AVEE'S PROFILE

Just thought of something new that adds replay value:

Letting the player know of his progress, with completion rates for instance. You beat the game and are then shown your Item finding rate as in the Metroid games, or Scenes rate for every girl as in Heartache 101.

I believe that should appeal to most players who want to achieve mastery of the game, find every secret and all that.

Letting the players know of their progress at the end of the game encourages them to start over again and try different paths, while letting them know at anytime during the game should appeal more to players who want to achieve mastery in a single run, thus adding play value instead of replay value.

Craze, try my game, at least for the boss battles.
I believe my Crystalis SFS (an A-RPG) project's boss battles are well tweaked and provide a satisfying experience. You can easily take them on with one or two levels above or below the average, the average maximum level players should reach in Demo 0.1 being Level 8.

There are 4 boss battles. Players who rush them, approach and mash the attack button without paying attention to their surroundings will get screwed. Serves them right. In three of these four battles you can play it safe at the beginning, focus on avoiding the boss's attacks while memorizing the patterns and devise an offensive strategy. Only a few minutes are necessary to do so.

When your strategy is perfect, and if you have the skills to back it up, the bosses can all be killed in under 3 minutes. Of course you can also play it defensively and make the fight last for 10 minutes or more. You have the choice. A few people complained about the first boss having too much HP, but he can be killed in under a minute without you taking damage if you're clever enough.

I usually prefer RPGs with Action or Fighting features, because they have the player rely on additional skills and they provide richer feelings of tension and satisfaction. Even when normal fights are repetitive and don't require much strategy, the feeling of actually controlling every movement and attack of my character is far from boring. If I get hit it means I screwed up; I'm responsible and I have to do better. My failure is not caused by a random chance of the enemy casting whatever uber-spell I can't avoid because my party's glued to the floor.

And a fast pace is a must 'coz I'm wasting my time playing video games and there are more important things I should be doing :P

As for conventional RPGs, regardless of the length of battles or amount of boss fights between normal ones, battles will be boring if there is no variety in the strategies. For example, Chrono Trigger partially succeeds here: some enemies must first be hit by a certain attack to lower special defenses, while Final Fantasy 7 and 8 sadly fail: just spam Attack, Limit Breaks or your strongest GFs all the time and you'll win every fight.

And even though fights are fun, I will quickly put a game aside if the story and cutscenes are boring (the Grandia series for instance). But I have no trouble going through mindless and repetitive fights to complete a game if the storyline's great. Uh... so my point here would be that players should not put all of their potential enjoyment in the hands of the gameplay.

If in 5 minutes from now I travel back in time 5 minutes, will the present "I" meet the 5 minute older "I" right now? Or will I only meet the now past "I" in 5 minutes? Which "I" am I?

The only game with a dog companion I know about is Secret of Evermore.

These custom character faces are excellent.
Keep up the good work ^^