Why Etrian Odyssey III is One of the Nintendo DS's Must-Play RPGs

I've been re-playing Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, lately, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, and I thought I'd try to get down some thoughts about why I find the game so compelling.

Quick basics: Etrian 3 is a first-person dungeon crawler in the style of old school PC games like Wizardry and the early Ultimas - a brutally hard, story-lite descent into a dungeon full of traps and monsters. The genre saw a resurgence in the latter

half of the Nintendo DS's lifespan, mostly thanks to Atlus realizing that the handheld was a perfect platform for graphically light, gameplay-deep games. The Etrian series' primary 'gimmick' is that you use the DS's touchscreen to draw your own map - a throwback to the old days when players were expected to keep books of graph paper next to the computer or risk getting miserably lost.

There are several FPRPGs on the DS (besides the Etrian games, the most prominent is probably the excellent Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey). So why does The Drowned City command so much of my attention?

1) Pick up and put down

One reason I've been giving The Drowned City so much of my time is that it's remarkably considerate of it. Previous games in the series had a nasty tendency to stretch dungeon crawls out to unpleasant lengths in the interest of challenge - you had to keep pushing forward or you'd essentially lose your progress. But TDC's map designers sprinkle shortcuts throughout their levels which can only be accessed for the first time from their more difficult side. This leaves the initial pushes into dungeon floors pleasantly challenging, while making progress easy to resume if you're forced back to town, and bypassing a dungeon floor you've already cleared a snap. And since these shortcuts are invisible, they give a nice bonus to the diligent cartographer, since careful notation is the only way to keep track of where they are.

The Drowned City also encourages variation in the gameplay experience through the use of the Ocean Exploration metagame. For a small fee, the player can load their party on a boat and explore the oceans around the titular city of Armoroad. Diligent maritime explorers can make money, discover hidden items and equipment, and unlock a series of challenging bonus bosses. Ocean Exploration is light on combat, acting more as a puzzle game, and it works wonderfully to clear the palate after a tricky boss fight or arduous bout of exploration. The only annoyance is that progress in the metagame is staggered by progress in the main game, which can feel stifling at times. But it also makes sense - if the Ocean's primary purpose is distraction, you can't let players burn through it in a single sitting.

2) Class

The level progression system in The Drowned City is fairly simple - for every level a character gains, they gain a single point that can be invested in their class skills. The innovation comes in the variety of those skills, and the classes that they make up.

The first Etrian game's classes were vanilla - a melee fighter, a tank, a wizard, a healer, etc. Their roles in the party were clearly defined, with the only tactical ambiguity being that, while the front and back party rows each have 3 slots, the games limit you to 5 characters in a battle party, meaning there will always be gaps that need to be covered with savvy strategy.

The Drowned City keeps the five-character limit, but mixes the classes in interesting ways. The tank can be optimized to be a massive damage dealer. The primary mezzer (a role that applies status effects to enemies, vital in Etrian's combat) does so by summoning companion animals into the party's sixth slot who then fight as NPC helpers (the sixth slot is also employed by ninjas, melee fighters who can create clones of themselves. The conflict over who gets to USE the sixth slot is one of the interesting ways the game's classes interact).

The most intriguing of these hybrid classes is the Prince, a kind of passive healer/buffer. The Prince's base abilities are a set of buffs which can increase attack power, protect from status effects, etc. But the rest of his skill tree is devoted to a sort of powerful but slow passive healing. Characters he buffs can regain health. If he removes a debuff placed on a character by an enemy, they regain MP (or, to be technical, TP). And, most usefully, if the Prince is at full health at the end of a round, he emits a party-wide regen effect, perfect for keeping the party in top form but devastating if the Prince takes a hit. The 5-person-party means the Prince will almost certainly be filling the healer role (instead of the Monk, an unarmed combat expert with several direct-healing spells but few buffs), meaning that the entire focus of the party shifts to keeping him (or her, as a Princess) at full health.

The whole system becomes even more fascinating/complicated when, 10 hours in, the option to subclass becomes available. Each character gets access to the almost-complete skill tree of one other class, allowing you to develop synergies between skills and shore up weaknesses in the build. A Prince can be subclassed to a Monk, to be able to heal himself back up to full so that the party can benefit, or to a Ninja to boost his evade so that he's never hit. The complexities of the skill trees and the subclass system lead to a lot of my time away from the game thinking about what builds and what skills would work together to create an optimal party (or, in  some cases, apparently pointless skills make me wonder why they were included at all, leading to excitement when I stumble on a powerful synergy that makes these 'useless' skills incredibly powerful - a late game unlockable class, for instance, relies entirely on inflicting status effects on itself to increases its combat power).

