's a feeling you're being fucked with by an autistic slant-eyed game master with thousands of excel sheets in a way that's sadistic but still relatively on babby tier versus that guy's own crazy Wizardry IV OC campaign or something and it made me realize how important purposeful design is to a good RPG experience.

Literal rock paper scissors.
Enemies attack in fixed patters that can shut down entirely by reacting accordingly. What makes the game challenging is that:
1, you can't see all the attack sequence, just three attacks at best.
2, the game doesn't track the patterns, (you) have to do that, either by a notebook or a spreadsheet.
So the game becomes a matter of doing educated guesses based on what attacks the enemis do and how they fit on your recorded patterns.
It's really original, well thought out and pretty imaginative, and the game shines with caster, due to having to keep track of mana, blocks to not die and match magic attacks to get extra damage.
It's absolutely not for everyone. But it's pretty cool and one of my favorite systems.

more polished

saga

Kek. I do like Rs2 and 3, but it's anything, certainly not polished.

Come to think of it, romancing saga 2 could easily be remade with today's tech by a single person, yet we have nothing.

It's still way more involved, requiring more thinking and skill, than literally any other JRPG at the time

You're just saying you never played any other JRPG at the time

God, I love pantyshots.

Unsure if that is a decent system.

Come to think of it, romancing saga 2 could easily be remade with today's tech by a single person, yet we have nothing.

type Romancing SaGa in Steam and see the results

RS2 BR alone is better than TLR's BR purely because enemies actually change with the BR ladder instead of getting a stat boost.
RS2 in general is way more complex than TLR, the campaign alone blows TLR's away and that's a SNES game against a 360 game, TLR is a massive step back compared to actual SaGa games and was designed like that on purpose, it was supposed to be babby's first SaGa.

materia... junction... Vagrant Story

The problem is none of these really impact the way you play the game. For FF7 at the end of the day you're still just spamming your strongest attack and LB, for FF8 you're just pumping your stats and actively ignoring the magic system aside from Aura and Meltdown and mashing triangle until you can LB, in Vagrant Story you're subject to autism grinding and unintuitive farming to set up a very specific set of attributes that you will never get through organic play to deal with specific enemies.

Yes these systems are more complex than LoD's "equip weapon of damage, armor of mitigation and accessory of +speed" but they do nothing to change the actual gameplay. That's where LoD excelled. That's the sort of shit that needs to happen for turn-based games to stay relevant as has been proven by successful turn-based games over the past year. It doesn't matter how much depth there is under the hood if it amounts to entering battle and selecting the "big damage" command over and over with no further interaction.

I gave it a shot, reached the second boss, but I stopped because I just had no idea who any of my characters were. The game tells you that you should care about them and each sacrifice is supposed to be a heavy toll (a bit like Darkest Dungeon), but they all looked the fucking same. black-and-white-and-red artstyle made them even more undistinguishable from one another.

You're just spamming your strongest attack and LB

And your 'strongest attack' at the time could be-

resisted by your target (in turn, heals them)

is a massive MP burner

Target can only be hit by PHYS/MAG

LB I guess you could make an argument for, but that's hardly 'spammable', that part is hyperbolic.

press X to attack

heal sometimes

riveting

What happened to the remake? It was supposed to release this year but they’re still completely silent about it

That's where LoD excelled.

OK dude but wanna know what else Legend of Dragoon excelled at? Being fucking boring.
FF7/FF8 were fun to play even if they weren't doing anything special to advance the jarpig genre, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Based take
Real recognizes real

It was supposed to release this year but they’re still completely silent about it

Trust the plan, end of the year release.

Minigames are not the answer. They're a midwit trap. They actively make the games worse because you're now spending longer selecting a menu for big damage and watching the stupid fucking animation play like a turbonigger and maybe parry an attack or two in a 500ms window like triplehypermegacyberniggercattle who only needs the IDEA of interaction and some flashy visual feedback to get fucking dopamine holy fucking shit go kill yourself you retarded subhuman you actively make the world a worse fucking place

but they do nothing to change the actual gameplay. That's where LoD excelled.

By being even more braindead and completely throwing what little RPG mechanics it could have had out of the window?
Are you serious?

The only thing I’ve heard about this game is that it has one of the most bullshit difficulty curves in its genre and that kind of scares me

I’m not really that hardcore