Re: Let's Talk Combat
Yup, I know about most of those things, and I know that you can used timed button presses to increase damage as in the Paper Mario franchise. I knew I was missing a term a bit, though, so thanks for correcting me.
I have a lot of experience with the RPG genre in general. It says a great deal that many of the games I particularly enjoy in this genre came out of the 90s and early 2000s, but I think it also says a lot that the sort of combat I like is still featured in top 10 RPG lists and whatnot.
I fully respect everyone's preferences here, BTW. Turn-based is not everybody's cup of tea, and real-time is not everybody's cup of tea either.
It's the same as where it comes to movement in games. Some people like top-down style (I used to be one of them), while some people like full 2D, as in AHC. Both definitely have their charms, though I suspect AHC-style movement is far harder to code properly.
I think one of the criticisms of pure turn-based combat, with no ATB element, is that in order to actually be difficult, sometimes enemies or even bosses will straight-up kill you because you didn't see their trick coming the first time, or don't know how to counter it. For me personally, this makes up part of the challenge. As long as a game is designed well enough that the constant answer isn't "overlevel, so you kill the boss before it kills you", I think it's okay. For example, if a boss does crazy damage to poisoned characters, maybe there is a poison-immunity ring somewhere before the boss, which will make at least one party member immune to that crazy damage. Or let's say a boss does really high wind damage; maybe there is a spell your mage can get at level 24 where it can nullify wind damage on your party periodically, so maybe you didn't want the mage with you before but you definitely do in this boss fight. Speaking personally, I love working this sort of thing out. AHC wanted to do this well, but didn't quite get there. Entombed wanted to do this as well, but it's too random; for the things it does get right, it gets a lot wrong. I was ridiculously excited when it first showed itself over a decade ago.
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