And you need an optimal party. Or, near-optimal at least. Because:

3) Challenge

The Drowned City is, as I said, a brutally hard game, something it inherits from its PC forebears. That difficulty comes in two flavors - exploration, and bosses.

Exploration covers tackling the mazes themselves - solving puzzles, fighting enemies, keeping your characters healthy. The star here is the player's own mapmaking. I know this sounds dumb - like a chore the game designers force upon you - but there is a real thrill in navigating via a map you created yourself. Working out how to best notate traps and dungeon features, leaving notes for yourself - it's just plain fun, and it gives me a real sense of ownership over my exploration.

Exploration also plays heavily in the game's crafting system. Monsters drop items that you sell in town to get better equipment to kill more monsters to get items to etc., etc., etc. But many monsters have 'conditional' drops - only gained when the monster is, say, killed on the first turn of battle, or killed while their head is bound, or with fire damage. The myriad requirements (most of which are hinted at in the game, although some must be puzzled out on one's own) force the player to keep a diverse set of skills on hand lest they lose access to the most powerful equipment.

And you'll need that equipment to take down the bosses on display in this game. These are more-or-less perfectly tuned to the level the player should be at to face them (one of the best things about The Drowned City is that, until you reach the endgame, there is almost no reason for a smart player to grind at all). They use powerful moves (that can often be effectively countered if you have the right characters and a proper observation of patterns), status effects (which can be negated if you have the right build), and huge health bars (many of which can be whittled down more quickly if you take advantage of elemental weaknesses). The best thing I can say of the boss designs in The Drowned City is that, after having my ass handed to me by them, my response is never 'That was unfair. I'd better grind some more levels," but "I need to adjust my strategy and pay more attention next time."

Closing thoughts:

The genesis for this little(?) piece was a brief Twitter conversation Michael Peterson (aka @patchworkearth), author of the reliably fantastic web comic Project: Ballad, about his difficulties in trying to get into the games. The common point of comparison for us was SMT: Strange Journey, The Drowned City's stiffest competition for the title of best first-person dungeon crawl on the DS (a much prized trophy, no doubt). Strange Journey wins, easily, on the basis of being a game 'about' something - it has loads to say about religion, humanity, environmentalism... But from a strictly gameplay point of view, I find The Drowned City's class-system to be significantly more engaging, and less time-consuming, than Strange Journey's demon summoning/fusion system for gaining access to power and skills. A lot of that has to do with transparency - Strange Journey's system involves a lot of futzing around with fusion guides and skill inheritance rules, while Etrian lets you see every skill a class can get from the moment you create a character. That transparency lets you start planning out strategies from the moment you start, and that planning, for me, is the true heart of the game's appeal.

Timed Hits Part 3: Gems, Tiles, and Beats

This is the third and final part of "He knows WAAAAAAAY too much about Timed Hits," a series of posts on how game developers have used and modified the mechanics of RPG combat over the years, and what it can tell us about the genre. Part One, dealing with the inclusion of action and timing elements, can be found here. Part Two, an in-depth look at how standard RPG combat is refined and enhanced by increasing player choice, here.

In this conclusion, I'd like to look at games that have approached the issue of RPG combat by avoiding it - by throwing out "standard" combat systems entirely in favor of more unorthodox choices. These aren't games like Call of Duty, where the progression mechanics of role-playing games are used to enhance an established genre. They're not even true hybrids, like the Shooter/RPG Mass Effect 2, which play like a deliberate cross-breeding of genre. These games, in my eyes, are still fundamentally RPGs*, but ones that have replaced their combat systems with a separate but equal alternative.


I want to examine these games, not because I'm dismissive of RPG combat as it stands (I think this series makes it clear that, on the contrary, I've thought FAR too deeply about it over the years), but because, by transposing new systems into the place of the old ones, we can figure out what makes this genre so compelling and long-lasting.

RPG combat is a metaphor, an abstraction meant to represent the hectic back-and-forth of a real battlefield. At the same time, it's meant to give the player a feeling of connection to their character's actions, with menus (or other combat control systems) representing the choices available to the characters. If games are about simulating experiences that the player couldn't have in real life, then the following games approach that old goal of simulation in new, innovative ways.


