RM2K3 BATTLE LAYOUT

Generally, I would suggest you to use traditional if you have a lot of different statuses in the game (like Berserk, Paranoia, Fury etc).

On the other hand, Gauge is excellent if you want to implement "limit break bar" like the ones in Balmung Chronicles - i.e. altering the faceset. However, like you said, status is not shown so that is one of the weakness. One way to remedy this is by using the B.Charset itself - i.e. making an animation with a word above the battlecharset that represent the bad status (lots of work if you have tons of statuses and the limit is 32 ugh). Still, this means that you will have less space for different battlecharset animations. If you like having different b.charset animation for different skills (like me) then this method essentially give you less animations to work with. However, you can use the battle animation to show the skill (the skill animation includes the hero charset) to give you an infinite space. But these battle anims are not affect by LIGHTING so that would be your issue instead.

Still, I that this is one of the RM's major weakness as it can only show ONE status. That means no matter which method you use, you can only see one status present (you can be heroic and Blinded at once and you wouldn't realise you are poisoned if heroic have higher priority). So my suggestion is to use whichever fits your design best. If the gauge is nothing but facial then go for alternative. But if it has some kind of neato function (like in that one game you don't have numbers so you have to look out at the character's face and bar to determine their health) then Gauge is the way to go.

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INot sure if it does the same for when targeting characters for healing. I'd guess that it does, but I may be wrong.

It doesn't - I once tried making a singe ally skill but it doesn't show any additional information when you select and ally.


Actually, I am having the same issue myself, but it's a choice between traditional and ALTERNATIVE instead of Gauge. I mean, it's cool to have transparency right? But it turns out that it makes the words somewhat hard to read in certain scenes.

At first I thought this would be easy to fix. I mean, just tick off the transparency and problem solved right? Well it turns out that if it is NOT transparent, the ATB BAR is somewhat "blocked" (becomes transparent-ish) by the layer above it (that is no longer transparent). This ticked me off pretty bad because the system set that I made is for alternative (looks worse on tradition). Now I am thinking to change it back to traditional because of this (it doesn't show HP/EN words in traditional!)