HASVERS'S PROFILE

I think the point on which your system would gain most in being extended is that so far, the state of the conflict boils down to: -who is dead -who has the cursed sword and the cool sword -who is empowered. Which is like a couple of different markers going into different slots corresponding to the characters, with actions moving markers around.

These three questions are enough to generate a lot of thinking, but the battle is puzzle-like in the sense that what you need to do is find the proper sequence of states and repeat it. To evolve toward strategy you'd need a broader, perhaps more continuous way of differentiating between (tactically relevant) stages in the evolution of the battle, so that local optimization like what we're doing here would have to be weighed against global currents that obey different, "emergent" mechanisms.

Given that your system does the tactical part really well with few ingredients, it seems to me that a single additional mechanics could contribute that dimension while keeping the system elegant, easy to balance, and so on, but I'm not sure about the best way to do it, so I'm interested in your opinion (or your rebuttal ;))

Originality 13: The fact that you fight with equal means and the use of partially hidden information about the adversary (through Sense and stances) are very interesting, and indeed creates a feeling of duelling.

Elegance 13: Boiling it down to a game of parries, counter-attacks and seizing the opportunity for a devastating strike was very pleasant. You lose points for a certain abundance of lesser skills that are a bit redundant or useful mostly as padding while you try to get the better ones, and the rather random unlocking patterns - some theme justifying these patterns would have been helpful for memorization.

Clarity 14: Difficult to plan without constantly switching between menus to check the effet of each skill; some visual aid or a more intuitive skill design (more indicative names, or classifying them further by what they do) would have helped; still, Sense and stances were a nice way to communicate informations about the adversary, and a general sense

Depth 15 : The tactics boil down to one main tension: building up better skills on one hand, while countering or avoiding the enemy's most dangerous maneuvers on the other hand. There is a lot of potential, but the system deserves more refinement: in many cases, one can afford to only passingly take into account what the enemy is doing, and use lesser skills a little haphazardly just to unlock a better one. It lacks in global buildup throughout the battle - effects stack over multiple turns which can create interesting situations, but every five turns or so, everything is roughly back to normal, with only a resulting advantage in HP.

Bonus: 5 for getting the duel aspect right.
Total: 60
There is the potential for great depth, but it's not exactly there right now. Press on the importance of proper countering, find a better logic for the unlocking (though the duality between Offense and Support skills, tending to unlock each other, was a really nice touch) and some way for some past actions to remain important throughout the battle rather than only a couple of turns - or use this system only for much shorter battles.

Originality 15: The item swapping is perhaps the only idea that's new on its own, but the way that usual ingredients wereput together (like the importance of hitting your allies) was really interesting.

Elegance 21: With only two simple mechanisms and a single action per character, an impressive amount of synergy is found here. Characters are perhaps not equally useful, but still, if this system is anything, it's elegant.

Clarity 19: The interface is slightly unwieldy, but apart from that, it took me only a couple of turns to start realizing what this was all about, and how I should start planning my moves.

Depth 18: Some elements of truly "emergent" depth are clearly there, through the possibility of achieving multiple things in a single action, and finding unexpected uses of the characters. The battle is more a sort of puzzle than an example of general strategic possibilities, but it's still satisfying.

Bonus: 10 for audacity and for getting all three pillars of the contest right (originality, minimalism and depth)
Total: 83
This text-based entry came entirely out of the left field, and did exactly what I was hoping from this contest: using few ingredients in an original way that creates variety and depth through combination and thinking, rather than endless lists of skills and stats.

Originality 5: No ingredient was really original as such, though more focus on states like chill could have created a new dynamic, if we really had to care about them.

Elegance 5: I'm sorry to say it looks a little bit as if you used every single mechanics you could find at once - too many ingredients, with too little difference between them. And as often, the skill categories are rather vague flavors instead of pushing toward different playstyles.

Clarity 10: While the skill descriptions and little symbols helped somewhat, everything blended together and it was difficult to know why some attack was more efficient at any given point or plan anything.

