Yuber wrote:BTW, assuming you know more than someone you're talking to IS pretentious("hehe, gonna show that filthy pleb how inferior his little insect brain is" kinda thing, but far less blatant).
I often open dialog with some broader statements that will give me a feel of the other side's knowledge when they respond, so I know what I'm working with.
Especially in a tech support-type issue. It never ends well if I just ASSUME similar knowledge levels there.
I prefer not to just leap in with both barrels blazing. As much as I do LOVE blasting technical details and trivia all over the place, it's thoroughly unproductive 99% of the time.
I prefer to think of it as writing for the audience rather than condescension.
I don't think you're a bad person, but my suggestion that you try vaping weed earlier was mostly serious.(no nasty hangovers like booze + vaporizing means no tar/carcinogens from smoke)
Just flaming hot air damaging my lungs(smoke is only PARTIALLY harmful because it's full of gunk. The actual HEAT is damaging too) and some prison rape when I get caught and convicted. Whoo, fun times.
I LOVE the ATB system. I see it as a great middle ground between pure turn-based and real-time action while remaining(mostly) turn-based at its core. Active= you want more action, wait= much more turn-based. Chrono Trigger is a great example of the ATB system being used to create a fast, fun battle system with cool tweaks like the dual and triple techs.
Chrono Trigger is a great example of why ATB was a terrible system, though it's not ATB proper. They kludged a 2D combat field on top of a pseudo-real-time kludge of an NES combat engine. So I had no ability to move my characters in a game where I had character-area attacks. Though the enemies had no such restrictions and could wander the battlefield quite freely, drifting in and out of attack range.
Though even when keeping to "true" ATB(TM) with no actual battle field, it has problems. Cyan's sword techs stick out, since using a higher-level one locks EVERYONE'S ability to fight until he's charged up. Possibly for multiple actions.
My favorite issue, though, was on the PlayStation, since long animations in active mode could have you dying of poison before the buffered cure could go through(since no action can occur during animations, so the game is paused, but time marches forward ANYWAYS so poison continues to hit EVEN THOUGH YOU CAN DO NOTHING ABOUT IT{yes, I died more than once to this. It's the main reason I used wait mode.}.).
And the difference between active and wait was just "does the enemy continue hammering you while you completely lose all ability to respond as you look for that item/spell at the bottom of the list." It's a terrible distinction.
Okay, on PS they added "does time progress during long unskippable attack animations that no one can do anything during" too.
And I see ATB as completely and fundamentally NOT turn-based.
There are no combat rounds for people to have turns WITHIN. No concept of a turn exists. Everyone moves on their own independent time scale.
And FF10 did THAT concept far better. Though they were borrowing from Grandia and Evolution by that point, Evolution being what SNES Final Fantasy SHOULD have done, in terms of combat engines. Limited enough to be easily doable at the time, dynamic enough to be INTERESTING.
On the downside, Evolution's setup makes no pretense of having real-time combat, so it wouldn't have had that bullet point on the box. It's a small price to pay, especially as the real-time aspect was forced in ham-handedly and never worked well. Unless the goal was to prolong combat by forcing players to do nothing but stare at the screen while they waited for gauges to fill. Because it worked spectacularly well at artificially prolonging combat.
Adding timer bars to an NES game is NOT what I would have called "next-gen" at the time. That a lazy kludge(there, I said it) to a game that probably began development on the NES ended up defining the series for a decade verges on criminal.
I completely disagree with you on the ATB system. What type of system would you prefer, Gil? I'm not a big fan of FFX, but I do like its battle system. Who cares if it's outdated? It's an incredibly good base if it's applied well.(as it is in CT)
Oh, hey, I actually answered this, in part, before I saw the question.
If we want to move from turn-based to time-based, Grandia is what I prefer. A full two-dimensional battlefield with the ability to move my characters around it.
If we're keeping it turn-based, Lunar. Which is basically turn-based Grandia(or vice-versa, as the case may be).
If we're keeping it easy to do on an SNES(hell, even an NES) and within Squaresoft's apparent goals of shaking things up and not being turn-based anymore, Evolution. It's time-based, and combat takes place on a more advanced version of Final Fantasy's front/back rank setup than a true battlefield.
That said, every solution I prefer makes the large enemy sprites the SNES FFs used difficult, because enemies have to be able to move independently of each other, so they can't exist as background layer objects.
And I'd actually rather see turn-based system like the NES Final Fantasies than the time-based kludge of FF4-9. I find ATB THAT problematic.
Lastly, if I wanted to play FF1, should I play the original or the PSX remake? As much as I love FF4, 6, 7 and 9, I know very little about 1-3.
I'll go with odditude's recommendation of the PS version.
If only so you don't have to
buy
potions
one
bottle
at
a
time.