ARGH'S PROFILE

Well that was disappointing.



And I notice it's still riddled with grammar mistakes, which is also unfortunate. All the effort you put into the story and unique art goes to waste when players are jarred out of the experience by an incomprehensible sentence.

This method of defense balancing is probably my biggest gripe with RPGs, eastern ones especially. When there's no way to direct enemy attacks, your tanks become virtually worthless because everything comes down to luck. If the enemy attacks the tank instead of anyone else that's good, but if the RNG decides to make everyone pound on the mage instead there's not a whole lot you can do about it. It makes battles way too much of a crapshoot and makes defense/HP balancing very confusing and difficult. But if you go the MMO route, things get really boring and repetitive, like you said.

There was an RPGMaker game I played once called Exit Fate that I think did a good job of this: both enemies and allies were placed on separate 3x3 grids, and anyone who had a battler in front of them couldn't be targeted by melee attacks. (So, say, if you placed a mage on the upper-right tile and a fighter on the upper-left one, enemies would have to go through the fighter to get to the mage. If you removed the fighter, the mage would still get a slight defense boost from being in the back row, but would be open to direct attack.) This was generally compensated for by no one being very durable, even the fighters, so you couldn't rely on them to take all the damage for you. It also made area attacks more varied and interesting, and potentially allowed you to shift your positioning to survive them better. Probably too far off-course from how you're intending to use your battle system, but having some kind of priority targeting system instead of depending solely on the whims of random chance might help with defense balancing.

author=TheJudge
Why not? Is the word Rabbit such a bad word? o 3o.

The original made a point of never acknowledging the anthro aspect. Changing that marks a pretty significant divergence from the source material, since it's adding an entirely new artistic element that wasn't there before. Though understandable for a more detailed rendition where the character designs will be harder to just ignore, it is understandable if some people are confused.

Hm, you're making the anthro aspect plot-relevant? That's a pretty significant divergence from the source material. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt Essence individual for each (surviving) character (as well as half of it for currently recruited ones)? The Prologue Characters are never Part of the active team, I can't see which the point would be either way.

Yeah, the prologue's full of lots of ifs and buts like that. I probably should have kept my explanation simpler, but I have a bad tendency to overcomplicate things. :< I honestly feel the prologue's very poorly designed; I guess Deltree intended it to be a simple no-consequence sandbox where people could get used to the mechanics, but the end result is way too complicated and it goes against the grain of many seasoned RPGer tactics (like the "keep everyone alive to preserve exp" thing) without giving you any reason to suspect you're supposed to take it easy. Just making it so you don't get essence at all, to make it clearer that this is an offshoot thing with no bearing on the main game, would have been a wiser choice. Cutting "Peaceful Approach" might have been a good idea too.

(As with many things, I feel IMTS did this better -- exp isn't split, you don't work with throwaway characters before getting the main cast, and you're exposed to mechanics gradually instead of getting everything dumped on you at once.)

By the way, if you ever get stuck on the other bosses, I've outlined some basic strategies in my running review series. Don't look at them until you've reached that point in the story though, I'm pretty liberal with spoilers: boss 1, boss 2, boss 3, chapter 4's optional boss, boss 4, and a certain chapter 2 quest I would have really appreciated some help on my first time through.