SIDE VIEW BATTLES: ANY REAL POINT?

Well, I know that I personally like a variety of ways to represent battles. If the battles are fun, I don't care either way.

Being able to see things is more visually appealing than just being told that they're there, unless your characters are so ugly that they cause seizures. Of course, leaving out those graphics is less work, which is why people do it. So choosing whether to show characters or not is just a matter of how much effort you're willing to spend to make your game look nice.

However, I'll note that RPG Maker XP's default battle system, although front-view, actually shows your characters and shows the spells and stuff happening to them. RPG Maker VX's doesn't by default, but could with the right scripts. And generally shows them in much more detail than most people put into the sprites in their side-view battle system - though in exchange, it's not animated. Also, I often see characters' faces shown on the battle screen, which is sort of a middle ground.

I do kind of wonder what the overall preference is between small, animated sprite battlers vs. big, non-animated picture battlers. Since that's something I could see going both ways. And it applies to enemies just as much as to party members.

Can't Yanfly Melody, Atoa's scripts, and Tankentai all use those battlers? Even if they can't use that exact format, I know they all at least support complex animated battlers, with poses for different actions and situations, as well as complex movement based on a variety of situations, etc. You'd have to rearrange the spritesheet into the right format, but that's hardly the same thing as "essentially unusable".

Animated enemies are really uncommon. Even a lot of modern RPGs for the Nintendo 3DS have stationary enemies. As a result, if you don't want to make your own battlers, it's really hard to find ripped graphics to use. Ideally, all your human enemies, party members, and every NPC in the game have to match in style/size/proportions, so you have to find a game with a ridiculous shitload of humans in it to rip, so you basically just have to use either Suikoden or SaGa Frontier graphics. I won't blame anyone who wants to only use animated battlers for the party, or who wants to make in-battle graphics look different from out-of-battle graphics - those are easy ways to get around the problem.

author=Mr_Detective
So if I use the default front view system, my game will suck ? :|

Not at all! The classic Dragon Quest games as well as similar hits like Earthbound use front-view character-less battles. Being able to see characters in battle is a great and easy way to establish a connection between them and the player, but not the only way. You may just have to work harder and get a little creative to make up for the lack of immediate, obvious visuals.

author=Mr_Detective
So if I use the default front view system, my game will suck ? :|

Whut? I'm not sure how you leapt from "A is better than B" to "if you do B then your game will suck". There's a pretty enormous logic gap there.

author=vox-humana
I didn't mean they were technically unusable - obviously they're made to be used. But like you said, if you use animated battlers like that then you have to match everything to them in style and size etc, it becomes pretty impossible. So as nice as those battlers are, I can't see a viable way to use them properly.

Due to the fact that there are no up-facing or down-facing versions of those style battlers, they're clearly designed to only be used during battle, and for the characters to have completely different sprites on the field map. I don't personally like that method, but I understand it, and it's pretty common. So you could do it that way, but I empathize with your distaste for it.

Personally I considered using those for my own game, and then making sprites in the same style to match them, but ended up doing it the other way around - I took RTP style sprites from RPG Maker XP, and made animated battlers in that style. The result is, uh, still kinda time consuming, but only really hard for melee fighters. So the trick if you're making animated battlers is to have a game with all gun and magic users, heh. Much easier to animate. But if I were starting over right now, I'd figure out a way to make the game using graphics that already existed, because I'm sorta sick of spending three to four hours in Photoshop for every hour in RPG Maker (I thought that ratio would get better over time as I got further into the game; so far that has not happened).

If I had to pick a favorite perspective it'd be that 3/4 angle that's used in games like Suikoden or Breath of Fire 2. That's a difficult angle to draw and animate at, though. It's easier to visualize motion in sideview and adapt it into a sprite.

It depends though. However I still think showing the player a graphic of your role playing character is better in a sense. This is because you control a graphic when moving through scenery so you should see your hero graphic being controlled in battle. It only makes more sense and is probably more visually appealing.

However this can vary per game. If your game is like a 1 character controlled game then first person is kind of awesome as it makes you feel like you the player are attacking the enemy visually. You can imagine you are the hero especially in games where the game's role is the players role and history and experiences are made directly by you and you even name the hero yourself. I would enjoy it more if animations looked like they were coming of screen towards you then as well.

I just feel its better side view because it shows the character actually performing the skill used not just showing a flash of animation or light that demonstrates the character attacked. You see the character damaged and in a state of condition when status damage is inflicted. This third person perspective adds more realism than the traditional dragon warrior battle system. It reminds you that your characters are dead, in a state or in danger. You gain more of sense of relation to your characters and you can make skills look awesome so you enjoy visually seeing it in action as well, like Squall's Limit Break Lionheart. I only pulled it off once when I completed the game originally and that was to defeat Adel which was one hell of a satisfaction at the time.

In all fairness it does depend on the type of game but on a general basis I prefer to see a character graphic performing actions rather than no graphic whether its side-view or not. I mean even a Pokemon Style Visual Approach is still great as its still front view but shows a overhead view of the pokemon of graphic of the battler in action.

author=UPRC

author=Jude
If I had to pick a favorite perspective it'd be that 3/4 angle that's used in games like Suikoden or Breath of Fire 2. That's a difficult angle to draw and animate at, though. It's easier to visualize motion in sideview and adapt it into a sprite.

This is how I've always felt as well. In my opinion, it gives you the best view of the action.

Kind of like the original 2 Golden Sun games? Maybe 3, never played it.

Also my preference is to have the characters visible but that's basically it, a graphical difference, you can make the battles play the same whether or not you actually display your characters and as has been said if you don't display them there's no need for consistency with your in game graphics, or making monsters the appropriate size for your player battlers.

author=LockeZ
I do kind of wonder what the overall preference is between small, animated sprite battlers vs. big, non-animated picture battlers. Since that's something I could see going both ways. And it applies to enemies just as much as to party members.

I prefer animated battlers myself, although a back view of bigger non animated characters in a Pokemon style could be pulled off pretty nicely.

author=vox-humana
since you have to worry about animation, consistency of the sprites between each other, consistency between battle and field sprites

Even commercial games have problems with this, so I wouldn't be too worried about it. In Atelier Iris on PS2, Klein has a different hair color for his battle sprite, profile pic and overworld sprite. They're all a weird blondish-orange variation, but all very clearly different shades.

Final Fantasy III/VI also has issues with it. The profile pics have far more details on the faces than the sprites that they're barely recognizable as the same characters. They're sprites all look the same age, with the same complexion, and with no facial details. If I remember right, Cyan's sprite doesn't even have his mustache. I recall being so confused when I saw Leo's profile pic. It looked nothing like him.