Before I even put a single enemy into the database of Wine & Roses, I sat down and made a list of roughly fifteen ideas for interesting (yet easily understandable) battles. Gimmicky battles with confusing or subtle tricks weren't useful to me. My basic criteria was this: if my battle narrator couldn't fit the idea into his one-line message box, it wasn't appropriate. Ideally, Francisco wouldn't have to say anything in particular to get the idea across, but sometimes it's necessary for clarification or purposeful redundancy.

So, for example, the Infernal Machine fight requires no direct commentary from Francisco; he's free to be a witty narcissist. The boss follows a simple pattern of two minor, easily-avoided attacks for two turns and then every third turn it unleashes Moloch's Furnace for catastrophic Solar damage to all three of the ladies you play as. The premise and solution are clear: it deals lots of Solar damage at once, so you need to optimize your exorcists to not take much Solar damage.

A battle that required some actual help from Francisco is the battle against Red, Yellow and Indigo. They use weapon, Solar and Lunar attacks respectively, and are in general easily dealt with in ways I won't cover here since the game's almost out. Still, it's the first fight in a while that has multiple units, and so Francisco reminds you that "these lovely ladies will be furious if one dies, surely." This is a quick reminder going back to some of the first fights in the game, where enemies would gain additional actions each turn when their allies fell, encouraging you to kill them all at once, or to disable them through non-lethal means while focusing one at a time. It's also the earliest appearance of the Douse ailment, so it's mentioned that "being Doused means you evade less and take more Solar damage."

And lastly, there were fights that I simply decided not to put in the game because they were too awkward to explain well, and couldn't be easily noticed by playing the fight. This mostly has to do with conditional damage/attack usage. A boss using Dreadful Lunge every other turn is obvious; a boss using Dreadful Lunge only while suffering three or more ailments is obnoxious and sounds stupid if Francisco tried to explain it: "this guy looks like he'll use a powerful attack when under a lot of ailments" sounds just... no. That's not going in my game.

In a game designed to present a unique experience in each battle, I had to make them both approachable and special -- I hope I succeeded without overwhelming the player. We'll find out in a few days...