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 »
I know you’re just exhausted by the multiple-post-per-year pace of updates around here, so let’s take a break from turn-based combat systems and talk about the progression systems of two very, very good action RPGs. When you die in Dark Souls – and if you know nothing else about the… 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 »
I have needed a new website for a while. Here be it! Though I’m proud that my homemade blog/RSS solution on Gigaville actually held together for 10 years, it should have been taken out back and shot long before now. The new site serves a few purposes: Hosting this blog,… Read more »
