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Like I saw on some tweet I think:
It’s poetic justice that Square dropped turn based from final fantasy, only to lose GOTY to a turn based rpg.
Something about turn based combat always makes me immediately turn a game off. I can do a turn based strategy with an entire board like BG3 but what Pokemon or most JRPGs do is simply unplayable to me.
I understand I’m not in the majority here but I just genuinely don’t understand the appeal.
I used to avoid turn based for the same sentiment, but have found some really compelling games that change the formula that have changed my mind. Not every game will be a winner, but there are still some good ones out there.
Strict turn based used to always seem simple to me, and I don’t find it appealing all the time. Pokemon has unit variety, but the strictness of each turn can get really stale.
Games that improve turn based combat are my preference in this category. Persona 5 changes the flow of combat depending on how each unit/character performs and exploits type weaknesses (chain/group attacks). It also takes Pokemon typing and unit diversity and makes a cool fusion/inheritance system out of it.
Older Final Fantasy games with Active Time Battle also scratch this itch where the timing of using skills and specific character order still somewhat matters, you don’t always mash A and spam abilities. FF also does really well with unit customization - materia, GFs, Sphere Grid, etc. mean consecutive playthroughs won’t always feel the same.
Chrono Trigger takes ATB and adds geometry in a physical dimension to attacks which is really unique, but still feels turn based at its core.Like you said, full tactical games are fine because the quantity of units or structure of the arena make the turn based mode interesting. BG3/Divinity, Fire Emblem, Triangle Strategy/FF Tactics, and Gloomhaven fall in this category and I love games like these.
I realize now I kinda hit the points in the article, oops. Sorry if this was repetitive lol
Lol you’re all good. I do enjoy a good read.
Admittedly, I don’t have much to add but if you’d like to keep talking I have a LOT of opinions on Persona 5 because it’s probably my least favorite game to come out in the last 10 years.
Sure, I’m curious what your opinions are on it! I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I can already think of parts people might not like. I’m not one of those rabid fans that will defend it religiously, it’s by no means a perfect game.
The most obvious criticism to make is towards the story, is blatantly dumbed down vs previous games. I will ignore that and judge it simply on its own merits. A quick disclaimer here though is that since I hate turn based combat, my bf was actually the one playing and I was just watching and talking about it.
However, I can’t talk about bad things P5R does without discussing this first…
The game actively continues the dangerous notion that it’s okay for adult women to prey on teen boys and it’s disgusting. There is no justification for why they are constantly sexualizing the teacher in front of the kid and allowing you to date her. This genuinely needs the least amount of explanation, it’s just gross.
Now onto the main issue I have.
The game is extremely inaccessible with its design and gives me and my bf massive headaches to look at for too long.
Before I delve deep into this it’s worth noting that P5R did fix a lot of these issues actually. However, P5R is also an extremely overpriced DLC which is an entirely different matter.
The game has an extreme over reliance on movement in its UI making everything extremely hard to read or focus on. When you select a dialogue option, the background behind the text is moving. Characters names are obscured like a captcha in dialogue boxes (which move). When standing still in the overworld every icon on the screen is moving (most notably the weather icon is moving the most) Even when the game is paused the background is constantly moving. The worst offender for this is the dungeons which have a terrible warping effect on the side of the screen that cause really bad tunnel vision.
I spend a lot of my time when I do UX/UI design (I’m a front end developer) making sure my design is as accessible as possible. I am a big believer that video games can be art and are fantastic at it… but P5 felt like it was constantly fighting against having anyone play it by being the single most headache-inducing game I’ve ever experienced.
Anyway that’s my big rant about how perpetuating harmful notions about allowing boys to be r*ped is bad and also a giant wall of text on how the UI is terrible and actively harms a portion of it’s player base.
Anyway, I don’t hate persona at all, just this one entry. I plan to watch the bf play P3R when it comes out cuz Persona 3 was fantastic and the remake looks like it’s going to be good.
