LIGHTNINGLORD2'S PROFILE

author=Desertopa

author=GreatRedSpirit
I fukkin' love world maps for no sufficiently rational reason. I even had a poster of the FF6 one on my wall (and I want to get better ones besides what I take from old Nintendo Power magazines)

These are definitely something I wish more RPGs still did. I especially like ones that don't cover the whole world, but just the specific portion of it that the game takes place in. It's a nice way to abstract away distances and make the world seem larger, because otherwise you end up with entire continents which can implicitly be traversed in about five cumulative hours on foot.

I really like how they handled it in the Suikoden games, where travel is always within a single country or between a few small countries, but it still implicitly takes days to travel between locations, and all the installments in the series take place in the same world. It helps drive home that the world is big enough to fit lots of stories into, not barely big enough for a one-off game.

Interestingly, Pokémon has implemented a true world map as of ORAS - using the Eon Flute, you can ride Mega Latias (Omega Ruby) or Mega Latios (Alpha Sapphire) across the sky freely and land in any area you've been in. You can use this to fly to Mirage spots, which are inaccessible via any other method and also encounter phenomena where legendary Pokémon live.

I may not have a game as of yet, but I can tell you from experience that there's a world of difference between adding onto an existing combat system and making all the entities and actions by yourself.

If you are skilled at this, you can still make a short game, but please do feature a gameplay system that you enjoy.

I got Hearthstone back because I love the single player campaign - Heroic is partially fun but it occasionally takes extreme luck to proceed - Instructor Razuvious in particular can often render the match unwinnable by just drawing certain cards, since he'll then 2HKO you with his Massive Runeblade.

Can we cite systems that we actually like but are poorly used due to factors unrelated to the system itself? Final Fantasy 7's Materia system is really fun - it has some really unique stat modifiers that level up and teach skills attached to your gear - you can even combine the green magic materias with blue ones for even more unique effects. There's a few things that could make it more interesting (such as equips that only allow certain materia in slots), but it's a very good system overall. The only thing holding it back is the nonexistent game difficulty.

There's also a certain love I have for well-known dungeon archetypes, most of all, ice dungeons. They tend to be more quiet, have a rather puzzle-oriented approach (usually, sliding) and are the single best source for puns. On the flipside, fire dungeons invite massive hamfests with big boss enemies (which is enjoyable for a different reason).