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What should change?

So, as I've mentioned around the place several times, I'm wanting to do a new project.

The biggest issue of course with this one, is the near-zero effort on anything outside of the battle system. Even the levelling system, while sufficient and flexible, is not very interesting.

I had entertained ideas of rewriting it while keeping the same overarching ideas, but I'm not even sure about that anymore. If I'm going to essentially be doing an entirely new game that at most draws inspiration from this one, then there's much more room for change - including in the battle system which, while great, still has room for improvement.

The first thing to come to mind is more clarity for the player on how things work. Yes, traditionally, you know you have "50 strength" but trial and error is the only way to see how that translates into actual damage. I'd like to make this more transparent, so the game can focus more on "figure out how to defeat the enemy with what you have available" than "figure out what your attacks and stats actually do".

As you may know, this game is heavily based, battle-system-wise, off Final Fantasy X (aside from being much harder), but some features - most notably summons and overdrives - are not in any way replicated. I'd like to integrate these features somehow, but perhaps not directly in the way FFX does as both are overpowered there.

Then, the next question is of course - how can I replicate some of the existing game's best boss battles under this new system? For example, Dark Transient - often considered the best (and hardest, or at worst second in difficulty only to Corelock) boss in the game - would be rendered far easier by the presence of summons if they worked exactly as in FFX.

I have a lot of ideas, but I'm still figuring out which ones I want to use. Any suggestions are always welcome.

Posts

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I'd love to play a harder Final Fantasy X. <3 I remember playing that as a teen and it was kinda fun but the end optional boss felt anti-climatic and blah for some reason. I personally wouldn't want it TOO hard though.

You can make summons/summoners not be overpowered- this isn't really that hard at all. You will just need to do a lot of battle testing to tweak the numbers so fights still feel challenging/exhilarating. It's often as simple as giving your abilities the correct numerical value rather than anything too complicated strategy wise. And then playtesting enough times. And don't have or seriously nerf 'Quick Hit'-type attacks cuz that move was way too strong in the original FFX. Speed/agility is the one that usually needs to be kept in check the most in these makers.

I primarily use rpg maker 2003 myself, but I'm pretty sure you can easily write a formula in the newer makers where 50 points of strength always translates to 50 hp worth of damage on regular attacks. And if you want it to be really transparent you wouldn't even need a defense stat or anything, just give the monster extra HP when you want it to be tank-y so '50 strength always does 50 HP worth of physical damage.' Unless of course the monster evades it somehow etc. You wouldn't even need that though, just crank up their HP plus all the different crap the enemy can do to make life miserable for the heroes heh.

In the skill tooltip window you can also give more transparent info that games don't usually have like 'This ability does damage two times your strength stat for such and such mp' or whatever tax/nuance you want to give it depending on the character. It might seem at first glance like you're holding the player's hand too much with all that stuff, but they will be in for a nasty surprise. =D



I won't be using an RPG Maker for any future projects; I'm wanting to write my own code. However, due to that *this* project is RPG Maker (VX Ace), and that I intend to heavily draw from it gameplay-wise, I still think this is relevant here. :)

This game itself already is quite similar to FFX gameplay-wise (not identical though, so don't go in expecting an exact clone). If you can tolerate that the story, mapping etc is pretty poor quality, you'll probably enjoy this game's battles a lot, especially the bosses. :)
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