DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

There might not be any good quotes to illustrate it, because games which are that magic-centric are so rare. I picked up the intended meaning because I've had thoughts along the same lines, but I've never seen a game which actually runs with the idea before. It probably would have been clearer if he had described the idea himself.

It's a good way to turn fantasy back into something which gives the player a sense of being exposed to a new and unfamiliar world. Generic medieval fantasy is too overexposed to cultivate curiosity at this point, but what about a setting where armored knights ride into battle and blast each other with thunderbolts, because the usefulness of magic completely supercedes weaponry, and magic-based troops are the core of armies. It gives the player reason to wonder what else about the setting is different from their usual experience, whereas in a conventional fantasy setting there's no reason to ask.

So, I've been tossing a game idea of this style around for years, and considering the sort of graphical and coding investment it would take to make it as I'd like to, I'll probably continue to kick it around for years, but I think LightningLord's comment has a lot of sense to it.

It's not that there aren't ways to justify using both warriors and mages in combat within a single game's setting, but there's an almost complete absence of games that don't use these kind of justifications, even though they don't necessarily make much sense. Lots of the ideas we have about balancing the usefulness of magic and martial skill originate with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons which offered players the chance to imagine themselves as adventurers in a variety of styles. They're designed for balance in a game which incorporates both kinds of combat, they're not explanations for why magic and martial skill logically have to be balanced in usefulness.

Considering how many JRPGs feature magic wielding teens and children, those games have already discarded the idea that magic takes long years of dedicated study to learn. The idea that mages are comparatively frail is usually preserved for game balance, but the same logic implies that there should be no buff college students. The idea that mages can't wear heavy armor is likewise a kludge- the original explanation is that it interferes with their concentration, and yet nothing prevents them from casting spells in the middle of a pitched battle surrounded by screaming and clashes of weapons. The real reason is that heavy armor is one of the main incentives to play a warrior-type character, and so it has to be restricted even though realistically speaking it's not that difficult to wear (a suit of full plate armor weighs about the same amount as the backpack overstuffed with textbooks I carried to and from high school, but the weight is much better distributed.)

If you stop deliberately making arrangements for balance, it's easy to envision a setting where magical means of warfare render skills like swordsmanship obsolete. I'd be interested to see a game where combat is all magic-based, and instead of HP, you have points representing the strength of the barriers standing between you and magical obliteration. Barriers could be shifted through a distribution of damage type affinities, so for instance if you expect to be attacked with a fire spell you can funnel most of the strength of the barrier into protecting against fire, even to the point that it'll absorb fire damage, but then if you get blindsided by another type of spell, it'll do massive damage. Healing magic only exists in a plot-based rather than mechanical context, and if any of your characters are attacked past the limits of their barrier, it's Game Over (which means the combat naturally has to be calibrated according to the assumption that a single character getting knocked out is a failure condition.)

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Desertopa
JRPGs are mostly made with teenage boys as the primary market demographic, and every other group as a periphery demographic, and I think there are a lot of pervasive issues with the genre which are a consequence of that.

I feel like...that wasn't always the case, or something??? I mean, yeah, it more or less has, but even then there seemed to be more distinction and focus on production and quality in the past at large. When I think of past titles like Xenogears/Saga, Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean 2, etc, sure, I enjoyed them as a teenager, but those titles seem to be fundamentally different than the very, very anime tropish games that saturated the market a few years afterwards. The aforementioned games may have beem marketed to teenage boys, sure, but they resonated to all ages. A lot of new JRPGs seem to be just for preteen shut ins or something.

Even games like Lunar, which absolutely were made with a relatively young audience in mind, they're lightyears away in production value, creator care, and quality from the carbon copy gaijin-moe JRPG that defined the genre until relatively recently. What was the cultural shift that turned Star Ocean 2 into Star Ocean 4?

The line of thought 'this genre was made for a younger audience' can be true, sure, but quality seems pretty objective across time. The oldschool animated X-Men series? I can still watch that, it's legitimately entertaining. The Disney animated movie Hercules is one of my favorite films, period. Something being out of your age audience is one thing, but some of the stark differences we see in JRPGs is something different.

(this isn't a bemoanment on the state of JRPGs. As I mentioned, I like the genre, and the genre itself is actually rising up in a good way as of late, and there have been good gems throughout the years.)

Well, there were games without a lot of wide age group appeal in the earlier days too, but I think it's true that game designers have become a lot less willing to take risks or experiment than they used to be. The necessary man-hours to create a game at commercial standards have gone way up, and the industry seems to have responded by sticking more closely to formula. And the increase in graphical resources has given games something they can sell on even when the other elements are lackluster. In the old days, if you had a game with weak story and characters and unoriginal and tedious gameplay, you had a lousy game and nobody was likely to suspect otherwise. But with modern graphics, you can sell a game on flash and aesthetics, and convince plenty of buyers to take your game seriously. Selling games on moe appeal also might have been common years earlier if moe appeal were something you could easily achieve on SNES-PS1 hardware.

author=Sooz
Yeah, I'm not gonna say it'd be impossible to pull off an actually horrific sexualized child, just that it's 1) extremely, punishingly difficult to manage that while NOT attracting pedo creeps; and 2) probably not worth it, given the fact that the subject is so tainted with the pedobait brush that normal people are going to generally avoid the hell out of it. The payoff's just not really worth the sisyphean effort it'd require, unless you're the kind of person whose only validation is "I did thing." (In which case you are probably not reading this anyway.)

I don't think it's that weird to find validation as a writer in drawing something worthwhile out of a source nobody would expect. Or maybe it is, and that's just another way I'm weird. I mean, I spent a while working with the creator of Final Tear on a revamp of his game's script specifically because it was such a ludicrous prospect that it would be that much more interesting if I managed to make something good out of it. I still think it would have been possible, but I decided even if I managed it I'd probably still cause people to think I was crazy.

There are lots of weird and challenging things you can attempt as a writer which don't carry such a heavy risk to your reputation.

author=Craze
FFXII's "you should use a different slot" save crystals were the best. until they TRIED TO EAT YOU

You know, I honestly enjoyed that. Final Fantasy XII is like, 75% sidequests, and I'm too much of a completionist to just skip by all that, so it left me completely overleveled for the main plotline stuff, and that sort of thing helped to add a bit of tension back in. Of course, it probably would have made a lot more sense design-wise to stick that kind of stuff in sidequest areas where, if the players are more likely to get killed, at least they've kind of brought it on themselves.

author=Craze
Desertopa: I'd like to think that I write characters and dialogue in at least a fun way, but plot structure and NPCs completely elude me. traditional rpgs have so many major npcs and it's like... why write somebody that isn't a party member??? does not compute in the crazemind

Maybe I'm biased, but I feel like if a person can write good characters and dialogue, they can probably learn to write worthwhile plots, since I think you can approach plotting from a character-based perspective where putting together the overall structure of the story isn't so different from developing the structure of a conversation.

Do interactions with NPCs not interest you in the games you play, or is just about writing them? If it's the former, I guess it makes sense to focus on stories that lend themselves to an NPC-minimal setup, but if it's the latter then maybe you just need to approach the narrative with a different perspective?

If you ever feel like farming out NPC writing to someone else though, or having someone else to hammer out plot ideas with, I'd be happy to collaborate.