And to finalize up my little talk on turn based battles I’m going to go into issues that I actually have with them. With the way I talk about turn based battles it should be clear that I enjoy them. An often made assumption, alas, is that just because I enjoy them I have no issues with how they do things. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
One major issue is the streamlining of menus. This has gotten better in past years but there are still some major offenders. Pokémon is quite possibly the worst in this department as with the DS iteration, there was practically no good reason for it to take me so many button presses to accomplish simple tasks. There is a touchscreen for god’s sake. Verbose menus do have the advantage of being clearer, but when presented with 10 buttons a couple more shortcuts than what was available should be standard.
Chrono Trigger DS, however, did this magnificently without even disrupting the original controls. The touch screen not only gave a map and the ability move around and interact with the environment, but with one click any of the submenus could be accessed. Even the status displays for the characters could be pressed to jump to their equip screen which also served as their status screen. Breathtaking, really.
Another issue is that about midway through most RPGs the player tends to run out of reasons to use that item command. Magic has reached a decent level of potency by now and if a character is, say, poisoned, might as well heal them and take care of the poison after battle, right? Items really need to be available in a larger variety and smaller quantities. Penny Arcade Adventures makes the player really think about item usage as while items are in a ready supply, only a few can be carried at once. On top of that, the earliest command available in its unique twist on an active time battle system is the item command. Being able to do proper damage and boost or lower stats of the player and enemies on top of basic healing with a limited amount of resources requires a larger amount of thought.
If there is one thing I will praise the Tales games for, it is its handling of items. There is a healthy variety, the holdable amount tends to cap around 15 of one item. I believe it may be less in some cases. And someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there may be items that serve two purposes at once. At least, if there aren’t, there should be. What I mean is that say a character is poisoned. A simple antidotal herb would be nice but why don’t I also have access to an item that soothes while it heals? An Icy-Hot or some such. Cure the poison and heal some hit points at the same time! (And is it just me or has Cure and Heal swapped meanings between too many games? Is it cure wounds and heal poison or the other way around?)Â
And if we can blame Final Fantasy 7 for anything, and we can blame it for quite a lot, this whole overly-cinematic, “RPGs are the graphical powerhouses of gaming” thing has to be relaxed a little. Okay, I’m sure someone will say that Final Fantasy 6 started this trend, but no one really played that in America because the game was damn impossible to find. Or at least I never fucking found it until years later.
It’s great to push technology and make pretty things but at the same time it can’t be forgotten that we are working with an interactive piece of entertainment here. I’m not even so much worried about long cutscenes and battle animations as those have been getting better as of late but what I am tired of is when a game that plays smoothly is shat upon because it doesn’t have the best pumping graphics. The amount of hate Final Fantasy IV on the DS gets is ridiculous considering it is an amazing remake of the game. All the mechanics work just fine and we are supposed to dismiss this for the graphics. Nay, I say.
Of course people want pretties, and with pretties come a price. If its going to be a turn based game that isn’t first person like Dragon Quest, there is pretty much going to be animation. Even Dragon Quest has animation now. Hell, it did when it was doing slashes and the like. It’s a visual medium, visuals will exist. The problem is the speed. Final Fantasy 8, one of my favorite games, was a big offender of this with huge ass long summons. Thankfully, the game is beatable without ever using the Summon command once. I’ve done it. But a lot of times, it’s just these heavy graphics pushing the systems too hard. Too much loading, too much overbearing the console and here comes the slowdown and some such. But hell, at least it’s pretty, right? Final Fantasy 9 suffered from this. So very hard.
The Last Remnant attempted solved this mid-attack tedium to an extent by putting in Active Triggers, which are basically quick time events that randomly happen during battles. On top of increasing damage or allowing for counter attacks they also allow for combo attacks which aid to finish the enemy off sooner. But this was a bandage on the gushing wound of a system slowed down not so much by its design but by the technology behind it.
As a community, we really have to stop and say that it’s okay for a game to look a little worse if it will perform better. Drop a few polygons or scale back just a little if it means the game will run smoother. We’ll thank you for it, I promise.
I’m sure there’s more, but I think that’s all I have to say for the time being. A good while, at that. Just let me know your thoughts!
