GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

It's one of the things that I don't like about a fair number of Bruce Lee movies. He was a fucking fantastic martial artist and the fight scenes are a delight to watch but narratively it's boring. Bruce Lee enters a room with n number of bad guys and disposes of n number of bad guys, sometimes he even breaks a sweat. Sometimes he even takes a few hits before delivering his solar plexus death punch. They're great to see Bruce Lee wreck dudes but there's no tension in the fights or even the overall movie half the time.

If we could've turned off lives I would've pushed for it, lives are trash! (although finding an actual "cool" thing to find in odd places or for collecting coins would be tricky, the star to unlock stuff seen in the later RMN World would probably have been best)

Lineline's my favorite level gimmick but I can absolutely see not liking it. It's like a weird pseudo-autoscroller, getting it work right in water in SMBX took some playing with the speed and it never quite gets there, and the p-switch part is dumb and idk why I thought that was good level design.

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it. also Yoshi Island Yoshis own

10's combat was a step up from previous games but FF combat has always been kinda empty. Most of the neat stuff you see is from challenge runs where the minutiae matters but the backbone of "hit weakness / use strongest attack, use cure everybody spell when HP is low" was always there.

10's problem is while it worked to expand things so characters were effective against certain types of enemies the game never evolved much from Besaid Island. Bring in Tidus to hit dogs, Wakka for birds, Lulu for slimes, Auron for armored enemies and when you need to break an enemy, and Yuna to turbofuck bosses. There's a few occasional enemies that need more but they're second to the usual enemy templates until... the interior of Mount Gagazet? The endgame starts to get more interesting, then the postgame takes the game's math and throws it down a flight of stairs.

It had potential but it spent too much time splashing in a puddle before trying to swim. It was still an upgrade over previous FF games though. The ATB was dead, turn order wasn't rigid and you could see who'd be coming up when and could plan around that. It was free to change characters which didn't help the trash template mobs but added strategy to bosses: You could hide your healer so after the boss' big attack you could swap anybody out for Rikku/Yuna and heal the party instead of waiting for their turn to come up if you left them in the party.

There's good bits, there's bad bits, and really I wish the combat spent more time in the oven. I've heard other games use a similar combat system like Megaman X Command Mission and Trails of Cold Steel(?) but I haven't played either so I can't comment much if they did and if they took FF10's combat another step further.



also yea fuck the sphere grid


e: expanding on sphere grid bits because I can't shut up atm, I liked bring able to have more control over the growth of the characters (aka Expert Grid only). It was a tedious slog to work with though and needing spheres to unlock stat gains just added to the busywork.


e2: also my post kinda just went off about ff10 without talking about the rest of your points and I do agree there's nothing wrong with taking what works and adding your own spins and twists to it. You don't have to redefine RPG combat with every game, hell I'm pretty much like that. My brain just doesn't get some of these games that do their own things and idk if that's become I'm some geriatric or the game. Familiarity can be a huge boon!

I think that's where team building and gearing can be a factor. You got your set of keys, the boss has a set of locks, but you can't bring all your best keys for all the locks. Do you ignore a key? Do you bring somebody with two half baked keys to improve lock coverage or do you focus on pounding on one lock while ignoring another?

Consider you're going to the fire cave to punch the fire dragon and you are picking your damage character for your party:

Frosty the Snow Sorcerer has great burst ice damage DPS, frying trash mobs quickly to reduce attrition damage. However has poor sustainability due to poor MP / cooldowns.

Saint Rick has less burst DPS but doesn't have any sustain issues, the damage will keep flowing over the course of the battle. Also has an emergency barrier once per battle in case something goes south on the boss.

DOOM WIZARD has wide elemental coverage but no focus, they do a bit less damage than Saint Rick to ice-weak enemies. However the boss has two beefy Dragon Knight adds that are weak to electricity instead of ice and DW can hit those weaknesses, dropping the adds faster and making the fight safer.


Obviously not the best designed characters or game, but hopefully it shows that while it is still keys & locks you can create options in what keys the player takes to address what locks.

rip calgary

at least you scored a few times