1) Puzzle Quest

Infinite Interactive's Puzzle Quest created a slight stir back in 2007 by adapting a Bejeweled-type Match 3 game as a battle system for an otherwise typical fantasy RPG. The player moves around a map, solving quests, searching for treasure, fighting monsters. And when it's time to fight... Out come the gems!

During combat, the player takes turns with the AI, moving pieces on a Match 3 board, trying to line up gems to fill their various mana bars or deal direct damage. Matches of four or five provide extra turns and bonus effects, and much of the strategy relies on making optimal moves for yourself while denying strong moves to your opponent.


The RPG elements come into play by allowing either side to vastly modify the play field. Both player and opponent are equipped with a wide variety of spells whose effects range from direct damage, to massively skewing the distribution of gems on the field to a particular color, to destroying certain gems for a big boost in power. At the same time, player equipment and stats modify the effects of matching gems (generally increasing mana earned or damage dealt per match).

One of the ways that I like to judge games like this is by seeing how they represent different enemy "types". In Puzzle Quest, a "fast" enemy will have low HP, but plenty of cheap, quickly recharging spells. A "mage" will have a few cheap abilities designed to funnel mana to him to fuel his expensive, devastating spells. A "warrior" will have straightforward spells and a bonus to his damage for matching skulls (the direct-damage gem type). Fights become a matter of learning how to control the battlefield and counter your enemy's specific tactics (for example, denying a fire-based enemy access to the red gems he'll need to cast his spells). These mechanics allow the player to get a sense of what it would be like to fight these creatures that is both separate from, and parallel to, the sense they'd get from battling such monsters in a more traditional RPG.


2) Bookworm Adventures

Of course, Infinite Interactive was following in Bejeweled creator PopCap's steps in more ways than one with Puzzle Quest - the puzzle-game-as-fighting thing had already been done a year earlier by the kings of gem destruction with Bookworm Adventures, an RPG spin-off of their popular Boggle clone Bookworm.

Compared to Puzzle Quest, the combat in Bookworm Adventures (and its sequel, released in 2009) is ridiculously simple. You have a grid of letters. You spell words with them. The longer the word you spell (and the more difficult the letters used), the more damage you do to the opponents who are bashing away at your health after every word spelled.

What BA lacks in complexity, though, it makes up for in charm, and in visceral thrills. Lex, the titular bookworm, is cute as hell, and his vocal clips and dim-witted taunts are often delightful (not to mention the always-hilarious descriptions of enemies, most of whom are parodies or direct lifts from fables, nursery rhymes, and works of literature).

But the real appeal of the game is the slow construction of perfect words, the thrill of tapping away at your enemies with "and" or "boat" or "car" as you wait for the final letter that will let you unleash "extraordinarily." The battle animations support the joy of it, ranging from a simple head-bop by Lex to an earth-shaking blast of vocabularial power. (Note: Do not try to use "vocabularial" in Bookworm Adventures, it is not a real word).

The RPG mechanics are limited - Lex levels up automatically as you play, slowly increasing his basic stats. And a new treasure is gained at the end of every level, two of which may be brought into the next to produce a bonus or defend against certain status effects. But to me, it's still a great RPG, because of the way it translates my mental struggles into in-game awesomeness. Blowing away the Monkey King with "devastated" felt as intense and real as blasting Sephiroth with Knights of Round did when I was 13.


3) Sequence

Confession time: When I started this series, two months ago (Ye gods, do I write slowly), it was initially as an EXTREMELY roundabout way of talking about a game that I felt had redefined RPG combat in an important, enjoyable new way, and which quickly became one of my favorite games of 2011. That game was Sequence.

The first game from the two-person team Iridium Studios (plus two musicians and a handful of voice actors), Sequence is one of the strongest gaming debuts I've played in a long time. The plot, which starts with a standard "guy-wakes-up-in-a-mysterious-place" premise, quickly expands to include warm, memorable characters, hilarious meta-musings on the nature of gaming, and, ultimately, strong questions on the nature and value of free will. I could write an essay on it (and probably will), but the focus of this article (and no one would blame you for forgetting, given how many parenthetical statements (including this one) I've been making), is on combat. And the combat in Sequence is sublime.

