Eastern RPG Battle Gimmicks

Hi all! My current work is a small-scale Eastern RPG that focuses more on quests over a large story. As a result, I'm focusing on gameplay.

A major part of any Eastern RPG are the encounters. While I've played my fair share of E/JRPGs, in order to properly design my game, I'm starting with 'standard, well-known' gimmicks that I can either use, expand upon in the context of my battle system, or just discard for this project.

Part of this topic, I would like to be about talking about specific gimmicks. In my list I've found a few that in my opinion are overdone, but maybe for familiarity's sake I should somehow include them.

Another part is just seeing if I've missed a spot. I would like to catalogue these gimmicks for future use and/or publication (if this doesn't count; I can see this list helping many people with their Eastern RPG projects.)

Here's my list as it stands...

1. Undead - Usually beaten by healing abilities or items. Presumably, this fight justifies buying more healing items than you actually need, even when they're useless for the latter 66% of the game.
2. Barrier-Change - You have to use the correct type of ability on the enemy to harm it.
3. Artificial Time Limit - Sort of like Odin in Final Fantasy IV; you have to deal enough damage before it pwns you all.
4. Multi-phase Boss - The standard final boss fight; beating one form means the battle continues against the next.
5. Triggered Vulnerability - A specific attack disempowers an enemy, making them easier to defeat.
6. Fixed Vulnerability - Only vulnerable to a specific type of attack in the first place; everything else deals scratch damage.
7. Decaying Enemy - An enemy who you can't hurt, can hurt you, but who dies after a set amout of time; in other words, an endurance test.
8. Kaizo Trap - The boss dies, but retaliates with a final attack that annhilates you if you weren't prepared (e.g. adequately buffed and fully healed up) for it.
9. "Fairy Battle" - If you attack the enemy, you game over; instead, you must attack a specific thing based on some clue or question, in order to win a massive reward. Often characterized by a light reprise of the standard battle theme.
10. "Puzzle" Boss: Sequence - A boss fight that requires a specific series of actions to solve
11. "Puzzle" Boss: Roulette - A boss fight where, in order to harm the boss, you have to hit a thing and take your chances.

Have I missed anything? And, how valuable do you think these are to the average player? Discuss!

 

I'm gonna take some time to categorize these a bit.

First is time based conditions, either in windows (of opportunity or punishment) or outright limits in the form of countdowns. The softer form is using your time to kill formula.
Next is relational conditions. Elemental strengths/weaknesses and status effect susceptibility would be the big example. Essentially anything where you can say under normal circumstances this does X, but against Y type it does Z. How undead flip the script on what life and death effects do would fall under this.
Possibly last would be trigger conditions. Doing X causes Y. It could be as simple as a counteract or as complicated as a full blown puzzle. Chances are most interesting ones will change previously established conditions of the other types.

That might help... might. At the very least it's better to think in terms of higher level notions instead of with minutiae.

At this point, I'm just "unenthused" about jRPG combat. I still play them, although there hasn't been much since the PS2 that has seemed interesting (doesn't help that I don't own a newer console and/or emulate them). Do people who still play jRPG's even expect anything out of the combat?

 

That's pretty insightful. I especially like the idea that a 'soft' time condition involves a standard battle, where the 'Time to Defeat' equation dictates who wins is pretty cool, I never really thought of it that way.

I think something like the "Odin" or "Decaying Enemy" cases are interesting mathematically, because they're a fixed TTD (either for you or your enemy, respectively) - I think those fights are probably the least fair of any JRPG combat trope on this list, and should be used sparingly, but where they'll have the most effect (specifically, the Odin fight is an optional sidequest for Rydia.) It might also be a good idea to have them as sort of 'ready checks' for endgame, or postgame, content, but I think some other trope would come off as being more fair. Unless I were making a masocore JRPG, in which case muahaha.

I think your concept of trigger conditions is the most powerful, though, because you can set up all sorts of cool scenarios that fit 'expected' JRPG battle types. In fact, trigger conditions could conceivably be used to set up a sort of 'relational' system, since a relational system is pretty much the same thing, except the condition is like, "When I am hit with thunder spells, I take double damage."

 

There's some overlap, although I would think of triggers differently in implementation. Triggers would be a bit more prone to be one-offs, while the relational stuff is more of the daily bread-and-butter. I would imagine most triggers would be custom for that monster/fight. Something like if an icicle is attacked, it can drop and damage whatever is below it, or hitting a specific monster causes the boss to change states.

Another thing coming to mind are some of the more gimmicky fights in FFX, where there are very clear foreign elements that drastically change the way the battle can play out. At least these have some capacity to change the normal player behavior away from "kill everything that moves" (albeit to "kill this specific thing, then make sure everything else is dead").

 

I'm probably going to get the "Captain Obvious" award, but it sounds like the reason you're fed up with Eastern RPG battles, is because more often than not the objective is "kill all the things" instead of "use 'kill all the things' mechanics in cool ways." It's something I feel too, so it's a note I'm taking for my project's overall design.

 

Not necessarily. Most of it is due to migrating to PC and not having a console, so I've just drifted away them and haven't played anything new. So pretty much the only new ones I've played in the last few years are Recettear and Dark Souls (which barely counts).

It's less that I'm fed up and more like I'm content. As much I wouldn't reject if, it's more that I have no motivation to catch up on the back catalog of Gust and NIS games that I've missed.