SLASH'S PROFILE

And I got a PHP error or something and accidently double posted :/ sorry!

Skills are a huge part of what make a character unique, and can make or break a player's love for a character as much as the plot will. No one would've liked Magus without Dark Bomb. The best example i can think of is FFVII and FFX. FFVII had 9 characters that were great in the plot, but almost exactly the same in a battle situation. FFX based it's battle gameplay around switching characters to utilize enemy weaknesses.

For my project right now, I'm using a normal level-up-gain-a-new-skill system, where each character has unique skills, with the added twist that you can upgrade these skills throughout the games using items. Once a skill is upgraded (and it can be upgraded in 4-7 different flavors) you can switch b/t any skill you've unlocked outside of battle.
This means you can equip your normal "attack-all" skill to do fire damage, ice damage, inflict poison, break armor, or something completely new. Upgrading the skill becomes necessary to exploit enemy weaknesses to elements or statuses, and also improves the skill's base damage.

I think this makes all of the characters unique (each one has their own skills) but allows them to all remain useful (you don't have to rely on the one character who happens to have a Fire spell).

Earthbound style Yotsuba&!

:3

Quest 64 is an excellent example of an RPG battle system and should be emulated more frequently.


(I am joking. What I said above was an intentionally false statement meant to be sarcastic. Quest 64's battle system has very few redeeming qualities.)

post=121174
Well... like people said, the more characters you have, the less you can flesh them out and detail their personality and powers. Doesn't mean that fewer characters is the best, though. One of my all time favorite games is Shining Force (II), in which you had to chose around 8 characters from a party of up to... I don't know, 50? Of course some characters were just weaker than others, but you could chose the ones you found cooler and invest on them.

That would depend a bit on gameplay, I guess.

When I was a kid, my friend and I thought the turtle you find as a party member was such a badass (mostly because he was a turtle). I replayed the game about a year ago and wow, holy hell is he the most useless character. He has about a million defense and 3 hp, and does 1 damage to anyone he attacks until he's level 40.