This is going to get a little complicated, so if my ramblings stop making sense, just skip this paragraph and watch the embedded video from Iridium's Jason Wishnov talking about the game (and even if you do understand, you should watch the video to see it in motion - plus, it's pretty funny). Combat in Sequence, to quote Wishnov, is a "mash-up between a rhythm game and a traditional RPG." When combat begins, a song starts playing. The player is presented with three small screens, each with a DDR-esque row of arrows at the bottom. One screen is for Defense - arrows that fall here represent enemy attacks, and must be blocked with well-timed player input or damage will be taken. Another screen is for casting spells - the only way of doing damage to opponents. The player chooses an equipped spell and activates it - causing a specific sequence of arrows to fall. Failure to input the sequence causes the spell to fail, doing nothing except wasting mana. The third screen is for re-charging the mana used to power spells - there's no consequence for missing notes here, but if you don't pay attention to it, you'll run dry and be unable to activate any of your attacks.



The tricky part here is that only one screen can be active at a time - necessitating a constant cycling as you deflect attacks, charge your mana, and execute the often-tricky sequences needed to unleash attacks. In essence, this means that your true enemy in these fights isn't the gorgeously drawn monster you're facing (which is really just a pool of hit points and an attack and defense stat to modify damage given and received), but the tempo and beat of the song currently playing. Timing becomes the most crucial consideration of every move - a powerful spell might be unfeasible if its steps are too complicated, or its sequence takes several seconds to input, seconds where you're either taking damage or frantically flipping between screens to block. The tension of dividing your attention, watching all the parts of the "battlefield", and waiting for a moment when your opponent's attacks flag to strike... It's as pure a sensation of "being in a fight" as any of the other combat abstractions I've encountered in more traditional RPGs.

When I finally tapped into that feeling, it made me realize that that's the element I seek out in games like this. The adrenaline rush of pitting my mind and hands against an opponent, of formulating desperate plans and executing them with my tongue clenched between my teeth. And Sequence made me realize that that feeling is core to the joys of the RPG, and that it transcends whatever metaphor a game uses to convey it - whether it be timed hits and Judgment Rings, or job systems and wordy menus, or deadly beats and falling arrows.

If there's a lesson to be taken away from all this, it's this: The battle is what matters, not the skin it wears.

At the risk of being a terrible shill, I'd like to point out, here at the end of this series, that Sequence is available on XBox Live Arcade and Steam for $5 (and it often goes on sale). If you love RPGs, and even only like rhythm games, you owe it to yourself to play it.



*If one of the points of this series was to consider what, exactly, "RPG" means, by excluding elements of narrative design and focusing solely on combat, I have to conclude that, in this regard at least, the series has failed. Having examined as many combat systems as my feeble memory could present me with, I've become a little flummoxed by the sheer diversity of the genre. The only similarity I can find (and even here I'm generalizing horribly) is the common sense of disconnect between the player and the action on the screen. Menus, swapping gems, even things like Shadow Hearts' Judgment Ring, all stand in between what the player experiences and what the character does. Even in games that give direct control to players, the character's stats still modify the effects of player action in a way that, say, the character in Modern Warfare does not. If Zelda's Link was meant to be a "link" between the game world and the real world, then perhaps an RPG character is defined in the way they don't link, in the way their existence stands between and modifies the difference between the player and the game.

Timed Hits Part 2: Fight, Magic, Item, Cycle All Your Stats and Powers Into One of Hundreds of Different Templates, Run

Note: This is Part Two of "He knows WAAAAAAAY too much about Timed Hits", a series on how to breathe life back into RPG combat systems. Part One is here, Part Three is here

So, the question remains: How do you break up the monotony of the FIGHT/MAGIC/ITEM/RUN paradigm of RPG combat? Last time we looked at the addition of timing elements, and complete conversion to action gameplay. This time we'll take a look at how you can increase player engagement from within the "classic" turn-based RPG system. This essay focuses on how to increase the available choices open to players, while the next one will be about crafting challenges for the player that force them to innovate within the space you've given them.

How do you overcome boredom in RPG combat? Give the player more to think about, more to do.

This one is so basic that you'd be excused for thinking I was padding my list by adding it. But it really can't be overstated - finding ways to increase player choice, and making those choices more meaningful, is the cornerstone that's kept interest in the turn-based RPG alive. Every designer looking to work in the genre must figure out how to approach these issues if they hope to make an engaging game.

