ALTERNATE ELEMENTAL INTERPRETATIONS

You can stab the rock user in the eyes.

Yep, I agree that rock-paper-scissors isn't perfectly logical. On the other hand, it is somewhat limited to the shapes that you can make with your hand. So I mean, the repertoire of possible weapons is like... rock, paper, scissors, the letter W, the number 4, the middle finger (or I guess it can be symbolic of a bird), etc.. Whereas, I feel that there's actually a lot of room to get the elemental interpretations correct in an RPG.

On the subject of Greek elements (and specifically, their use in FF1), I want to know why your foes are made out of earth, fire, air, and water; but your attacks are made out of fire, lightning, and ice. They never really aligned in a really convenient way. I'd prefer to see the attacks and the monsters deliberately chosen to create logical match-ups, like water attack vs fire elemental and fire attack vs ice elemental. I don't like ice attack vs fire elemental, because honestly, when has someone ever thrown ice onto a fire to put it out?

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... "Oh noes, not a wooden staff, wood grows from the ground, so a wooden staff is my bane." I'm right in saying that that doesn't make sense. ...

You've never seen a tree before have you?

Actually, everybody has. So, assuming that I've seen a tree, why would wooden staffs be a strong attack against an Earth elemental / Sand Golem?

You wouldn't fight a sand golem with a wooden stick, you'd use growth. Trees can spit the earth easily as they grow.


This whole argument is awesome for being RPG nerdy.

I employed a very simple elemental tree in Generica that I plan on reusing because it is so easy to grasp:

I had Fire, Ice, Lit, Dark, Phys and Poison.

Fire <-> Ice
Lit <-> Dark
Phys <-> Poison

So fire weapons damage ice creatures (and vice versa). Healing spells would be classified as Phys. Undead enemies would be considered Dark-type.

With this setup you cover all the pertinent elements while keeping a simple vs. schema. I like it.

Light and Lightning are the same thing in my games too simply because they're both light.

I don't have wind, I've got instead something I don't have a name yet for. But of course, none of them really have any specific names.

Well it's color is green, if that means anything at all.



Actually all my elements are like that, I leave it up to the player to decide what to call each element. For the sake of sanity and so the player knows what type works against what, I'll use colored symbols and you could just call them by their name. For example, the player might say "red stuff works against that monster but it absorbs all the yellow stuff".

It's actually much like Chrono Cross if you think about it. It does go Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, White, Black, but what's weak and strong against what is different for every enemy. No one or piece of equipment HAS an element, it just has what it defends, is weak against, etc.

In Chrono Cross, Blue and Red oppose each other. But in my game, blue stuff doesn't always work on anything that's fiery, or even looks like it might be red. Sometimes blue stuff is negated. Just because you're fighting some monster that's always on fire doesn't mean blue is the smartest thing to use on it. In Earthbound, there was that Carbon Dog, for example- If I remember properly, it's speed went way down when turned crystal, but its defense went way up.

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...But I do think it would be cool if there were dark reds, light greens, and stuff like that .

There is for me, you can have black-red or white-red. White is Lightning, Light while Black is gravity or magnetism. They even have their own symbols with their powers combined they summon --! Ha! Just had to take a shot at your avatar.

But yeah, the symbol looks like a golden nova if it's white-red, it's an oily drop if it's blue-red, etc. Of course my current project is supposed to be simple so I'm not sure I'll make a cross table of icons. While WeaponSoul is a completely random name, NovaForce is named after the fact that the main character (The one who's sprite was duplicated during a test) is white-red.

PS:
Seriously though, Heart?! What the hell was that >.<