After 5 years of having a proper job, I’m working on a new indie RPG. As you know from reading my (apparently annual) posts on this thing, I’m interested in older JRPG combat systems, especially from series that have been dormant for 10-15 years. I recently replayed Xenosaga Episode I to refresh… Read more »
Grandia 2 Anniversary Edition is out today on Steam and GOG. Hooray! This is the best combat system in JRPG history, bar none, now available without the questionable English voice acting. Grandia’s combat is much beloved among JRPG enthusiasts, so much so that in the absence of any official sequel from GameArts… Read more »
JRPGs rely on randomness to alleviate the fact that you spend a lot of time doing the exact same thing. Random damage values, random enemy behavior, random success or failure of special abilities all ideally help the game to create different situations for the player to react to, starting from the same… Read more »
tri-Ace’s Valkyrie Profile is weird even by JRPG standards. It throws out nearly every genre convention in order to tell the Norse story of Ragnarok in RPG form, much though it may deviate from the source material. The valkyrie Lenneth must prepare Valhalla for cataclysmic war by recruiting the worthiest dying mortals to serve as divine soldiers… Read more »
From the beginning I knew I wanted this blog to look at the mechanics of Chrono Cross. It was my first JRPG, and changed my gaming taste forever. (It was not, I later realized, my first RPG – that turned out to be Steve Meretzky’s 1994 adventure game/RPG mashup Superhero League of… Read more »
JRPGs tend by nature to be repetitive. You slog through the same random encounters over and over, and the same strategy works every time; occasionally a preemptive strike will shake things up, or leveling up will unlock a new ability that changes the boilerplate formula you apply for the next… Read more »
There is a gradient of abstraction in RPG combat systems; at one end you have the pure turn-based systems, in which you choose from a defined set of possible actions and the result is simulated, e.g. the original Final Fantasy; at the other end you have pure action systems, like… Read more »