Repeating: For combat in a turn-based RPG to be successful, the player must be presented with varied, interesting decisions that evolve and change as the game progresses.

(I know that RPGs have long been seen as the domain of "story," and, certainly, some of my very favorite video game stories have been told in this genre. But there is nothing inherent to the turn-based RPG that makes it an ideal vector for good storytelling beyond the willingness of the people making them to try telling one. As that willingness has spread to other genres, turn-based RPGs have remained, if not as culturally dominant as they once were, at least still relevant. So, there must be some aspect of the games, beyond their narratives, that keeps them interesting to players.)


Characters as Trees (And no, I'm not just talking about Exdeath)

In a turn-based game, battles are reduced to a series of discrete decisions. These individual choices are the core of the combat experience, and they MUST be interesting if the player is going to be engaged.

Once again, we're starting from that ur-RPG, that basic building block from which so much innovation has been constructed: Dragon Warrior.

In Dragon Warrior, there's only one tree that choices are being pulled from, and it's very simple - the one representing the player character's combat actions. In any situation, you choose either Fight, Magic, Item, or Run. Magic and Item have sub-choices, but those choices carry the cost of using up resources (MP or the items themselves). This tree expands when new items or spells are obtained, and the values for some of the decisions can be altered by new equipment, but this is the basic structure through which the player responds to every challenge in the game. Further, each choice is an optimal response to a particular situation - Fight is ideal for dispatching weak opponents, Magic is needed to destroy strong opponents quickly, Item for emergency healing or the occasional rare buff, and Run when survival is uncertain. The strategic element of Dragon Warrior, then, is not one of devising real plans, but one of assessing the danger level from turn to turn and choosing which of the four basic responses is most appropriate.

Once you begin to add other party members, things become more interesting. Every active character in an RPG party is a separate decision tree, sometimes only distinguished by the odds and numerical effects of their basic commands (Bob's Fight command does more damage but hits less often than Mary's, say), but usually also featuring unique commands that allow them to fulfill specific battle roles. A typical "White Mage" character, for instance, will have a tree featuring a fairly weak Fight command, but will compensate for this by having a much more complex Magic sub-tree, allowing the player to make more nuanced decisions about what type of healing or support they want to give their party via this decision.

By presenting the player with not one single decision tree, but multiple trees being cycled as character turns come up, we vary the gameplay experience (Hopefully. Early RPGs often fell into the trap of giving "Fighter" classes an extremely simplistic tree in exchange for a reduced need for healing and an increase in the power of the "Fight" command. Useful in-game, but not tactically very interesting. Later games often give the Fighter a selection of different types of strikes to use, each with different costs and effects). In a static party, though, even these multiple trees can only get you so far. To keep things interesting on the player side, we need to vary the trees/characters available.

The easiest way to vary the trees available to the player is to switch characters out of the party as the plot demands. After all, in the context of the whole game, a character isn't just the sum of the choices they allow in battle, but a hopefully well-realized person with their own motivations (Final Fantasy V gives us an interesting inversion of this, where a new character replaces a party member, but keeps the former character's abilities and, consequently, their decision tree). At the same time, new mandatory party configurations force the player to adopt new strategies to take advantage of the shifts in the decisions available to them (This can be used for narrative weight, too. For example, the sequence in Final Fantasy IV in which the Dark Knight Cecil escorts fragile-but-powerful wizards Palom, Porom, and, later, Tellah, up Mt. Ordeals is both an interesting gameplay challenge - keeping your "Glass Cannons" safe until they can take out your enemies with their spells- and reflects on Cecil's journey from invading general to stalwart protector).

Still, by assigning specific decision trees/characters to the player, an avenue for player choice is removed, possibly hampering engagement. To redress this, we have to take a step back from the battles we've been focusing on so far, and look to party composition and character (tree) customization.


Uh...If we bring more than three people into the dungeon, it'll.... explode. Yeah. - Party Composition

By choosing the members of your party, you're making a choice about which decision trees are being presented to you in battle. It's now up to you to figure out which sets of choices dovetail, intersect, and overlap in ways that allow you to win battles with the lowest amount of resources expended. Some games do this by allowing you to choose character classes at the outset (based on various decision-impacting features, such as the class's cost to operate and the "bushiness" of their decision tree) and letting the character trees develop as a natural outgrowth of the class (the first Final Fantasy game, for instance).