Depth 10: There may be some ways to do clever tricks with all that, I did once or twice. But in the end, spamming powerful skills was enough to overcome anything.

Bonus: 5 There's something real nifty underneath.
Total: 35
I think you've got the overgrown version of a *much* better system.

Maybe my scores are a bit harsh, but while as such this is a more viable battle system than some entries I ranked higher, it is less interesting as a contest entry because it lacks direction.
A system with so many redundancies is very hard to read for the player, and to balance for the maker, resulting in Spam for Win. Trim it down to the point where you (and we) can carefully orchestrate the interactions between skills to obtain complex and unique action paths, and you'd probably double that score ;)

Originality 10: It's audacious to have only 1HP and I enjoyed that move.
Elegance 5: There's something to say about having an almost minimal number of commands, but they should have some sort of combinations or something. I really hoped that, at least, charging twice would do something.
Clarity 5: There's no way to know if an enemy can or will attack next turn, so no real way to plan anything. The player is really left in the dark.
Depth 5: There's really nothing to do except hope that the enemy will be charging next time I attack.

Bonus: 3 for taking the "minimalistic" part seriously.
Total: 25
Now I didn't expect *that* degree of minimalism :P Really, this feels like the bare start of a system. What comes next may become interesting though.

Originality 9: Inklings of potentially interesting play with cooldowns, unfortunately very limited. Also, having to take into account the next battle due to not being able to reuse the same strategy was a nice point, although it would be better if it weren't such a New Game+ thing (i.e. if there were some way to plan over multiple battles from the first time, and perhaps select their order accordingly)

Elegance 16: it's really elegant to use only the combinatorics of one strategy and three skills (plus potentially choosing the same one multiple times), and I would really like to see this refined. Right now however, I'm really not sure what role Lightning was supposed to play, the buffs/debuffs were occasionally useful but not enough, and the master skills were redundant (the instadeath was total overkill).

Clarity 14: On my first playthrough I felt a bit at a loss on how to evaluate the value of each skill in a given situation. On the second, I discovered that I could equip the same skill multiple times and wanted to hit myself in the face. From then on, and thanks to the battle tips, I was quite able to figure how to overcome the enemies.

Depth 8: Figuring out which strategy/skills combination is optimal for a given battle requires a little thought, but once it's done, the battle is pretty straightforward, because there's not much building up occurring during it. It really lacks player skills that affect cooldown (ours or the enemy's) as well as interactions between skills. Spamming the most powerful attack is still too important.

Bonus: 6 There's the potential for a very nice reduction of RPGs' usually tiresome pre-battle minimaxing
Total: 53
I think this is quite complementary with other ideas here: it's a step in the right direction for the pre-battle thing (though it needs balancing and refining) but the battles themselves are very bland. The foremost problem is that it's still too close to "one goal=one action" - if you can find a way to have skill effects somehow combine to become more than the sums of their parts, you may be on the way of something really good.
PS: Loved the cows :P

Originality 1: Almost the exact same system existed in Suikoden
Elegance 5: It's a rock-paper-scissors, which is pretty elegant for what it's worth, but I cannot really give you credit for that.
Clarity 10: Although we're told that different enemies have different preferences, it's not very useful. I guess the game is in a sense *too* clear, since we're basically told how to win every turn.
Depth 5: The messages given by the enemies are transparent so you just have to do the right actions.

Bonus: 2 for trying to make some AI, even if it doesn't really impact the game.
Total: 23
Winning is just so straightforward right now, and it's still so close to the Suikoden system, that I cannot really consider this as a useful contribution to the contest, even if it works as part of your game.

Originality 13: The importance of position was nice, especially the Support/Front alternation with changing skills. Some skills also have interesting trappings. Other than that, many common ingredients.

Elegance 12: Using position to decide which enemy is affected by skills AND to lock/unlock skills through the front row/back row was a nifty move. On the other hand, most skills didn't seem that useful, some characters were completely useless

Clarity 8: It didn't take long to figure the main mechanisms for the battle in general and for each character in particular. On the other hand, the effect of buffs/debuffs was almost impossible to decipher, the conditions for inflicting injuries and using Quarter mage spells as well. I had the feeling that there might be clever things to do, but I never was able to find anything beyond a two-step process like using Surgical Strike then spamming Bloodshed.

