More Engaging Turn-Based Combat in RPGs

some people think that if you've played one RPG you've played them all the typical fantasy story of a party going off to destroy all evil in the land fighting the only way they know how by taking turns usually a person might be turned off to an RPG because of the turn-based combat and how stale it can sometimes get but some games know how to get someone a little bit more interested in the gameplay we start off with one of the most outlandish series that exists the mother series while the first game follows conventional RPG mechanics the later games do change it up mother 2 or earthbound as it's known outside of Japan doesn't follow the typical random battle system out in the field you can see all the enemies sitting around attacking you if you get close enough like this you can get the drop on enemies getting an extra attack if you approach them from behind or they can get the drop on you if they do the same or you can just avoid them if you want and if you're a high enough level battles just ended in an automatic victory which prevents both unnecessary grinding and makes backtracking easier when in battle damage isn't just chunked away from your health total it rolls down so if you manage to heal yourself or end the battle before it gets to zero you're still in the fight mother 3 has all of these and one more mechanic rhythm battles if you time your button presses correctly you can do more damage with each hit granted each enemy's rhythm is different and the only way to figure out what an enemy's rhythm is is to put them to sleep to hear their heartbeat personally I think this mechanic is dumb not the time button presses that do more damage just the extra work you have to do to get there luckily it's not a required mechanic so you can just go back to wailing on small animals with baseball bats I could be doing this whole time undertale is the prime example of how to turn conventional RPG mechanics on their head it questions the grinding of monsters for experience as you do in most RPGs and gives you a new option befriending them instead of just attacking like you would normally do you can do other things like complement them or pet them how you act in these fights will impact the ending you get if you attack you can do more damage by timing your button press in this weird box here when you get attacked you have to go through a little bullet house Sal minigame now this can be anything from dodging bullets to jumping obstacles or basically playing a rhythm game and the more monsters you fight at a time the more crowded the box gets with bullets now obviously enough it's important to dodge the bullets but it's even more important if you're doing a pacifist run considering you aren't killing anything and getting experience your health total never changes during a genocide run though you're gonna get a little bit more health but I'll leave it up to you to figure out if it's worth it or not lastly we have Chrono Trigger that one game that's always on those lists of snez games you should play or best RPGs ever even though it's created by the minds behind Final Fantasy it takes combat in a whole another direction as opposed to just lining up like in Final Fantasy your party spreads out surrounding the monsters you've encountered during the fight you can take advantage of positions in your enemies for example ranged weapons are shot across the battlefield when an enemy is far away but when they're close they take the butt of a crossbow instead monsters also wandered around getting closer to hit certain party members and then we have the tech system each character has a list of special moves that use up MP that can be used for either magic or special attacks for example Kronos cyclone attack can hit multiple enemies that are close together and frogs slip cut pulls an enemy in close then hits them back as you win battles you gain tech points just like experience when you get enough points you unlock a new move now depending on your party makeup you can also combine these tech moves as long as they're ready and have enough MP they can combine their tech moves in a better movies like aura world to heal the whole party or ex strike to deal more damage to a single enemy this isn't just limited to two party members it can be done by the whole party - and that's pretty cool now out of these three games I obviously enough have favorite mechanics from each one in the mother series I really like the auto win mechanic backtracking becomes so much easier when you don't have to keep fighting the easiest enemies over and over again in undertale I really like how you can avoid attacks through the mini game and how what you have to dodge relates the enemy you're fighting in some way like flies from a frog or bones from a skeleton and in Chrono Trigger I really like how you can attack multiple enemies on screen and also combine attacks to do even more damage when playing I really just kept wanting to know what attacks I could do next and it really kept me invested well I mean that the story but that's not the topic of this video clearly it's not that hard to change up traditional RPG mechanics to make a game more interesting so here's the hope and the genre doesn't go stale

Channel: Ben Staub

Views: 65,004

Keywords: RPG, video games, chrono trigger, final fantasy, turn based combat, earthbound, mother series, mother, mother 3, video game mechanics, combat mechanics, role playing game, SNES, Undertale, bullet hell, Super Nintendo

Id: 0Rebci_7ABQ

Length: 4min 36sec (276 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2017