Conversely I really liked how dynamic the UI was and that was one of the things that made it stand out. I didn’t even think about that it could be a problem for some people but feels like the kind of thing that could be turned off in an accessibility menu in the next one hopefully.
Thanks for your reply! Those are all really good points and I range from agreeing completely or understanding wholeheartedly why you feel the way you do about the issue.
Japan’s approach to romance tropes, especially with school age people, is problematic at best. Maybe as a teen I would have fallen head over heels for it and loved most of it (except Kawakami’s plot, yuck), but I definitely had to mentally distance myself from it because it felt weird to even interact with as an adult. At least most of them progress as friends and only turn into relationships at the end (most… bleh). I don’t even remember which romance I might have picked for the final companion step, maybe I skipped the commitment altogether. A part of me fully expects P6 to do something similar and I’m less enthusiastic about that part of the game as a result.
I never thought of the UI being difficult to read and concentrate with, but I totally get it now that you’ve mentioned it. There were definitely times I had a harder time navigating menus because of how much the background moved during transitions. The design itself was committed in every aspect, but the devs could have done more to normalize some of the text or add options to tweak the animations to be less dizzying while still being visually diverse.
I need to try P3 and P4 still, they are in my backlog and I never feel the initiative to start one of them. Your remark about P5 dumbing down some of the features of those games is a little inspiring because I did like the combat and options from P5. If it’s even better in past games, I may like those even more.
Persona 1 is notoriously incredibly stupid difficult so watch a let’s play instead for that one.
As for P4 it’s on Game Pass right now and P3 is getting a remaster that’s coming out really soon and looks really good. So now would be a fantastic time to play through P4 before P3R comes out.
I kinda get it, but I do like games like Persona and Trails. My gripe is with the chess nature of SRPGs, they can’t hook me at all even though I love all the other strategy games like stellaris, civilization, total war, etc.
I’m always the minority on this, but I don’t really like turn based strategy video games. Taking turns belongs on the tabletop. I just don’t get the appeal. I love rts games though.
Personally, I prefer turn-based because I have literally all the time I want to make decisions. I mostly play strategy games regardless (and against an AI at that), but something like XCOM is a lot less stressful than Age of Empires because I don’t constantly feel like I’m falling behind if I take an extra few seconds to check something
This profile is oriented towards the simpler style of combat in Japanese-style role-playing games (though they do have their own subgenre of strategy/tactical games). Fewer factors in making decisions can allow for quick pacing, not something one can get on the tabletop. Katsura Hashino, the director of the latter Persona games, once described it as akin to composing manga on-the-fly.
I understand the feeling, though. I think something with like Baldur’s Gate 3, one has to be excited by the visual and audio presentations to drop something much more similar to tabletop into a video game.
In theory, any turn based strategy game could be a tabletop game. The problem is that these games can be VERY complex, thus pretty much impossible as physical games. Imagine doing all the calculations of a late game Civ5 end of turn on tabletop. Culture, science, food and gold gains from each city, gold expenses from city buildings, gold expenses from army units, unit health recovery, checking which tiles’ improvements have finished…
I love turn based. Games like XCOM, Marvel’s midnight Sun, or Baldur’s Gate 3 could only be turn based.
While it’s not all ‘action’ games, I’ve found many distill down too some very basic mechanics because of it gets to complex no one would play in today’s world. Anyone else remember MechWarrior 2, and every key in the keyboard was bound to something… and how you absolutely didn’t use even half of it. Less tactics, more button mashing. Don’t get me wrong, that is fun sometimes.
Before reading the article, my mental reply: “Because chess and go have existed for centuries, duh”
After reading: The planning part can be true when the system isn’t just a simple math of bigger number better
A lot of times the system is “you can learn how it works or grind until you can have no strategy and still win”, and unfortunately people tend to just take the latter option when given the choice.