Depth 11: The only aspect that really granted some depth was swapping the characters around. Buffs/debuffs really didn't do much. The best I could come up was a two-step process like inflicting an injury then using bloodshed.

Bonus: 7 (including 1 for terrible puns in skill names, because I'm weak like that)
Total: 51
A slight evolution rather than a revolution, but an interesting one. With some work, this could become a good variant on the RPG formula, requiring to swap characters around a lot and so on. Seeing how difficult it is to find characters clearly useful and to build synergies here, I still think you have too many ingredients in this for now - IMHO, you should start by trying out a simpler, barebones gameplay that works well on its own, then construct characters progressively to fit specific roles and open new options, without rushing into the specifics of buffs, points for actions (like Bulwark) and so on that will require further balancing.

I think the system is simply not working right now, due to problems of implementation. As such, I feel I cannot give a fair judgement of the ideas behind the game. That's too bad, because the principles of distance, HP=MP and limb-based skills were cool! This could have been something like the RPG equivalent of Toribash ;)

3xT: Seiken (Dragons and Damage over time)

Originality 13: It's a funny thing to say, but while damage evolution over time is far from new, no one really explored various functional forms for it.

Elegance 14: It represents an aspect of RPG battles, the way that buffs/weaknesses/combos can stack to create a progression in damage per turn, while abstracting from the specifics of those usual ingredients. Having to repeat a skill again and again as the main mode of action is however quite inelegant.

Clarity 14: If anything, it's very straightforward to figure what one skill is going to do when you've used it once against a given enemy. But the grounds for choosing that skill rather than another are more a case of "guess what the author had in mind" than cleverness.

Depth 4: There could be something deep here. What you're doing is essentially playing a car race on the HP bar and controlling the pedals, which can be cool. The problem is that there's almost no point in changing skills mid-battle here. they don't interact, there's no way to affect the enemy's output or to slow down (and no point to the latter).

Bonus: 3 It really feels like part of a good system - but just a part.
Total: 48
While it's not really interesting in the battles that are proposed, the basis for this is actually sound. I want to see it implemented in a smoother way and as part of something bigger, where switching between behaviors is actually really needed.


3xT: Almadana (elements)


Originality 8: Elements. Once again they are three flavors for the same spells (think Mass Effect 3 ending). Some novelty in the way using one element blocks another, though.

Elegance 5: The elements are pretty much unnecessary in the end - they occupy your mind a whole 10 seconds while you try to guess which enemy is sensitive to which element, then you're set.

Clarity 12: The formula of win below was trivial to guess. Whether it's a good or a bad thing is a matter of perspective - I suppose as part of a larger system, this kind of clarity would be useful.

Depth 4: Use element 1 thrice, then element 2 twice, then element 3 thrice, then ultimate skill. Lather, rinse and repeat.

Bonus: 2 Tradeoffs should be cultivated.
Total: 31
As such, nothing much to see in my opinion, unless I missed something. If the elements actually corresponded to different modes of action (perhaps introducing things from the other two systems here), it could become interesting.


3xT: Prysmatic (Lens)


Originality 13: The idea of some physics-inspired combinatoric mechanism made me all giddy with anticipation. On the other hand, past that, the actual effects are quite unoriginal.

Elegance 12: Reducing it all to the manipulation of a single object (the lens) is very elegant in principle; too bad that not much follows from it.

Clarity 5: The lens image in the top right corner was really useful, but apart from that, I had the hardest time understanding what to do and how to do it.

Depth 5: Once the trick has been figured out, not much to do except attack until you win.

Bonus: 7 For SCIENCE
Total: 42
I would absolutely love to see this system, or a system like this one, done thoroughly. With a more intuitive meaning to the states of the lens (or whatever main object is being manipulated by the characters), and more interactions. As it stands, though, it's a bit underwhelming. But I really want to encourage your for attempting to do something radically different.