Others give you a certain pre-set number of characters and ask you to form a viable party from these ingredients. This can vary from a small group of potential characters (Final Fantasy VIII's three-person teams formed out of six total party members) to a staggeringly large one (Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, which has three party slots that may be filled by any of the game's 300+ recruitable demons). The key to generating interest here is to create a variety of trees that are distinct from each other, but which interact in useful ways. A large roster of playable characters means nothing if it doesn't reflect an increase in interesting choices available to the player. In terms of combat, distinct characters are less important than the distinct decision trees they represent.

It's at this point that meaningful strategies can begin to develop, allowing a player to tune their party to individual strengths or to countering a particular challenge. The player ceases to reactively pick one of the choices presented by the game, but to begin creating their own.


Get a Job System! - Character Customization

Beyond choosing which decision trees to include in the battle, most games also allow the player to customize their characters; that is, use in-game systems to edit the decision tree each character represents. This can and has been done in a vast multitude of ways, but one pitfall that needs to be avoided is one of homogeneity. This relates to something I call "the problem of the optimal," something one of my favorite game writers, PC Gamer UK's Tom Francis, discussed recently in the context of his stealth game Gunpoint. To wit, if there is a clearly optimal solution to a problem, most rational players will choose it. Any choice presented to the player between an optimal option and something else is a false choice, and player freedom isn't really being expanded. In RPGs with extensive customization, this can be seen in character decision trees that narrow down and become extremely similar to each other (Final Fantasy 7 is the example that leaps to mind, where endgame characters essentially act as holders for the modular Materia that represent actual player choice in battle). If there is a "correct" character build, one that overcomes in-game obstacles most efficiently, most players will choose it.

The obvious solution is to establish game challenges in such a way that there is no single "optimal" build (more on this later). But it's also possible to constrain character customization in ways that still allow the player significant choice in their available combat options. Anyone who's spent any time with World of Warcraft or similar games will be familiar with the multitudes of ways designers have tried over the years to inject variety into the standard Tank/DPS/Healer paradigm (although competitive environments like MMORPGs are usually extremely aggressive in working out mathematically "optimal" character builds and punishing players who do not follow them - again, limiting player choice). In single player games, the Etrian Odyssey series on the DS stands out for including a larger-than-average set of distinct classes, each of which contains multiple specialized sub-classes based on which skills the player chooses to invest points in. In essence, you end up with a party of five hand-tailored decision trees, each focused on a different aspect of combat, each reflecting a conscious, engaged choice on the part of the player.

I firmly believe that enjoyable gameplay derives from a sense of player accomplishment, a feeling that I, as the player, was victorious because of the choices I made. By expanding those choices (while, possibly, quietly guiding players toward more useful options), the designer allows me to feel responsible for my victories in a way that a more game-controlled system wouldn't allow.

Of course, all the choices in the world are meaningless if the obstacles I'm overcoming with them aren't interesting and challenging. Next time, we'll talk about how the other side lives - how enemies and bosses in turn-based RPGs drive player innovation and engagement.

He knows WAAAAAAAY too much about Timed Hits, or, How to keep your console RPG combat system interesting: Part One!

This is Part One of a Three-Part series examining innovations in RPG combat. Part Two can be found here, and Part Three, here.

Once upon a time, long before the dystopia we live in now, where every Gun Shoot City or Modern Fightknife is filled to the brim with progress bars, unlockable perks, and precious, precious XP, the role-playing elements in video games were the sole province of the nerdiest of nerds. Unlike other video games, which prized reflexes, or luck, or knowing the rules of sports, all you needed to succeed at the RPGs of yesteryear were patience... and a love of reading.

The major challenge facing your silent, indistinct hero in those classic RPGs (besides eyestrain and your mom's threats to throw the Nintendo in the trash if you didn't let her have the TV back, right now, and no, she does NOT care that you haven't saved in an hour) was combat with the various static pictures of monsters that constantly popped up to assault him.


As you can see, the tactical options open to our hero (named BUTT, in honor of the fact that I was six when I first played Dragon Warrior) are somewhat limited. In fact, it's easy to see this combat as a predecessor to casual Facebook games like Farmville. No, seriously, let's break the gameplay of, say, Dragon Warrior down into its basic gameplay loop.

