The Shrine

Since Skies of Arcadia happened to be brought up in a recent thread, I thoguht it's quite appropriate to discuss cool tricks to improve an otherwise battle system. In fact Skies of Arcadia's battle system was downright atrocious but it had enough cool things to be tolerable and these are relatively simple things to do.

1. Idle time. For any game that is the traditional 'input all your commands for all your guys' turn based thing, there is a lot of idle time between the turns. In Skies of Arcadia your character and the enemies will futilely pretend to hit each other (and miss everytime), but this is a good way to create the illusion something is happening as opposed to time magically stopped. Of course if you have a real time game, or a quasi-real time game like the Grandia series, then this is not necessary because there's enough action going on.

2. Spatial awareness. You don't need a grid or a hex board to move people around but the physical layout of the battle should mean something. In Skies of Arcadia your character will switch to a long ranged attack that is exactly the same as their melee attack when attacking something far away. The Grandia series makes movement a huge part of the strategy. In FF12 your character runs up to attack and then slowly walks back in some sort of guarding position (even though it doesn't do anything). This will also eliminate the mysterious syndrone in RPG where your character attacks and then magically backs off exactly the same distance at whatever the face-off range is. Not every game has to actually make geography part of the system, but you can at least pretend it means something, like Skies of Arcadia does.

3. Music. In the days of the bloated 100 soundtrack 4 CD OST, the part where you spend most of your time in a RPG has surprisingly few tracks. Most games seem to go with 1 battle theme, 1 boss theme, 1 final boss theme, and occasionally something special for the important guys. Most of the game's music should be devoted to the part that you do the most, which is the battle engine.

For an extreme example, if you look Wild Arms Code F, they got the following battle musics:

Rudy, Cecilia, and Jack separated (regular)
Rudy, Cecilia, and Jack in the same party (regular)
Jane Maxwell, before she joins the party (regular)
Regular boss battle (boss)
Zed (boss)
Boomerang (boss)
Some other Quarter Knight guy (Alwhatever) (boss)
Lady Harken (boss)
Zeikfried (boss)
Mother (boss)
Zeik Tuvai (final boss, though also used in the Zephyr trial)

There might be a few variation of the regular boss battle but I never paid attention to those. Note that just about every person that's important in the game has some special battle music associated with them. In the absence of story telling, this helps make up a significant portion of these character's personality assuming the music is picked right. Heck, Proto Man of Mega Man is pretty much developed only through his music (I sure don't remember the game actually say anything about his background). The whistle defines who he is.

Consider how bloated game soundtracks are these days, it's a mystery to me why they don't spend more time to put more tracks on the part you spend 95% of the game on (the fighting).

There's so much bitching about the Skies of Arcadia Battle System, but it's really not that founded--it's a basic system that's easy to get into and use. What more do you want? Yeah, the accuracy rate is atrocious, but it's fairly atrocious for both sides.

Skies of Arcadia's battle system isn't particularly good or bad. It is extremely average but when you add the loading time, the extreme difficulty of the battle compounded with the impossibility to die, you end up with a very boring game where you either do 3 damage and Lunar Light every turn, or you just chug Riselem/Curlen/etc Crystals by the dozens to get bosses dead under 15 minutes. Also due to the how the end bosses all use Eternium line spells you're forced to respond in a very defensive way. Just about every fight at the end goes like this:

Vyse - focus
Aika - Delta Shield (without this you're dead)
Fina - focus
Glider - focus

Next turn:
Vyse - Pirate's Wrath
Aika - Delta Shield
Fina - use some crystal
Glider - use some crystal

If you've taken too much damage in one round, you'd have to drop the Pirate's Wrath for Lunar Light instead, and hope you can get lucky next turn. And if Silver Nightmare hits Fina then you're basically screwed because her petrify seems to work 100% of the time on your own guys so this means next turn you absolutely have to use Lunar Light (which has priority over anything, even Silver Nightmare) and waste an entire turn doing no damage. I think Lunar Light is balanced by the fact that you basically can't do damage on the turn you use it, but there's too many things that force you to use Lunar Light to counter which means a lot of your turns is spent doing nothing. When you get hit by a Silver Eclipse/Nightmare at the end it's not a question of how much damage you'll take. It's how many turns you'll end up wasting to recover before you can attack again.

I completely agree with you on the music. Most games do not change the battle music (or they do so sparingly) and it makes no sense to me. Since that is 90% of the gameplay, why can they not change it around or spice it up? Even if 1 out of every 3 battle musics suck, at least you would know (as the player) that it is just for this particular area and you can endure it until it changes. If the battle music in a game sucks and never changes... it is almost reason to stop playing.

Most of the RPG's that strike a cord with me are not due to story or gameplay, per se, but the cinematography. FF3 had so many moments where sounds, silence, and music created strong moods that were impossible to ignore.

Music is so important, in any game.