CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

It's impossible to say without further information. The idea is by itself neither a good or a bad idea, it depends on implementation.

A warning though, defense and counter rate usually doesn't scale the same way. Having say +5 defense means much less late in the game than early while +5 counter rate is equally effective early and late in game. Unless you do the math carefully, you will make the parrying dagger either useless at the beginning or overpowered at the end or both.

Usually, limit breaks aren't well done. In the majority of the games with them, I just use them as soon as they are available. The only fights worth saving them for are bosses, but if I save them for that, I'll never be able to use them for anything else.

Often they are also poorly balanced, often being either overpowered or underpowered.

A game that did them well is an earlier demo of Glacia. There was one boss which would gradually use stronger and stronger attacks as it lost HP. I saved up two limit breaks, cast a strength up spell on the characters who could use them and then used them to skip the final 25% of the boss fight. In later versions of the game, the boss is way weaker and you may just as well use the limit break right away.

As for a game that did it poorly, how about Final Fantasy VII? First of, you charge it by taking damage, which means the game rewards you for having something bad happen to your characters. More importantly though, the balance is pretty much nonexistent. Granted, the balance of that game was very bad period.

author=LockeZ
See, you say that, but if a linear RPG seems more boring to you than a linear action game (like Contra), it's just because you apparently think RPGs are boring compared to action games. Which means you don't like RPGs, not really. Which means you're not the person that anyone making RPGs is making games for. So your opinion about them is irrelevant. Right? Stop me if there's a part of that that seems like a leap, but I think my logic is sound.

I did once decide to play Contra a bit and I noticed something (to me at least) interesting about it. I found myself enjoying Contra more than RPGs, but I got tired of playing it quicker. I identified the main reason being that while Contra had better action than RPGs, it had only action going for it. So, when I inevitable got tired of the action, it meant I also got tired of the game as a whole because the action pretty much is the whole game.

Anyway, I like having choices, but only choices that feels meaningful for me matters. Take Suikoden as an example, it has a lot of choices, but the only ones that actually matters are the ones that decides whether or not characters will join your army. If the rest of the choices were cut out, I would have enjoyed the game more.

The consequences of the choice doesn't have to be super important to be meaningful, but most of them should do what they say on the tin. For example, if I get to choose between being nice or mean towards a character and the only consequence of being mean is that the character I'm mean towards get hurt for a cut-scene or two, that's enough for me. While it's not important, it still means I can affect how the main character react to people and the option I got never implied that my choice would have a huge consequence.

However, if I'm given the choice between say sneaking into the villain castle and not do so, then a no should mean no and not that I'm forced to do it either way. If I don't actually have a choice, then don't pretend I do. Likewise, going back to my earlier example, if I can choose to have my character being mean towards the female lead frequently, but the game still ends with him and her being a couple, there's also a problem. If a choice implies it has a certain consequence, it should have that consequence. I can accept exceptions like choices have unforeseen consequences for story reasons, but not when the game flat out nullifies them.

The ability to backtrack is also based on whether or not it feels meaningful to me. I could backtrack easily once I got the airship in Final Fantasy X, but I didn't find much that interested me by doing so and I would have liked the game just fine if it automatically progressed instead of letting me choose from a list of locations. In Kingdom Hearts however, I absolutely loved revisiting earlier worlds even if it just was to pick up previously unavailable Dalmatians.

We have some different ideas of how to handle status effects. I don't think there is one right way to do it, but I do think that status effects are useless or near so in most RPGs, so what I think can be said about all methods is that you need to do something different from what most RPGs does in order to make status effects useful. You need to ask yourself "what am I doing different from other RPGs that makes status effects useful?"

This I think goes with pretty much all ideas in your game. Let's say you want equipment to be something the player has to think about and not just about equipping the piece with the highest number. Commercial games are getting better here, but in most RM games it's easy to figure out what equipment to use, even if there's more than one available per tier. So once again, you need to do something different to get your desired result.

So, here's a new don't: Don't do something the same way as in other games and expect a different result.

author=Feldschlacht IV
The issue then is the danger of damage and the ease of healing, rather than the use of status effects. In a game like Final Fantasy VII damage or even a K.O. is just a minor inconvenience that can be fixed in a turn or two. Compare games like the SaGa series where heavy damage must be prevented at all cost and a downed party member meant that unless shit turned around fast, you were fucked.

Indeed. In games where enemies are non-threatening, status effects are practically useless. I can only imagine using them if they are a convenience (I can inflict it without increasing the amount of button pressing needed.)

Often (maybe even usually) when a skill doesn't work, the problem isn't the skill itself, rather it's that the combat isn't designed in a way that makes the skill desirable. No matter how strong you make a certain skill, it will not be useful unless your battles generate situations where said skill is desirable.

Then make the risk of the status effect as valuable as the contingency plan.

A risk is valuable? Do you mean the benefit if the status effect would work is worth the risk of it not working? In that case, the problem is that there usually isn't a "survive more" when it comes to battles. If the contingency plan is reliable, the benefit of a status effect is usually not a priority, like surviving with more HP intact which nobody cares about since they don't feel any pain when characters takes damage. If the contingency plan is not reliable, you create a situation where battles becomes an RNG gamble which a lot of players won't consider fair.

I can only see it work if you do have a contingency plan that's reliable, but there is a limit to how often you can use that contingency plan.


Anyway, I once worked on a game where I had a blindness spell that hit all enemies, had a 100% accuracy on all it should work on (slimes for example, were immune) and pretty much reduced their accuracy to 0%. In addition to that, healing spells were really expensive (basic attack spell - 5 MP, basic healing spell - 18 MP). I did two test runs trough a dungeon, one where I played the way I wanted it to be played and one where I went for (near) maximum offense. I found out that I was still doing better in a my maximum offense playtrough.

First I tried to just increase the damage output of enemies, but I had to make them unreasonable strong for an early dungeon. In the end, making status effects useful without breaking anything else required me to combine a slightly improved damage output of the enemies with lowering the MP pool of the characters, lowering the MP cost of status effect spells and changing the HP scores of the enemies a bit.

It really takes a lot to make vanilla status effect spells in RPGs useful.