Legends of an Otherworld

SentinelProxima recently completed a Let's Play of this game on Youtube.

Some background information here - at the time he started this LP, the game had been sitting in an incomplete, abandoned state on my hard drive for several years. It's a miracle that I still had the source code, to be honest. Watching through his LP actually was a big factor in me finally resuming work and finishing the game off - particularly of note, only about 20% - 30% of the game actually remained to make at this stage, so more had been done than not. Ironically, the LP itself went through a similar thing - after reaching the final boss, it was left for over a year before SentinelProxima finished it off.

From watching through this LP, there's a few things I picked up on relating to the battle system that I feel need changing for my new project. These are not at all to fault SentinelProxima's playstyle - I can certianly understand why he did things the way he did, and a big part of that is "the game allowed for it", or even in some cases "the game required it". Conversely, there are some things that I feel were underused, and that I should consider either reworking to make them more useful, or outright removing them.

A particular concern for me was that the start of every battle was basically "set up protective statuses and buffs". These things absolutely need to exist, but the problem I see is the "set up once, now you're good for the whole battle" approach. I feel these need to be handled differently. One possible way of doing this is to make sure most bosses (and higher-tier random encounters) have a way of dealing with these. Another is by making them of limited duration (most status effects and all buffs in my game did not expire over time).

Another idea I have had regarding this, specifically with regard to buffs, is to do away with the "two levels of buff", make them more potent so that they're still useful, and slap on a restriction that you may only have one stat buffed at a time - if you buff a different one, the original buff goes away. (Most likely, debuffs would work the same way. One buff and one debuff at the same time, as long as they're on different stats, would be possible.)

In short, I'm wanting these kind of things to be situational rather than an "always do this first". But at the same time, I don't want to make them too minor or too short-duration to be worth using, either.

There will always be some cases where the best approach really is "always try to have it". Haste is an example of such - the advantage of being under Haste is tremendous. This would likely need to be addressed either by bosses removing Haste regularly, or by limited duration and a high cost to cast it.

Finally, another concern relates to sidequests. In the LP, SentinelProxima chose to pursue most sidequests as soon as they became available. This was intended, and taken into account level-wise, for most of the sidequests. The problem arises with one that was specifically intended as post-game, yet SentinelProxima chose to do it before completing the game. In this case, it meant he had a relatively easy time with the final bosses.

I'm not sure how this can be avoided. One option, of course, is to literally block access to such sidequests until after the final boss. But I don't know how I feel about this option. Another could be to give no rewards, not even levelling, from such sidequests - but then this limits the ability to give the player more to work with as they continue through the quest.

I'm really not sure what the answer to this one is. The only way I could see to resolve it is to directly buff up the final bosses if sidequests have been completed, but eh... that doesn't quite feel right either to me.