Pokemon (which was brought up a couple times as a game that might feel exciting even if its battles can be grindy) is a really good example of how to keep the player's interest curve high - even in the random battles, there's always a real chance that something exciting will happen, like encountering a really rare Pokemon. If you do, it feels epic. And if you don't, it's usually over within like 15 seconds anyhow. This is very good design IMO.
@Dreadshadow: That exists in Shim Megami 4, Strange Journey and other games by that company too. However, I find the demon interaction a tad too random for my tastes. Maybe I just don't like it when you use route A and the demon refuses to join, so you go route B and they still refuse to join? Kind of hard to know what you were supposed to do then, because as a player all you see is that both possible routes failed, so now you are just confused (and frustrated too). However, I'm not sure what the fix is myself, ideas?
I like to add skill elements to this kind of thing. For example, there's a random encounter in one of my games where a creature asks you for a random item and - since it's run through a troop event - you can't check to see whether you already have it. You can say "yes," "no," or just attack him (and his cohorts), which starts the battle. If you say "no," he'll just walk away, but if you say "yes" and don't have the item, he'll assume you were trying to pull a fast one on him and attack! On the other hand, if you say "yes" and DO have the item, you can trade it for a massive reward.
Other ways you could add skill might be a minigame, or a battle thing where if you want to win over the "friendly monster", you have to defeat things that it summons to "test" you. Not every encounter
should be this different, but including a lot of them throughout the game is the kind of thing that makes it feel like an experience to the player, not a grind.
I know not many people think about this in this regard, but making dynamic battle music can get you a long way.
I remember when I played "The Last Remnant", a pretty cool RPG with kinda unique battle system, the music which changed during the fight depending on the morale of the party got me so hyped sometimes, even in "random", grinding-type battles. The battles were mostly the same, but the music was just too epic to not like the battle.
I'm much more of a mechanics guy and not necessarily as good at thinking up aesthetics like this that would make otherwise-mundane activities feel really rewarding, but yeah - you make a great point. I liked this battle music shift in
Skies of Arcadia as well. A friend of mine gave me a great suggestion recently to keep the battle theme running when a scene involved three consecutive battles, rather than returning to the map music every time the player leaves the battle screen, and it made the scene feel so much more quick and action-packed. This kind of thing is overlooked way too often by all but the best storytellers!
Another important thing is to make sure your resources like mp are balanced. Honestly I don't like the idea in games where you can just buy something that recovers your mp, because if the player can do that they will just continue to use their best skills/spells that consume mp. You want the player to feel like it is a valuable and limited resource and that they need to preserve it when possible, this will lead to them trying to make more decisions in battle, do they preserve their mp or use a skill/spell to give them an advantage.
Totally agree with this (if there are MP-restoring items, they should be fairly rare, expensive, etc.), which is why the addition of TP was such a boon in VX Ace. It's great to have a resource that you try to conserve, plus a resource you can use freely because it resets at the beginning of each battle.
Also do not make the Attack command pointless, we hear a lot about rpgs where you can just spam attack and win which is boring but an rpg where I don't use attack and spam the same skills over and over again every battle is just as boring (and requires me to press enter/click more). If you make mp limited like I said above players may chose to use attack every now and then since it is resource free. You can also find ways to make the attack command more beneficial. In my games I've been making the attack command basically the only way to score a critical hit; it provides something extra for the player to consider.
That's a good point. It's true that the "press X repeatedly; win fight" design is (deservedly) so maligned that sometimes we go too far the other way and make the Attack command useless. But there's also nothing worse than situations where skills that cost something are
worse than just attacking. It should be a situational thing.
I guess if you don't want the players to ever Attack, you shouldn't include it as an option.
Lastly don't feel the need to make normal encounters (depending on the context/length of the game) these long epic encounters. I don't actually want to spend 10-20 minutes on some normal battle that I might run into again and then repeat the same process. Save the long battles for bosses and aim to make normal encounters a significant fraction of the time.
It's true that a 10-minute-long random encounter is terrible design and incredibly annoying to the player. And maybe that's what bgillisp was getting at, and I didn't understand the intent. But what I'm trying to say a lot in this topic is that there's a big different between epic/long and interesting/memorable. A 40-second-long encounter can still be interesting or memorable, like the example from my game above, or enemies with some unique twist (thinking of Mushcoid or Sliver from
Tales of Symphonia, for example), or the "friendly encounters" in some
Final Fantasy games. This wakes the player up. It gives them something to think about, and to pay attention to. It sticks in their mind, even if there are a relative lot of them.