1)The player has a goal, accomplished by exploring a dungeon.
2)Every dungeon requires a certain number of steps to fully explore, and monsters attack periodically at certain step-intervals.
3)Every combat turn, the player trades some of their health (and sometimes a less-easily replenished but more powerful resource, MP) in exchange for damaging the monster.
4)Bonuses to your stats, gained by increasing your level or buying better equipment, reduce the amount of health that must be paid to defeat any given monster.
5)If the player has sufficient resources to defeat all of the opponents they encounter without spending all of their health by the time they've accomplished the dungeon goal, they win, and begin looking for another dungeon.
6)Repeat until game is finished.

Which isn't to say there isn't tension there - especially since the random number generator being used for the combats can cause the "health paid to defeat monster" cost to vary wildly - but the only player skills required are planning, and the patience to acquire the stats and items needed to execute those (pretty simplistic) plans.

What it translates to, in gameplay terms, is mashing the A button a lot, clicking Fight as fast as you can, and speeding through the combat text. And it's not like this is a problem only afflicting the residents of 1990, either; although Square's Active Time Battle system, in which choices must be made in real-time while the monsters continue to attack, added a bit more pressure to turn-based combat, this basic system is still at the heart of the vast majority of role-playing games.

So, what's an RPG designer to do? How do you liven up this most basic of gameplay loops?


Ask me what my job is, and then ask me the hardest part - Timing

One trick for injecting some extra excitement into your game's battles is to add a timing component. Sick of mashing 'A' constantly? Good news! Now you can mash 'A' selectively instead!

The idea here is that, by adding a small amount of skill-reliant player input into every action your character performs, the player becomes a more active participant in the battle. The question isn't just whether Ignacio Steel XII, Elf Spaceking, has a high enough ATK stat. It's whether Jerry, Dorito Eater, K-Mart Employee, and Gamer, has the skill to input the commands that power up Ignacio's Spacehorsesword, Sparklemune and let him ridestab all his enemies to death.

Why it's good: The added element of risk adds a lot of excitement to a game, especially if the game lets you play with that danger - increasing penalties or making the timing more difficult - in order to enhance the rewards.

Why it's bad: Sometimes it's nice to be able to grind through some random battles without having to watch for the half-second where one of your character's eyes glows slightly redder than normal. And some people, sad to say, suuuuuuuuuck at timing. Poor, Guitar-Hero-loathing weirdos.


Who did it early: Super Mario RPG (1996). This game is so strongly associated with this mechanic that I had to make a supreme act of will not to just put "Timed Hits!" for this whole section and move on. SMRPG used Timed Hits for everything; attacking, defending, special moves, items.

The best use was undoubtedly for the unfortunately named Scan move 'Psychopath." Get the timing right with it, and you'd not only see the enemy's health, but also THEIR VERY THOUGHTS! These could range from the saucy "MAGIC! DEAL with it!," to the heart-wrenching "Don't pity me, Mario!," to the conscientious "Gotta mow the lawn soon!"

They only really had one thing in common: being completely useless to the player. Fun, though!


Who did it best: All of the Mario-based RPGs (of which there have been, if I'm counting right, 6) have some elements of timing, but the handheld games (Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, and Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story) push these to the extreme. Of special note is that every attack in these games can be entirely negated with good timing (and most harder battles assume that your relatively fragile plumbers will be dodging everything thrown at them flawlessly). These games, especially the excellent Partners in Time, push the Timed Hits paradigm to the point that every battle becomes a small-scale platforming segment, and they're fantastic, engaging fun.

Honorable Mention: The Shadow Hearts games, which incorporate the timing-based "Judgment Ring" not just into battles, but into winning the lottery, haggling with shopkeepers, even operating a treadmill-powered teleporter to the moon!

Who did it... not so best: Loath as I am to speak ill of the cult favorite Mother/Earthbound series, the third game (never released in the US, but a translated version is not at all difficult to find online, if your conscience will let you play it) features an ill-conceived "rhythm element" that adds needless annoyance and frustration to battles. By tapping along to the beat of the music (which can be near-impossible to discern), the player can combo their attacks, increasing damage. While the feature is almost entirely optional, the game mentions it often enough to make players feel like they're missing something by not taking advantage of this obtuse enhancement.

