Rather than tell you, "THE ONE TRUE WAY TO CREATE AN RPG, ALL OTHERS SUCKETH!", I'm going to list a number of RPGs that I have played in my day and talk about what I liked about each one.
TACTICS OGRE:
For those on the non-linear story telling band wagon, this is IT. Non-linearity has never been done better. Don't talk to me about that steaming pile, Fable that pretended to be non-linear but ran on rails more tightly than AmTrack. In Tactics Ogre there are two, major decision moments in the game each of which radically alters the course of events. What makes these so great is the consequences of each flows as natually and properlay as if that is what you were intended to do all along. Seriously, how many "non-linear" games can boast that? Most wind up with eight "fake" endings that don't really make sense and the one you were supposed to get. But that's just the major plotline, there are litterally dozens of minor events throughout the game that change (sometimes fairly drastically) the course of the game based on whether a specific person died or left the party or not. Seriously, I wanna meet the guy that set up the mission and dialogue trees in the slim hopes that some of his genius might rub-off on me just by standing in his presence.
The thing I did NOT like about this game is the character leveling process. The way it works is that each job-type you can have a character hold adds differing amounts to different stats (the function of some is not all that clear) each level they earn while they have the job. While this may sound interesting, what it turns into is staring at a spreadsheet trying to figure out how many levels a person needs to hold a specific job for before switching to a different job. Which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds like (and it really doesn't even sound like much fun). The scale of most of the battles is a little large for my tastes as well, although its a matter of preference I suppose. To be honest it never bothered me until I played Final Fantasy Tactics.
FINAL FANTASY TACTICS:
The character leveling system is the coolest thing EVER. It is also one of the things I liked about Guild Wars (which had something similar). The way the leveling process works is by earning new skills in one of four categories for each job-class. A character can then use two active skill lists, one reaction skill, one support skill, and one move skill FROM ANY JOB THAT THEY HAVE PREVIOUSLY HELD. Which means that you can mix and match these skills from different classes to customize each character allowing for a huge number of combinations and thus tactics and strategies. It is awsome, simply awsome. I also liked the scale that the battles are fought in. Compared to Tactics Ogre you are on a map half as big, with half as many units, that can move half as far. It makes each move you make mean a lot more and you have to be more careful.
Things I hated about FFT is that too many of the "end-of-chapter" battles depend more on luck than skill to pull off, the system menu is poorly designed, the incidences of "Engrish" are more annoying than amusing (Tactics Ogre was made three years before FFT and the translations were a lot better). For those who find it important, the plot is on rails. I mean absolute rails (but at least the rest stops are well marked and the stalls are clean). There is no decisions you can make in the entire game that will have any impact on the plot at all. It is basically the antithisis of what Tactics Ogre was. But, it's not an important issue for some people so it is a minor gripe.
X-COM: ENEMY UNKNOWN
The very idea of duking it out with some uber-powerful alien menace mano-e-mano makes me giddy for some reason. While the game itself is billed as a "Turn-based, tactical shooter" it does have some RPG elements, and besides, that doesn't mean that some of the ideas couldn't be carried over. The storyline is relatively linear, however simply progressing through the plotline was one of the games puzzles (and not of the, "dur, what do I do next" sort, more of the, "what piece am I missing, what should my objectives for the next few missions be"). And that is part of the charm, you the player could set your own mission objecttives to advance the plotline. At one point I needed to capture a live alien of a specific kind. I finally got my opportunity to do so and instead of playing the mission out I grabbed what I needed and forsook the civillians I was SUPPOSED to be protecting to firey, plasma-ey death. Hooray for the good guys
Things that didn't work so well however were the RPG elements (and it got even worse in X-COM: Terror from the Deep). While it had character developement and RPG elements to it, they were so weakly done and so poorly implemented to make them seem non-existant. Furthermore the game did not really differentiate between "incapacitated" and "dead". Did I meantion that a single-hit is usually enough to incapaci... I mean kill you? Not to mention the numbers of weapons of friggin mass-destruction available. Which meant that you could have spent HOURS on some dumb-ass getting his stats up and this retard would get snuffed in a second because the pathfinder hiccupped and left him standing on top of a live grenade.
FINAL FANTASY: ETERNAL NOVA, FINAL FANTASY VI
Things in the FF franchise kinda went on a down-hill slide after VII (and I still maintain that the series peaked in FF VI, but that's just me). FF:EN is a fan-made game using RPG Maker and is absolutely a gem. That it's a fan-made game and turned out as good as it did is even more impressive. The thing that I loved most about Eternal Nova is the story and how well it was told. The best thing about it were that the character motivations were beleivable (even, or perhaps especially because the villain's goals were something that I could understand). Perhaps that is why I enjoyed FF VI and FFVII was the character motivations were (mostly) something I could understand (although I always thought Setzer's pre-apocalyptic motivations for joining your party were weak). In Eternal Nova, our physical reality causes the god-like creature Paradorn great pain and duress, so she spends the game trying to rid herself of our existance. In FF VII, Sephiroth was fighting to retake the planet for "his people" (that he would become a god-like being in the process was just icing on the cake). Even Kefka's derranged philosiphy was something that, however flawed, you could get ("why do people build when they know it is only going to be ultimately destroyed? Why do people cling to life when they know they are only going to die?") Nothing kills a storyline faster than a bunch of characters that are behaving in a non-sensicle wacked-out fashion (and no, "because they are evil" is not a character motivation). The same needs to go for organizations as for characters. The Finel Police are a fine example of this. They beleive that they are holding the moral high-ground when they go around repressing dissidents and arresting who they are being told are criminals. That they usually wind up behaving as badly or worse never seems to register on them.
Things that Eternal Nova did poorly are largely due to inexperience (but that didn't alleiviate any of the frustration at the time). One of the worst examples is a "timed-maze" puzzle that pretty much requires you to either have a copy of the map on-hand or to die and reload constantly until you memorize enough of the level to make it through. That the "GAME OVER" screen takes a long-time to get through and cannot be skipped is equally infuriating. I'm sorry, but level-memorization is not something I feel belongs in RPGs (heck, I can't stand them in platformers) and if you are going to have a timed-run through an area at least make things fair (FF VI did this right by forcing you to run through the map once before when you weren't timed so you at least had SOME idea of the right way to go when it was a flight for survival). The other area that Eternal Nova botched is that the openning cutscene takes FOREVER to play and there is no way to skip it or to speed it up. Really annoying when a mistake on the main menu costs the player about 15-minutes before he can go back to select the entry he REALLY wanted. Can't really think of any glaring flaws in FF VI (as it is perfect and all
). Ok, here's one; I can not stand having to put the game on hold so I can wander around LOOKING for random encounters to level my characters up some more so I can be tough enough to beat the next encounter. I mean, it's like, "OMG! Hannibal's at the gates! We need to defeat his general immediately to disrupt his assault!" And then YOU spend the next THREE DAMN MONTHS wandering around on safari trying to get enough levels to actually beat the mother. I wish all despots hell-bent on world domination were this patient. And do I REALLY need to get into the "Clound-in-drag" sequence and in how many ways it should never have been included in the final game?
Well, that's all I've got on this. Hope it helped somebody out, later all
WafflesToo
