BACKWARDS_COWBOY'S PROFILE

I vaguely remember a Super Mario game. I don't know if it was NES or SNES, and for all I know it might have been one of the early Donkey Kong games. My real dad was really into technology and video games, so I imagine that's how I got into it.

Final Fantasy II: I got it on the iPhone (it's just a port of the PSP one with touch controls) and just never got into it. It's just too different from all of the other Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy XII: Working on it. I had stopped a long time ago because I got stuck at a boss.

Final Fantasy XIII: Never started. I just left it lying around because my brother tried it and told me it was complete shit. I figure I'll get around to it when I'm recovering from foot surgery all summer.

Baten Kaitos Origins: Disc 2: Point of No Return

Class of Heroes: It's like Etrian Odyssey for people who hate fun.

The Last Story: I'll get around to it eventually.

Final Fantasy VIII: I hated most of the characters.

Dungeon Explorer: The 80's were hard.

Dungeon Explorer Sequel: Neither the DS or PSP one had the appeal of the old TurboGrafx one.

Persona: I got to the final boss and decided to consider it finished.

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth: No.

Rondo of Swords: Up there with Hoshigami in terms of how-fucking-hard-can-a-game-be?

Persona 2: They censored Hitler and that was really just a downer. I wanted to fight Hitler.

Rogue Galaxy: My old PS2 cooked the disc.

As far as improving the issues with variety, at least in FFX's case, bumping the active party size from 3 to 4 would solve several issues right away. The biggest problem was that if there were three enemies, and each required a different character to kill it (unless you wanted to spend eight turns bashing a slime with a sword), you had to swap out all of your party members which prevented you from using who you wanted to use. By increasing the active number of members to 4, you could always have one or two that you actually like and weren't using out of necessity.

An alternative would be to limit the number of specialized enemies to only one or two per fight, with the others being basic enemies. I understand flying enemies being able to avoid non-ranged attacks, but an enemy that is simultaneously flying AND resistant to magic? That restricts you to smacking it with a blitzball. The character customization tried to offer a solution by allowing any character to learn any skill or obtain any stat-boost, but with the exception of two characters who had stats suited to multiple skill sets, it required excessive amounts of grinding unless you waited until the endgame. The system was also hurt by the fact that only party members who actually took an action in battle gained experience, so if you had to swap out to fight a certain group of enemies, your options were either to not let that character gain experience, or waste a turn or two swinging at and missing an enemy to qualify for experience.

TL;DR Version:
-Variety requiring you to switch just to finish regular encounters is bad. It's fine for bosses or stronger enemies, but there is no excuse why a high-level warrior can't off a low-level slime in one hit after 30 hours of gameplay.

-If you have enough party members that it's enough for two separate parties, then even those who were on the sidelines should be gaining experience to avoid awkward level gaps between party members or certain characters falling into complete disuse.

-Give the player an alternative to having to switch, such as items that cast spells at like 70% power so they don't have to always switch to the mage.

-Don't add useless characters with gimmicky abilities for the sake of variety. I don't care if my beastman can learn monster skills if they're all just the same move with a different animation dealing less damage than my mage's spells.

author=Craze
so you're saying that changing characters won't add variety to a bad game? why do peole in this forum keep assuming enemies are gonna be boring? =| i saw it plenty in the miss topic too... people just assume everything is ff6 (and thus poorly constructed) and give their opinions based on that.

kind of a pessimistic atmosphere for gam mak :<

FFX was the opposite of FFVI, but to the point where it was also bad. You had to switch to certain characters all the time because most of the enemies in the game had attributes like Flying, Resists Physical, Resists Magic, Armored, Fast, etc. With something like seven characters, it became a pain swapping through everybody to finish a battle against three or four enemies. And then they went and applied the attributes to the bosses, so several boss fights became restricted to three characters capable of dealing decent damage, plus whoever you were using as a healer. It's the perfect example of variety gone wrong.

I'm having a hard time believing that the first RPGMaker that I learned to use is actually legal for me to own now. I might just spend $19.99 for the nostalgia.