Your favorite rpg 2D pixel game is?

[Spirox]

Hey guys,

I am making this poll because I wanted to know what people do like in terms of the combat systems.

I know that all of you (almost all) hate griding but what about it when it's Golden sun? or Fire emblem?

My opinion I liked both (Fire emblem a little bit more tbh)

What about you?

 

[Fliptoynk]

I like the combat system in dragon age origins. But if you want a bit simplier than DAO, but still rocks... Look for age of decadence. I don't have qualms with head-to-head turnbased combat but we can't deny there are better combat systems than that. What game engine are you goin to use anyway? Those combat systems can also be done in rpgm... I think

But that's just me.

 

[Sphere42]

I definitely don't like any kind of time constraint if the game focuses on being tactical. Dynamic turns with pause-for-input are fine though. Since you listed Golden Sun first and I actually played it the most by far I'll give a rundown of what I did and didn't like about its mechanics:

• The Djinn/class/summon system feels really good except for the edge case of summon rushing, some individual Djinn abilities being pretty broken (shield cycling...) and getting all your characters royally fucked (not in the good way!) by Djinn Storm. The dynamics of needing to balance immediate power (summons %maxHP damage) versus long-term sustain from powerful classes and being able to sacrifice said class for unique utility effects were great. Also many of the higher classes felt pretty unique within the context. Keep in mind such a system requires a rather high base amount of complexity to actually function, this definitely is not something you can put out as a v0.1 alpha with only 1-2 classes and all Djinn+summon effects being varying amounts of damage.
• Offensive Psynergy and elemental RPS are useless: the main flaw with GS's combat in my opinion. For a world and story so focused on the balance and interplay of four fundamental elements you sure don't pay much attention to them in combat and unlike the rather ridiculous physical stats there is no real "mage spec" where you fully invest in powering up elemental spells.
• Passive PP regen deserves its own mention. Sure it's probably a bit OP but being able to actually refill between fights really helps alleviate "too good to use syndrome". In pretty much every Dragon Quest clone/RPGM default system I find myself starved for MP and forced to pretty much only use heals, out-of-combat utility and whatever might help in the boss battle.
• Speaking of which the spells having out-of-combat uses, while not part of the combat system per se, really upped the immersion and made the characters more engaging. Boktai also did this really well on a completely different combat system though so it's more a matter of effort and world design.
• Broken Unleashes: every weapon having its near-unique attack spell instead of boring old critical hits was great and really added a motivation to collect and try many different weapons instead of just going for the biggest pile of stats. It also "ruined" a large portion of the endgame though with stacking crit chance and damage modifiers to autoattack everything to death being one of the easiest endgame strategies. If you don't go all-out with a weapon-focused system I would dial this one back to making some rare artifact weapons grant access to spells/skills while equipped.
• Useless status effects: pretty much universal and nothing you can really do about it without opening the floodgates for abuse (zombie+Phoenix Down anyone?) but spells or even entire classes designed around the primary function of debilitating/debuffing enemies simply don't work in a PvE format unless you make them mandatory. If you need to cut corners and don't have other reasons to keep them (e.g. being able to use the "sleep" or "hypnosis" spells on NPCs to molest them) axing status moves would be one of my first priorities. Status-spamming enemies are incredibly annoying too but can provide some variation as long as they don't stunlock.
• Spectacular graphics: yeah yeah "muh 4k 120fps" but it looked great for its time and most parts had a very particular charm I find hard to describe. Basically TBS/TLA hit that sweet spot of being cartoonish and colourful but also epic, "realistic" and polished enough to not hurt immersion. Dark Dawn actually made things worse by going 3D because a lot of models were low-res and some of the effects just don't translate well.
• Grind bypass: pretty sure this was never intended as a "feature" but the way the game's RNG worked you could actually bypass it by hard-resetting the system and following its reverse-engineered progression. Normally I would advocate playing as intended or just cheating in the stuff if you don't like grind but in this case the deterministic components of the loot system were at just the right level of complexity to make farming items an incredibly tactical endeavour (especially since certain enemies could throw a spanner into the "standard" strategy) without requiring pages upon pages of spreadsheets for basic proficiency. This one is very important because both being put off by the "legit" grind and going straight to cheating would have significantly reduced my playtime and enjoyment of these games.

Given the site we're on here are my main recommendations for "so you've decided to make a cookie-cutter RPGM HRPG" devs:

• Award sex for winning/playing well. If "winning" means gritting your teeth and not bleeding out as someone rapes you fine but having to knowingly fail encounters to see any sex scenes really grates on my nerves. Slightly more meta if the character "reasonably" can become an elemental god of destruction the story/cutscenes should respect that. Granted many non-porn games fail that too but wanting to repeatedly show the PC getting dominated and raped is a much more significant argument against typical RPGM leveling than needing to maintain dramatic tension for munchkins.
• No sex grind: sex scenes are supposed to be the reward. But don't tie them to traditional RPG grind and even more importantly don't turn the sex scenes into an actual form of grinding themselves! Combat sex is rather underused but if it's more than a quick slap the actual scene/animation should be skippable just as lengthy summons/enemy planet crackers should be.
• MP regen, renewable items. Let's face it variety and complexity will be lacking compared to dedicated and more marketable non-porn games so please make the things you do include reasonably usable. Having a single PC with heals, buffs and offensive magic often leaves the latter neglected due to the limited MP pool, and the usual currency grind for outfits/sex toys on top of functional armour further discourages buying potions.
• Shake it up, even a little bit! Not expecting Final Fantasy levels of combat mechanics but at least consider simple modifications like rolling debuffs/status effects into other skills, giving the PC a smaller set of unique abilities instead of all the "-a, -ga, -aga"s or even just using leaf+fire+water as your basic elemental spells instead of the omnipresent fire+ice+lightning+wind/earth+holy+dark.
• Not directly related to combat but please PLEASE don't half-ass the equipment-porn-interactions! If a character can undress they should then also be fighting naked and ideally at least some NPCs would react when you speak to them. If characters can actually go topless/commando/naked willingly then equipment management and clothing damage should be consistent, too many times have I seen games where you can undress the PC and run around naked despite not having the required "lewdness" because the game only checks your equipment status after combat (where clothes could be destroyed against your will). And once or twice I believe the character still refused to undress but was fine walking around naked and drenched in cum if they reached that state during combat, that obviously shouldn't happen either.
• Think about whether you actually should use RPGM as your engine. I don't hate RPGM games, in fact I like the good ones a lot. But that means including nonlinear exploration elements, other content or mechanics related to physically traveling, decent art choices/worldbuilding and some level of interactivity on par with typical random encounter combat even if you don't actually "fight" anything. Do not use RPGM to make Visual Novels. If nothing else use a standalone tile graphics composer with art which actually suits your setting and save/screenshot that stuff to use as still images in Ren'Py.

 

[CustardPi]

Donkey Kong

 

[F22232425]

This is off-topic!!!

 

[Spirox]

Thanks guys for your answers!