PSWHAAAAA! ...LIIIIMIT BREAK!

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=Craze
Everybody go play Etrian Odyssey 3.

http://etrian.wikia.com/wiki/Limits

^Sounds like regular skill mechanics to me, save for the bonus turn given.

My knowledge of Limit Breaks is mostly limited to how FF6 to FFX handled them, hence I think a Limit Break's purpose IS to break the game in the first place, allowing you to breeze through a difficult challenge or save a lot of time in an otherwise long fight. Therefore Limits might actually be a designer's attempt at balancing tough battles, but it's easy to make them too powerful.

I do like FF6's though, because they're ultra rare and can't be spammed, and I played the game for years without having any knowledge of their existence.

Mostly limit breaks are just there to create skills that have a cooldown that persists between battles. This helps break up the attack, attack, attack, attack pattern a little bit in games that have very short normal battles where a normal cooldown wouldn't work (because when a battle only lasts two rounds, what's the point of a 6 round cooldown?). It makes normal battles a little more different from each-other while also giving you a cooldown skill you can use several times per battle on a boss.

That's not a bad thing to do by any means, especially in an easy game. In fact it's great in an easy game. Especially since limit breaks have the side effect of being more beneficial to you the more powerful your enemy is. But if you aren't trying to make an easy game, you probably want to do more than that.

Some games that did them differently:

Lufia 2
The IP gauge in Lufia 2 was a limit break meter with two major differences:
- Most limit breaks only cost a fraction of the meter.
- Your equipment determined what limit breaks you could use. Each piece of equipment had its own limit skill.

Some limit breaks in Lufia 2 were very powerful - the healing and status ones, particularly. They were especially powerful if, like me, you avoided every random battle in the game that you could possibly avoid, and so the bosses and the few random battles you did fight were legitimately difficult. And the different costs created different cooldowns for the skills. Having more than one character with an area healing spell was invaluable, even if you could only use it every other round. Being able to debuff the boss's attack power multiple times at the beginning of the fight was insanely useful, if you could manage to get the same limit skill on several characters. Guy, who couldn't use magic, could suddenly use a very limited set of magic. You could recover MP mid-battle... but only with one character, because the item that gave that skill was from a treasure chest, and you had to choose who to give it to. This created a really cool way of making equipment more interesting - because each piece of equipment changed your tactical options in battle.

On the downside, bosses which used area attacks every round would sometimes fill your IP gauges so fast that you could use your cheaper limit skills almost every single round, which kind of broke the system.

Wild ARMs
Wild ARMs 1, 2, 3 and Alter Code F all use the same basic limit break system.
- Your FP gauge goes up from both dealing and taking damage, as well as from evading damage. It resets to 0 after each battle, though.
- Limit breaks cost 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of the FP gauge, depending on the limit break. Each character starts with a 25% limit, gains their 50% limit very early in the game, and gains the other two over the course of the game.
- In Wild ARMs 2 and 3, magic spells have no cost, but can only be used when your FP is above a certain number. So you need 70 FP to use Revive, but you still have 70 FP after using it. This creates a really interesting choice, deciding whether to use your limit breaks or not.
- Reaching 100 FP removes all status ailments, and in some of the games staying at 100 FP also makes you immune to status ailments.

The part about magic spells is very unusual, and helps ensure that even normal battles don't end too fast. It also means that characters can't use magic for several rounds after they die and are revived, making death a lot more of a problem than it is in many games.

What makes the Wild ARMs system really interesting to me though is the limit breaks themselves more than the system. Common limit breaks in the series include:
Accelerator: Makes the character act first this round. Choose another action after choosing Accelerator; it can be any action at all.
Extend: Makes a magic spell affect all allies or all enemies. Otherwise, all magic is single target.
Mystic: Like Extend, but for items. Note that healing items are sort of rare in most Wild ARMs games, since they cannot be bought.
Full Clip: Expend all ammo to use a physical skill for heavy bonus damage. Choose another action after choosing Boost; it must be a physical skill.
FP Shift: Grants 25 FP to a party member.

When you combine these kinds of augmentation effects with the other skills in the game, you get a system where you're building up power and then weighing whether to use it. Both because of how magic costs work, and because there are a lot of other buffs and augmentation effects with pretty limited durations, and you want to try to get them to line up as well as possible so you might wait for an Att+ buff or a Def- debuff before blasting the enemy. Or you might wait to use your 50 FP limit until you have 75 FP, in case you need the 25 FP limit for healing, because healing is extremely rough. Or wait until it's at 100 so you lose access to your 60 FP magic spell for as short a time as possible. But if you wait too long, you're wasting FP because your bar is already at 100. But maybe that's okay because of the status ailment protection thing! It's really dynamic and you're weighing several different layers of pros and cons, and I really like it.

Legend of Heroes Trails Sky had a similar system called craft. Each character had around 5 types of moves with differant costs. You could use them to taunt the enemy or alter someone's stats. There was also the option to interupt another character's turn to perform the moves that cost 100 points.