Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

 Since I am halfway through Final Fantasy Tactics, I feel compelled to write about its class system, and compare it to how its predecessor, Tactics Ogre, handled the mechanic. Obviously, I should clarify that I've clearly not reached the "end" of the former's class tree, and my opinion could change in light of new revelations. But, having seen a fair share of this game's classes, and how they work in practice. I feel qualified enough to write this piece. Final Fantasy Tactics Classes, In A Nutshell The basic mechanics behind the class system are deeply layered, yet simultaneously oddly simple. Each character, barring certain special characters, starts out either in a basic fighter class (Squire) or a basic healer class (Chemist). Progression from these starting points is obtained in one of two ways: In the first, the player expends skillpoints to unlock skills from the class' skillset. Skills, broadly speaking, come in four types: a. Active skills, skills that...

 It is fairly common in retro game communities to have people comment on how old games, especially those on consoles, were "meant" to look on CRT displays, and often throw up some blown up photos to demonstrate their point, like so: So far, they're not wrong, inasmuch as they're just stating facts about technology and the development realities of the time. Further, I respect that they're trying to combat another kind of obnoxious nostalgism, that of pixelism. Too often there are people who insist that every pixel is sacred and so should not be changed in remakes or with filters, which is obviously untrue, even without this rebuttal. Ironically, then, that's exactly where a lot of CRT nostalgics go wrong. Too many of them act like every pixel was designed specifically to look good on CRTs, and that playing them any other way is some kind of heresy. And this is where I have to step in and point out some big, gaping holes in their arguments. Like I said before, i...

After revisiting Valkyrie Profile with Elias , I think I've identified what makes it feel a little underwhelming to me. 1. Truncated characters: Most of your party members are people who have no real story or flavor outside of what their sad story paints. Which would be fine, except... 2. The mechanics make it so that most characters feel samey. The fighters have some peculiarities to their moves, the archers can shoot the enemy back row, and the spellcasters cast spells, but otherwise, most of them *feel* the same. The fighters don't have any moves beyond "hit the enemy in melee a bunch", the archers mostly just have weak variants of the one move, and every spellcaster can learn every spell in the game, with minimal difference in competence. Now, it's true that there are special moves to distinguish at least the fighters and archers. But truth is, most special moves don't get to fire in regular battles, and often can only be used once or twice, practically ...

 Yesterday, I was talking about the classic Fallout games' openings with a friend of mine, and we both arrived at an uncannily accurate observation: most RPGs in general, no matter the developer or the culture it came from, have terrible, or at best mediocre openings that don't exactly put their best feet forward, compromising either on the gameplay with really long expository or story centric scenes, or on the story with an uninspired early dungeon featuring really weak enemies. Why is that? Well, I posed the question to a few places, and came across what I think is a comprehensive answer: 1. I credit my friend for bringing this point up, but essentially RPGs find themselves needing to come up with good reasons for their characters to be adventuring the world instead of going on with their regular lives at home, like regular people. This imposes certain narrative limitations, as there's a very limited width of explanations that satisfactorily meet this need, and often RPG ...