Shi- boatloads of Skills

[Eschaton]

Go eat a steak.

Seriously, though, why is Radiant Historia with its pretentious JRPG title such a paragon of design?  Indulge my hilariously over-the-top trolliness, if you will.

 

[CWells]

I've noticed a trend in newer games in which the number of available attacks to the player has been decreasing, but the utility and customization of individual skills has been increasing to compensate.

Yet, on this site, people seem to boast about hundreds of skills.

*deep breath*

There seems to be two camps, here:  one one hand you can create a small skill pool, but give these skills LOTS of utility.  On the other, you can give them a lot of skills to increase the customization of your characters.

Thoughts?

My philosophy on skills is this:

With the exception of skills that are only in place to control certain scenes, or have special functions:

every skill should be considered important throughout a fair length of a game. And every skill should in some way come with a small trait that makes them just unique enough so that they do not lose their usefulness over time. I give bonus points to anyone who can thread together a chain of skills that can increase the effectiveness of other skills.

Variety is fun and exciting. Clutter is not.

If you were to ignore all the special commands in my game, there would only be about 70 skills(and about 30 or 40 states.). And about a dozen of them are unique in that only one particular character may have access to them as the story progresses. EDIT: There are six playable characters, each get 12 skills. So there are 74 skills total. A character can break the limit of about 12 base skills if they use equipment.

The power of equipment and how skills react to the equipment shouldn't be overlooked.

How will my armor hold up against Skill P? By how much will my offensive equipment increase the effectiveness of skill P?

Things like that. I don't mind lots of skills. Just make sure that your skills matter. And how you balance your character paramaters, your damage formulas and especially your equipment, all plays a role.

 

[Tai_MT]

Go eat a steak.

Seriously, though, why is Radiant Historia with its pretentious JRPG title such a paragon of design?  Indulge my hilariously over-the-top trolliness, if you will.

From what I've read about it, it sounds like a remake of "Chrono Trigger" without all the fun and mystery and plot twists.  It seems to take the Chrono Trigger concept of time travel and multiple endings and does with it what FFXIII-2 does with it.  It doesn't look like events are dynamic, but it looks like the endings are made to be.  Battle doesn't even seem to be that interesting, in all honesty.  Though, I have never played the game, my opinion is only as valuable as anyone says it might be.

Just by what I've read and seen on it though...  I will likely never play it.

My reasons are two-fold...  The first of which is...  It looks like someone took several great RPGs I used to love from the SNES console and mashed them together in hopes of recapturing the "Lightning in a Bottle".  While this is a good idea for anyone who hasn't played those games...  I'd think the people who had played them would likely rather play the originals instead of the mashed up and mixed together version.  The second reason I likely will never play it is because gamers are relatively easy to please these days.  If a lot of people start foaming at the mouth about how wonderful some game is, I try to steer far away from it.  You must remember, these are the same people who help give us a new Call of Duty every year as well as who think games like "Gears of War" are awesome.  These are also the same people who tell us that Assassin's Creed is amazing.

So, I'm not going to be picking it up anytime soon (or ever).  I'm just going to keep waiting for the next "most awesome RPG" to ever grace the store shelves.  Maybe next time the RPG will have a story and I can enjoy myself.  We'll see.

 

[devilarms2099]

Well I'm trying to separate skills by three different camps.
Specialty, Class, and Character

Specialty relies on what role the class takes. A tank class will gain all specialty skills that other tank classes will have

Class skills are exclusive to that class that makes it unqiue. 

While character classes are exclusive to a certain character. 

 

[Fafnir]

Go eat a steak.

Seriously, though, why is Radiant Historia with its pretentious JRPG title such a paragon of design?  Indulge my hilariously over-the-top trolliness, if you will.

Nope. Go play it or something. I have better things to do in my life.

 

[Quigon]

Go eat a steak.

Seriously, though, why is Radiant Historia with its pretentious JRPG title such a paragon of design?  Indulge my hilariously over-the-top trolliness, if you will.

I actually just started playing the first half hour of it yesterday and really enjoyed it so far. The battles are a little attack-spammy at the moment but I assume there'll be a bit better as it goes on.

I like the idea of having skills learned in the beginning being useful for the entire game though. I can see why that might be the case with the mentioned title.

 

[Lowell]

Go eat a steak.

Seriously, though, why is Radiant Historia with its pretentious JRPG title such a paragon of design?  Indulge my hilariously over-the-top trolliness, if you will.

Radiant Historias battle system is a bit of a unique design in that you're actively trying to control the battlefield and maximize damage to all enemies.

Instead of the usual single/group targeting type skills, you have some skills that force enemies into a specific section of the battle grid.

With this said, you have a lot of diversity in how you engage the enemy such as pushing them backwards and pushing them out of their attack zone/range (someone confirm this?), grouping the enemies together and letting AoE type skills target the larger group of them, or pulling the squishy enemies to the front lines and mauling them with your party. 

The only similarity I see that this has to Chrono Trigger is that AoE type skills, but with the above listed, you can easily strike down multiple enemies in a single turn with a skill that would possibly only attack one foe otherwise. 

The Battlefield is much like a chess board similar to games like Wild Arms 4 or 5, Final Fantasy 12, and Resonance of Fate which is much different to the standard rpg design.

 

[Fafnir]

There's not much in common with Chrono Trigger except both involve time (in completely different ways, mind you).

It also makes status effects relevant, does touch encounters right by allowing stealth and surprise attacks, and varies gameplay a lot depending on which characters you use, while keeping all of them viable. The characterization of both PCs and NPCs is good, to the point that you end up caring about random people off the street, not to mention SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER for Gorlami's sake.

 

[HumanNinjaToo]

I have 91 skills for my 13 PC's in the game I'm currently working on. 7 for each PC. My whole thing was making them play off each other as well as offer unique battle consequences.

For instance, one PC's skill may do mediocre dmg normally but if status X is inflicted on the enemy than the same skill may do heavier dmg as well as compound the effects of the status. Also, status's are unique to characters so forming the party may be strategic.

Also, I'm using the Ao no Kiseki CBS so certain skills take time to charge, add delays to turn order, etc.

I've also used a few other battle add-on scripts to make skills even more unique.

And the way I've designed the damage formulas really makes the player think about how to distribute stat points. You could load a character up with lots of HP and def but then the skills damage output would suffer towards mid and end game if you ignore the mag and luk stats. Although, the skills would still be useful for inflicting status and/or their CBS effects, other battle add-on effects.