| Jumpin said: That's not what I said about a three shield battle, you would be forced to use a 2-2-3-1-3-1 - with the 1 being replaced with abilities to save time, since otherwise it is insufferably long. Like I said, there's nothing brilliant about doing this, it's just one more encounter type you will experience dozens to hundreds of times, and another chore-ish type thing you have to keep doing repetively; every battle with 3 shields will be pretty much the same. My issue is the bloat of the battle system. Why add additional steps in the interface to a game with so few encounter situations? Especially when those encounter situations are extensively repeated? This extra fiddling with the interface isn't depth, its complexity for the sake of complexity - and that complexity is just repetitive actions, there isn't variety; the exact same tactics are applied to the same encounters - which are frequently repeated. This is why it only took 2-3 hours, in my experience, for the battle system to feel like a real chore. Ramping up over time doesn't fix these issues, it compounds them by further bloating the system in adding more steps to be repeated dozens and dozens of times. Take a game like Chrono Trigger, for example, the addition of enemy positioning and scripted actions is something that created depth. There are LOTS of unique encounters in that game. In addition, when you factor in the large variety of magic, single techs, dual techs, and triple techs, you end up with dozens of different types of damage and statuses you can deliver to enemies. So you have a large variety of options to deal with a large variety of situations. One of which, using a lightning bolt to stun a dinosaur, and deliver more damage, is just one of the ways to take down an enemy in Chrono Trigger - it's every way to take down an enemy in Project Octopath. Chrono Trigger, in addition, didn't bloat its interface to get the actions done. It was done far more simply - you select attack, and the character attacks - no extra fiddling around; no extra interface burden. |
Ok, but what I'm getting from your response is that you'd rather just have one input and simplify everything. But one of your major complaints is that it's repetitive. But if you just want it all to be one button press wouldn't THAT be the most repetitive thing? I agree that the front line back line positioning thing has interesting depth, as suikoden 2 is one of my favorite games (especially when combined with the 100+ characters and their interactions), but you can't expect everything to be the same.
Another of my favorites is valkyrie profile, which was very simplistic, but also had depth. While I loved that style and wished more games used it, I'm not going to expect every game to play the same way.
