CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

author=RyaReisender
Sounds to me like you're just not liking the game. Boring characters, really?

You say "Boring characters, really?" but you offer no argument to why that can't be a big problem. Here's the deal, "we wanted a Chrono Trigger inspired game and we got it, but the game was poorly made" is a perfectly valid explanation. If you say you want a chicken for dinner, it's implied that you don't want the chicken horrible over-/undercooked, don't want it together with other ingredients that doesn't work well with chicken and doesn't want it ruined for any other reason. Likewise, when people request a Chrono Trigger like game, it's implied that they want a good Chrono Trigger like game.

Further, game developers have a responsibility to know what they are doing. If someone requests that a game becomes harder, it doesn't mean that any increase of difficulty will make those who made that request happy, there is such thing as overdoing it or making the game difficult for the wrong reasons. Just the same, when people requested a Chrono trigger like game, it did not mean that any Chrono Trigger like game would satisfy them.

What Square Enix can say though is "Well, we tried, seems we don't have what it takes to pull it off anymore".

You can run some tests yourself. Just spam a crapload of events not doing anything. Then make a select few events (the heroes) move around and maybe display a few stock animations as well. See if the game slows down. Granted, if it doesn't, it's not a guarantee that things won't slow down when you're doing it for real, but you can still get a sense of what the engine handles well and what it handles less well.

I did my usual strategy with this game, I watched the very beginning of it and then hit some playlists somewhere in the middle and watched random encounters.

The very beginning had the problem that the characters didn't seem very interesting. Lucca and Marle weren't exactly deep and complex characters, but they still caught my interest way better than Setsuna and A-something. I may be wrong, but the characters came of to me as rather uninspired.

The random battles had the standard RPG problem; spam the same crap over and over. One player spammed attack while another player had one character who would spam Cyclone and one who would spam Lightning 2. If you're going to make a traditional JRPG, that's the tradition I don't want you to keep.

author=Red_Nova
Yeah, looking at stat changes and refusing to equip certain armors was definitely the intention originally. I was hoping players could see that Mia would lose more than she would gain by equipping the chain mail. Problem is, optimal or not, it was still an avenue that needed testing, and adding that to a large amount of other possible armor combinations per character would take up so much time that I eventually went with nixing the option altogether.

That's true, anything that's not supposed to be a good idea needs to be tested anyway. I've experienced it myself, I can take a lot of measurements to discourage a certain playstyle, but when testing that playstyle still proved to be superior to the intended one.

The ability to exploit elemental weaknesses was actually the reason Skill Lock was implemented in the first place. The very first demo let you use the same Drive over and over again as long as you had the SP cost. Locking skills prevented spamming attacks, but Luke was still so strong with magic that weaknesses didn't matter so much.

There is one interesting aspect of Luke's elemental spells combined with the skill lock. If a troop has both one enemy weak against earth and one against wind, there's an actual choice to be made. If you distribute the two spells among the two enemies, you end up causing more total damage than if you focus one one. On the other hand, focusing the damage is usually better than spreading it out. Well, in theory this is true, but it remains to be seen how it works out in practice.

I think that ultimately, I'm going by feeling. Typically, you're comparing yourself to others. However, if I included people who pick up the RPG maker, but quickly gets tired and quits, it would make it too easy to be "good" at something. So, it has to be at least decently experienced people. How experienced I can't tell though. Hence why it ends up boiling down to feel.

I don't think it's important to draw a clear line, but it's necessary to know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Play by your strengths and all that. So, you do need to get some sort of impression of what you're good at and what you're not.