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Comments
This is because bosses that can heal are absolutely never fun, ever.
I'd say no. Turn-based systems are good because they allow you to think about your strategy. Real-time systems are good because they have a sense of urgency. Hybrid systems have a mild sense of urgency, and no time for strategy (not that many games that use them have any strategy, but still).
^^
What about structuring a boss kinda like, how about, a player's own team?
At least, in a strategy RPG, you can have the boss be a team of several forward attackers, and behind them a few ranged attackers, and behind them, healers.
Viewtiful Pikmin? Pikmin Joe? That's the best way to describe this.
Case in point: Chaos. No final boss should be able to full heal.
Man I don't even play RPGs anymore.
Last Eastern-style RPG I played was The Star-Stealing Prince, because I am big on RPGMaker games because they are free.
Unless you want to count Ib, which is more of a horror game and also lacks a combat system.
The problem is that basically you have Chaos as a boss that can randomly full heal with no consequences ever and so you just need to get lucky that he doesn't do that too often.
Also, that's a full heal.
Would be better if the game made it clear that the enemies worked on the same strategic principles as you'd normally use, such as having a major antagonist stock up on a few autorevives for himself that he'll use if he's lower than a certain amount of HP, giving you a choice of either hitting him hard enough without letting him heal himself, or plan for a longer fight. Alternatively, if we're talking a tactical RPG, we can also have front-line fighters with very basic (albeit inadequate) healing who will want to run back to a healing source when they run low on health.
Funny how Fire Emblem deals with this. Instead of giving enemies healing, they take away YOUR healing. Vulneraries don't restore much health, and they can't be used on other characters. Healers can heal other characters, but not themselves. Now the designers just set about putting a much more even playing field up. (It's still not perfectly even since you usually get access to certain classes earlier than your enemies do, but whatever.)
I think part of the problem with healing stems from an asymmetry between what the player is doing and what the enemy is doing. The enemy is playing defense and, even though any sane person in such a role would stock up heavily on healing items, is supposed to actually present themselves as a surmountable obstacle to the player, whose protagonist characters are running an endurance slogfest every time they're in a dungeon.
Random question: how did Braid get a reputation as a really artistic game? I mean, don't get me wrong; it's fun, but its pretensions at artsiness are pretty transparent and almost entirely separated from the actual game.
I think it's because it's pretty much incomprehensible.
I don't think gaming as an industry has yet developed to the point where artistic-ness and pretension are easily separable.
I thought Outland was pretty artistic, personally. Also adequately described as a cross between Samurai Jack, Ikaruga and Metroid.
I wouldn't say that transparency is an issue regarding art. I mean, many a movie (Un Chien Andalou) or painting (Well...a lot of them, really) has been made with the rather noticeable intent of being an attempt at creating what most people agree is "art", even if art is a somewhat nebulous term either way.
I haven't played Braid enough to know about the second complaint, but if that is an issue then I agree with the notion that it seems weird to me that it's called art.
I think you misunderstand what I mean by transparent. I mean the fact that it's pretty much just generically pretentious, meaningless text dumps between levels is very transparent.
I don't really see how the text dumps are pretentious. Though they are kind of meaningless, yeah, in that they don't have much of an obvious connection to anything else in the game (you can draw connections between them, and you're certainly intended to, but you could probably do that regardless of what the text said).
Can you give me two samples?
The first is from near the beginning and the second is from near the end. Context won't help because there is none; they're just on signposts outside the levels. The first is obviously supposed to be vaguely referential to the time-bending mechanic, but doesn't really convey anything relevant to it.
So the Megaman X port I picked up for my phone. Pretty fun, being jump and shoot man. I really dig the aesthetics for this game. And riding on cars.
Doesn't that describe the game's main character itself, though?
In theory. In the actual game, he's basically Mario, but able to time travel a bit.
Well, yeah, but he's still looking for a princess and cutting rats, not?
At least, that's pretty much all I remember about Braid.
Looking for a princess? Yes. Cutting rats? No.
Last night in COH I ran into a boss with an ability that would heal him to full if you were anywhere near him when he used it. I wouldn't be so absolute, just because seeing him go down was really worthwhile.
Beat BBCSX yesterday, finally. I guess I'll start Catherine today. At some point.
So apparently an HD remake of Mighty Switch Force will be released for the WiiU, as well as a new title on the series and a new Shantae. I haven't played any of those games so I don't know if I should be too excited but it's good hearing the WiiU is getting more games
^Mighty Switch Force is a pretty great puzzle platformer, but I'm not sure the main hook(switching panels between dimensions) will work strictly in 2D. The first screenshot looks pretty great, though.
I think the major issue with the currently popular hybrid of real-time and turn-based systems is that it combines the shortcomings of each approach without bringing any benefits in return. There are better ways to combine the two; for instance, the Tales series has a real-time combat system that plays like a simple fighting game, but a button press brings up the standard JRPG item/magic/whatever menu. It works really smoothly, and you can use it to set up a strategy before going back into real-time and fighting it out while the other party members follow your commands.
Similarly, Valkyria Chronicles uses a combination that combines the strengths of each approach. You move around in real-time with enemies firing at you, and you have to aim and fire weapons yourself, but each combatant has a separate turn with limiting factors drawn from tile-based tactical RPGs. For instance, you can only fire once per a combatant turn (which might be multiple shots, depending on the weapon) and each combatant has a maximum movement distance before they must take an action or end their turn. Your own combatants also fire automatically during enemy turns, ensuring that a good position is important for efficient damage-dealing.
Does Valkyria Chronicles give players the timeout to strategize, and if so, how?
For what it's worth, another example of real-time action-RPG battling but with timeouts: the .hack//IMOQ games. (IMOQ is short for the names of the four PS2 games: Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine.) Even though the game is supposed to simulate MMORPG gameplay, you get to pause the action in mid-battle to choose magic and items, I believe.
As I remember it, there are plenty of opportunities to look at the battle map, and the whole battlefield stops while you're selecting a combatant to control. Almost every battle has an objective apart from "defeat all the enemies", too, plus a turn limit. As a result, strategies will suggest themselves to you, because there are very few scenarios in which it's acceptable to simply hold a position.
So I started Tales of Legendia and thing feels like an SNES JRPG in the worst way possible. It looks like a PSX game and sounds like one too. The game's directions are obtuse and the characters are bland and nondescript.
....and for some reason it got better reviews than Tales of The Abyss.
Tales of Legendia is generally considered the Black Sheep of the franchise an-
What.
Okay, I kind of know why. The English version of TotA was really glitchy, and reviewers tend to be harsh on glitchy but otherwise good games (see: Fallout: New Vegas, and Alpha Protocol).