The Shrine

That was what the develop of WoW said, regarding how in WoW it looks like after you play long enough the mana bar just never runs out and is a formality. It's hard to argue that this can be a bad philsophy, but as I reflect on this quote, it looks like plenty of console RPG does have mana or MP or whatever your special bar is called as somethign you *graduate* out of. When is the last RPG you remember where you're completely empty in all resource and can see your inevitable fate tick down? It seems these days if bosses can't instant kill you in a RPG or otherwise permanently disable you (status effects generally), you can never die, because mana is infinite and thus healing is infinite. Note that if your MP bar can run out but the way to refill it is trivial, it's the same as having infinite MP (see Turbo Ether, Elixir, and Megaelixirs).

But it didn't used to be like this. Most of the older RPGs are pretty good at pacing your MP bar. In Shining in the Darkness Heal 4 uses like 4 times the MP as Heal 3 so you don't use it until you get hit by the double Demonblazes in the final fight. You might even use your equivalent of Cure 2 if someone didn't get hurt too much. You also don't just start the fight using Super Spell as fast as possible. In Lunar Eternal Blue, all the Dragon spells do something crazy but uses up 99 MP. If you open up with say 3 Blue Dragon Vigors you now have a useless Jane for the rest of the fight. In Final Fantasy 4 it doesn't always make sense to cast Meteo over Flare even though Rydia had close to infinite MP (can always Osmose more back).

Obviously pacing of MP is not very hard. In a game like Shining in the Darkness it's obviously set up that Darksol will use his double demonblazes when he has X HP left and you're expected to be able to cast Heal 4 about 4 times before you run out, so if you're at level Z you should about to do X damage in 5 rounds (can take one double Demonblaze at full HP) assuming you conserved all your MP to chain Bolt 4 on those last 5 rounds. But even then, it adds a dimension where the fight at least looks close. Even if you know the fight always ends with you having 0 MP but the boss dead, the fight sure feels a lot more epic than the average Final Fantasy final boss fight where you end up the fight with nearly 100% HP/MP since this is where you use all your Megaelixirs. It might be a cheap trick, but why remove it if it does no harm to your game?

If your MP never runs out in a traditional RPG, that means you've powerleveled too high in keeping with the story.

I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of something that was made in the PS or later era where it was actually possible to run out of MP and having no obvious ways to refill it besides Lunar, but technically that's just a remake (they leave the game system intact for the most part).

It's time for a Parish plug!

Apparently the pseudo-old RPG in Game Center CX does make you strategize your MP usage: http://www.gamespite.net/verbalspew/arc ... .php#e1132

Where I am in DQ8, money is tight enough that I can't just stock up on whatever potion it is that replenishes MP.

And in FF12, MP usage was actually a big deal. When I was dungeon crawling and the enemies were weak enough, it didn't matter since MP replenishes. But if I ran into stronger enemies, and particularly in some boss fights, MP mattered. In theory, I could just use an ether, but in a close fight where I was struggling to keep just one character alive, spending a turn to replenish someone's MP so they can revive/heal others mattered.

I don't think you can say MP is limited if it's like FF4 where you can buy an elixir for 1 milion GP or whatever. All that does is make you stock up for the final fight and then still have infinite MP (for the duration of the fight). Also Zeromus will die long before you run out of MP if you just do Asura/Cure 4 on every round unless you're seriously underleveled.

In FF12 MP usage is a problem until you get the self MP < 10% gambit, then you just do if self MP < 10%, Charge. You can do it manually until then and it is just very tedious, so I consider that game to have nearly infinte MP too. Sure you can fail a Charge during a critical time but it is pretty unlikely once you have all 3 of your characters with the Charge gambit setup. That's probably why you don't get that gambit until pretty late in the game.

I'm more of thinking a case like Shining in the Darkness where you started out with 300 MP or whatever and that's all you ever get. In Lunar you can buy Star Lights but there's an inventory limit and the game probably assumes you carry mostly Star Lights at the end out of your 6 or so inventory slots, and it is quite possible to run out of MP that way. There are like only 3 Silver Lights that restores 255 MP in the game. While you're likely to save them for the final fight, getting 255 MP back on one guy when spells cost up to 99 MP isn't nearly the same as having 3 Megaelixirs for a FF game.

Never knew of or used the charge gambit.

My point was that even if MP is, in theory, infinite, it can still be a battle limitation.