DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=RyaReisender
I wouldn't generally say that puzzles are a concept I'd like to see, many games are better off without them, especially if they are just push the boxes on the switches and stuff like that. Well executed and uniquely dungeon-themed puzzles can be fun, though.

I think my personal preference would be to have occasional puzzle solving in the mandatory portion of the game, but make the puzzles things which, in the context of the story, are not puzzles deliberately designed by some agent. For instance, you have to figure something out by reconciling multiple pieces of information in an unintuitive way, or figure out how you can properly reinforce a damaged building so you can get through it without destroying it, etc. These help give the player the impression that their characters aren't simply solving every problem with brute force, and also acculturate them to the fact that the game actually contains puzzles. But these mandatory puzzles are not intended to be seriously difficult.

Then, in optional content (side dungeons and such,) I'd implement much harder puzzles, some of which may actually be deliberately designed puzzles in the context of the story. A guide shouldn't be necessary to progress through the plot, but if you want to access the optional stuff, you have to decide whether you're going to let it be a reward for extra effort, or you're actually going to crack that guide open.

author=RyaReisender
Also what I forgot to mention:

SaGaFrontier - LP system - You have HP and LP. If your HP reach 0, you become unconcious and lose 1 LP. If you are hit while being unconcious you lose 1 LP. At the end of the battle you fully recover HP. This is an amazing system that combines "every battle is a challenge" with "resource management".

Generally I prefer "every battle is a challenge", so full recovery after every battle is pretty much one of the best imaginable systems for me.

I think making every battle a challenge without implementing an overarching challenge of resource management between them works best in games where the battles are not numerous and not repeated (the player won't have the opportunity to grind on the same fights over and over again.)

To quote a bit from this Final Fantasy XIII review

In Final Fantasy XIII, your team is automatically revitalized to full HP and status neutrality after every battle, nullifying the whole "resource management" angle of the game. And without that, there is absolutely no point in fighting the same battle ten times in a row between one cutscene trigger spot and the next. In a game set up like Final Fantasy XIII, once you figure out how to beat the "two wolves and a soldier" enemy group, that should be it. You've solved it. But Final Fantasy XIII forces you to push through The Tube and do it again. And again. And again.

When there's no element of resource management between multiple battles, then unless every battle is unique you're going to be putting your players through the same challenge repeatedly.

When you add the element of resource management though, added threats become cumulative rather than redundant. Personally, I'm a fan of the combat system used in Grandia Xtreme (the game was pretty much built around the combat system, after all.) Every battle takes a nontrivial amount of your characters' resources to complete, and the challenge revolves around preserving those resources over the course of the dungeon. You're not even given free healing before fighting bosses, because it would run counter to the challenge of making your resources persist until you've navigated the entire threat.

author=LockeZ
- Wild ARMS 1 through 3 were full of amazing puzzle labyrinth dungeons, as did Lufia 2. Legend of Zelda is of course the series known for these kinds of dungeons, but isn't an RPG. Lots of RPGs will have dungeons with a single easy puzzle or two, but the full-on Zelda style dungeons with puzzles in every room and tools you collect over the course of the game to manipulate the environment in different ways are awesome. That kind of dungeon gameplay just fits perfectly with the way RPGs already focus on exploration, problem solving, gaining more powers as the game goes on, and slow deliberation of your available options.

Puzzles in RPGs were really common in early RPGs, but I think their prevalence was already on the decline by some time in the PS1 era. Which is a shame, because back when they were at their most popular, I was still a stupid kid and it was a huge pain trying to figure them out on my own. I'd be happy to see some tough puzzles in RPGs now, but very few games have attempted to offer that sort of challenge for a long time now.

I'll add another idea from Suikoden III (which manages to be one of my top games for providing interesting ideas I'd like to see elsewhere, above many games which I actually enjoyed more.) The actual level up mechanics of the game rendered it fairly moot, but I liked the fact that the main characters all start significantly above level 1, so that when you're introduced to characters who're actually totally lacking in combat experience, there's a clear and significant difference. A lot of games feature protagonists who start out as badass army officers or knights or whatever who're actually about as un-badass as it's possible to be in gameplay terms, and I'd like it if more games would show you tangible evidence that your character doesn't actually start at the bottom of the totem pole.

I didn't hate it, but I considered it a letdown compared to the previous two Grandia games. It's clearly unfinished, for one thing; it was rushed to completion and there's a lot of content which was intended but never made it into the final game, so the game feels kind of truncated compared to the first two.

Alfina is childish and saccharine, and utterly lacking in self reliance. There's less development of the relationships between the main cast members as a whole relative to the previous games, and the elements of travel and world exploration, where the charm of the first two games shone through, are severely stunted in the third. Yuki's character development arc is pretty minimalistic compared to Justin's or Ryudo's; he's practically static after the point where he gets his working airplane.

Plus, Raven is just... pointless. Someone clearly wanted him to be the coolest thing since bread slicing machines, but there's no depth to his character, and he basically just exists to look badass and have a few flashy cutscenes. He could be entirely deleted from the story without any substantial alteration to the plot.

The combat offers significantly more challenge than the first two games, more in the neighborhood of Grandia Xtreme, but it doesn't have the same degree of charm as the first installments.

author=RyaReisender
SaGaFrontier (or any Kawazu game) - Character growth - Characters get stronger depending on how you use them, impossible to skill wrongly, they will automatically become perfect in the style you play them.

While the idea might be good in theory, in practice Kawazu's games tend to be known for having very poor implementations; Final Fantasy II, where he got his start, was particularly nightmarish. The systems tend to be both hard to balance and vulnerable to exploitation.

A couple more of mine:

Treasure chests as used in Suikoden III: Loads of games use treasure chests, they're a genre convention despite being largely nonsensical. What did Suikoden III do differently? It made them actual goddamn chests full of treasure. I mean, how much stuff can you fit in a chest, realistically? Quite a bit. A chest with a single bottle in it is just kind of silly. Treasure chests in video games are probably inspired by stereotypical chests of pirate booty, but in most games they've morphed into something very different, something which is both dead common, and frequently contains only small amounts of largely trivial stuff. The chests in Suikoden III are few in number, almost all hidden away in remote places and guarded by some terrible monsters, and are full of large quantities of valuable items. They're never explained in-game, but players can make sense of them as being some sort of thieves' treasure troves, or something of that nature (the fact that the chests are refilled every chapter makes much less sense, and is something I'd avoid copying.) Treasure chests are properly turned into something exceptional. The vast majority of valuable goods in-game, as you would expect in real life, are acquired directly from other people.

The party synergy of the early Wild Arms games:
When you have a cast of multiple player characters, I like to see them kept distinct, so that they each offer unique contributions to the party as a whole. The Wild Arms games have some of my favorite examples of this. In the first game, each of the main characters has their own set of abilities which are not only different in function from those of other characters, they're acquired in totally different ways. Not only that, each character has their own distinct arsenal of tools for dealing with puzzles and progressing through the game, most parts of the game require all of them pooling their resources in order to complete the challenges they face. It helps reinforce the idea that the main characters are interdependent and function as a team which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Well, if it were a blog post, I wouldn't have seen it, and I might be interested in joining in.

My experience using an RPGMaker engine is currently nil, but, I'm eager to learn the ropes, have a lot of free time to commit, and this is likely to continue to be the case for a long time. I'm willing to do monotonous grunt work if it helps bring an ambitious project to fruition, at least as long as I have some opportunity to learn something about the process through observation. Also, if you want to farm out writing work, such as NPC dialogue, I'm confident I have something to offer on that front.

If you think you might need any of the sort of help I could provide, let me know, and we can try and work something out.