The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Shemri is another of my own characters. She started as a stoic renegade of the Gerudo clan, opposed not only to Ganondorf's rule, but to the thieving and xenophobic culture the Gerudo have had for generations. I like doing characters that are subversions of their race, but what I didn't know back when I made Shemri is that her premise echoes a certain character infamous for inspiring overused copycat characters amongst role-players. X) Anyway, Shemri left the clan at an early age to live as a huntress, aided by her feline companion Sheikah. She naturally became a part of the resistance against Ganondorf when that sprang up, and after the Gerudo Remnant resettled in Gerudo Fortress, Shemri wound up second-in-command to Nabooru. Things have gone a lot further than Shemri had dared hope they would in her lifetime toward restoring the honor of the Gerudo...although she still struggles to keep them, including their illustrious leader, from having wandering fingers toward others' purses. -.-; Old habits die hard.

In Forgotten Gates, Shemri is a physical glass cannon, very high in speed and attack, but low in everything else. She wields polearms, which are the most diverse class of weaponry in terms of possible damage types--blunt staffs, stabbing spears, chopping poleaxes, and even slashing glaives are included. Shemri's element is Shadow, making her strong against Forest and Spirit, but weak against Light and Fire. Shemri's skills revolve almost entirely around inflicting status conditions on the enemy, from a nerve strike to paralyze a foe to opening a dark rift to swallow and instantly KO the entire enemy side (although of course most enemies have a decent chance of resisting KO moves individually). As a little extra bonus, anytime Shemri takes a hit, there is a chance her cat Sheikah will make a counter-attack.

Shemri's special ability is Throw, which works very similarly to the ability of the same name in Final Fantasy 6. Any unequipped weapon in the inventory can be hurled at an enemy for a powerful hit, at the cost of losing said weapon. Naturally this is a fairly steep price to pay, unless the player is frequently picking up weapons they otherwise have no use for. I'm hoping they often will be, but there are some technical hurdles for that, which I'll probably be discussing in next month's design post. There can also be items whose sole use is to be expended with this ability, like shuriken and grenades.

As an aside, implementing this special ability in vanilla RM2K3 was painful and clunky. X) It involved a jury-rigged menu system in which a message box is displayed showing one weapon from the inventory at a time, with options to go to the next one, the previous one, or use this one. Now with DynRPG, I'm planning to reimplement this as a skill subset containing a skill for every possible weapon to be thrown. In between each battler action, the battle plugin will check the current inventory and add or remove those skills from Shemri according to what weapons are there, and maybe even change the names of the skills to show how many of each weapon is available.