Which Final Fantasty game used it: Not only was Final Fantasy VIII's Gunblade the coolest gun-sword-chainsaw hybrid my 15-year-old eyes had ever seen, it also gave the player unprecedented control over the flow of battle by... letting you hit R1 at the right time to do a little extra damage. FF8 also countered complaints that the previous games' summon animations were too long and boring by adding a rapid-tapping "Boost" system to the game's Guardian Forces. Meaning that instead of being bored during the animation, you were frustrated, your thumb hurt... and you were bored.


"Wow, we're a lot more mobile here than we are on the map screen..." - Action Instances

One of the biggest problems with the standard turn-based battle system is that it almost entirely divorces the player's experience from the character's. You click "Fight," he leaps twenty feat into the air and rends an eldritch abomination in twain. You press "Cast Gravity," she marshals her mystical might to manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe. If the goal of gaming is to let players do things they otherwise couldn't, this isn't particularly effective as a simulation.

Some games get around this by giving the player significantly more control over the character during battle than at any other point. Usually this involves switching from the standard moving-around-the-map environment to a highly detailed battlefield, and putting the player in direct control of one member of the party.

(I'm distinguishing, for largely arbitrary reasons, this style from games like Secret of Mana or Dark Cloud, where combat occurs in the same world/viewpoint/screen as normal gameplay. For some reason, I've always viewed those games less as RPGs and more like Zelda-with-stats (although, more on that further down)).

Sometimes this battlefield will be a 2D plane; more recent games using this model (the later Star Ocean and Tales games, for instance), use pseudo-3D or real 3D battlefields.

Why it's great: First and foremost, it's just a lot more exciting to physically guide your character's moves. At the same time, a good system won't sacrifice your access to advanced techniques, or to controlling your other party members. It can give you the sense of being both a powerful warrior and a general, truly, viscerally responsible for your party's success in battle.

Why it's bad: I'll let the Penny Arcade guys cover this one:

Which is to say: Most RPGs feature multiple-character parties. A system that forces you to control only one of those party members, leaving the others to the tender ministrations of the AI, can lead to some... unsavory... scenarios.

Who did it early: Oddly enough, given my earlier comments, Zelda. Specifically, 1988's Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. Zelda 2 gets mentioned all the time for being an odd game out (in a series with a LOT of strange outliers), and one of the ways it deviates most strongly from the Zelda pattern is in being an RPG, complete with random encounters. Walk off the path on the overworld and you'll quickly start seeing monster icons. Bump into one, or enter a dungeon, and you'll switch from a top-down map view to a side-scrolling battle.

Zelda 2's clunky controls (and often confusing translation) stop it from being as well-regarded as its brethren, but it's interesting to note that this system isn't that different from the ones seen in SNES games like Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean.


Who did it best: The people at Namco have spent a LOT of time refining the combat in their Tales games. My favorite of the lot is Tales of Symphonia (2004), easily the best of the Nintendo Gamecube's not-particularly-crowded pack of RPGs. Symphonia's combat is fast and challenging, without sacrificing control over your overall party. Plus, I'm a sucker for any game where combat performance is graded and rewarded (as it is with ToS's GRADE system, which trades battlefield performance for bonuses in a second playthrough).

Honorable Mentions: Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, developed by Star Ocean creators Tri-Ace, had a battle system utilizing the conceit that in-game time on the 3D battlefield only flowed when the player was moving, allowing for increased time for planning and executing strategies.


The Summon Night: Swordcraft Story series on the GBA has an in-depth crafting mode and a fun battle system reminiscent of the 2D Tales games. The interesting added quirk here is the ability to break a boss's weapon in combat, earning the recipe to craft it yourself.

Who did it... not so best: I never played much of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the game referenced in the above Penny Arcade cartoon, but what I played of it seemed to bear out Gabe and Tycho's accusations.

Still, though, this is a hard "genre" for me to criticize. It's just... FUN to run around the battlefield, executing simplistic combos on your foes. As long as the character I'm controlling moves fluidly, and the game isn't viciously punishing me for my lack of attention to my other characters, I'm going to enjoy myself.

Which Final Fantasy game used it: Well, by disqualifying games where exploration and combat happen on the same map, I can't use Final Fantasy XII, by far the most "action-y" game in the main series. So, with a biiiiiit of a stretch, I'm going to point to the PSP side-game, Final Fantasy: Dissidia, which has an extremely simplistic, tile-based overworld that quickly segues into elaborate 3D battles.

Phew! Close one!

Next time: Intense refinement, and intense weirdness!