/vr/ - Retro Games

>>4454208
It's a kind of aesthetic experience that no other medium (including cinema) can render.

my advice? find a way to make combat somewhat involving
square tried to do it with ATB in FFIV and timed hits in SMRPG
you can also add movement and range like in Treasure Hunter G
Grandia series is also a great example with canceling enemy actions
or do your own thing, get creative

Don't listen to oldfags, you should focus on the Undertale audience. If you were to listen to what /vr/ finds you'll probably end up with a horrible Wizardry IV clone no one would be able to get past the first room.

>>4454216
The thing is, I actually like Undertale, but the problem is it's sort of a fad game. When it came out that shit was selling like hotcakes, but now nobody talks about it anymore. Also I don't wanna make it a pile of le epic maymay

>>4454208
Current RPGs are so similar to movies or animes, but classic RPGs made players stir their imagination more because of puppet play by pixels characters, beautiful pixel arts, simple texts and story and the like. Their experience was only in classic ones, and you can not experience them in current ones, animes, and movies.

>>4454208

Proper goddamn pacing. Chrono Trigger is a good example of this. See also Phantasy Star IV. The story is always moving in some direction and it never wastes your time.

>>4454208
>I plan on beginning the process of talking about thinking about doing something
lol. The thing I like about Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, FFVII is they actually got made unlike every single other game fantasized about being made here.

>>4454216
Wizardry IV is awesome though

The endless, needless grinding. If 90% of my time spend on a game ain't wasted on grinding, it's not an RPG.

>>4454208
I really enjoy the one-off situations and minigames.

Good luck with your game.

>>4454215
I agree with this. Turn-based combat is not necessarily bad but it requires a lot of thought when it comes to balancing things. Very few games get it right off the bat, since it's usally either dull, devolving into spamming standard attacks for all fights, or unbalanced, making 99% of strategies pointless.

I'm a fan of skill trees. You don't see those often in older JRPGs.

>>4454208
Make encounters hard to avoid and threatening

Give interesting ways of developing your characters abilities and stats, with many viable playstyles

Make dungeon design daunting and somewhat labyrinthine, but with worthwhile loot not found elsewhere

Make a dynamic battle system with unexpected outcomes, where the player is encouraged to use all tools available to turn around a sticky situation

Give means to speed-up/skip cutscenes and battle animations

Classic RPGs mainly enjoy battles more than story. Grinding, level up and characters get stronger. Story exists to enjoy battles and growing characters more. Look at Wiz 1.

>>4454405
false.

>>4454589
He's correct.

>>4454398

>Make dungeon design daunting and somewhat labyrinthine

Everything else you suggested is good but this shit is just annoying. Especially if you're going with random encounters. Big confusing dungeons where every other room looks the same and you get lost easily are never fun. I'd argue the best type of RPG dungeons are more simplistic in design, but with stuff like puzzles to keep things interesting (Lufia, Golden Sun). Generally you'd want to not have random battles there either, or at least a small encounter rate. That should be a point in and of itself. Random battles every few seconds while you're trying to explore are obnoxious as fuck.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/256460/Cosmic_Star_Heroine/

Either you play this, take notes, and make the same whole game over again, or you brush up on your JRPG knowledge a little and try to draw inspiration from games that weren't already driven into the ground at the start of the decade

>>4454208
Aesthetic choices in general. A lot of games of now, though there are exceptions, strive to feel too realistic in my opinion.

A combat system that doesn't feel completely bread and butter (outside of some FF games anyway).

It isn't overstuffed with shit. Everything in there serves a purpose, and the game feels tightly woven together. Games like FFIX, which I still love, have a major problem with this.

I also like job systems.

>>4454208
Make the battle system fast-paced. There's nothing more annoying than getting into a random battle with a gang of enemies and having to watch a 10 second cutscene every time one of the attacks.

>>4455125
That's something which has been a huge bother in modern times. Only Pokemon really tries to keep that to a minimum, and the 3D shift was detrimental to it.

>>4454208
Memorable characters/dialog, the simplicity of levelling up characters without micromanaging stats, and loveable graphics.

>>4454208
This may sound weird and minor but monsters.

Monsters in jrpgs often feel like they have more thought and interest put into them and I love exploring the world to see what weird and interesting stuff inhabits it. When a game has interesting monsters it genuinely appeals to me more and I feel the world is made more interesting.

Try to make grinding engaging by having incremental rewards, not just farming XP. I like how FF1 and Dragon Quest actually require you to farm a bit of gold to buy new gear, because that gear actually makes a difference.

I'm a big fan of a 3rd stat that increases from battles, aside from XP and gold. Chrono Trigger has tech points, DQ6 has class points, FF9 has ability points. That way, instead of thinking "ugh I have to grind to beat this boss", I think "oo if I fight 7 more battles, I get auto-life"

>>4455510
I disagree to an extent. While Western RPGs might have more "boring" monsters, they have a much better sense of cohesion. If you're in a cave, you fight lava monsters, if you're in a forest you fight beasts, if it's night time, there's skeletons.

Not saying jrpgs don't do this, but it's really goofy and gay in FF6 when you're fighting a rhinoceros monster side by side with a motorcycle monster.

>>4454604
>Big confusing dungeons where every other room looks the same and you get lost easily are never fun.
OP, ignore the obviously gay and retarded posters and focus on making your game more like Wizardry IV

>>4455570
I gotta agree with him, I hate random battles combined with big confusing dungeons. I prefer the puzzle solving dungeons like in Zelda and Lufia 2.

Leveling up skills based on how much you use them is something I'm a big fan of but not sure if other people are? For example, you have to cast Heal 50 times and then it levels up and then you have to cast it 120 times or at least a spell of that same elemental like a water attack? Secret of Mana did it like that.
What >>4455565 said is also a good idea. Have points that you get from battling so you don't hate grinding but actually get something interesting from it.

Random encounters either need to be changed to how Lufia 2 did it with monsters that move on the map only when you move and if you touch them you battle. OR make it so the random encounters are very low or you can cast a spell to lower the encounter rate.

>>4455570
It means the op should make a fucking shit game?

>>4454278
>Current RPGs are so similar to movies or animes, but classic RPGs made players stir their imagination more because of puppet play by pixels characters, beautiful pixel arts, simple texts and story and the like. Their experience was only in classic ones, and you can not experience them in current ones, animes, and movies.
Yeah this

I keep feeling like modern jrpgs take my attention and interest for granted assaulting me with cutscenes instead of trying to gain it.

I recommend focusing on using NPCs and details to make the world you occupy memorable and don't make the plot over involved.

>>4455631
>Modern RPGs
>Cutscenes

I just started playing some Xenoblade Chronicles because I had only heard good things about it. I already knew it wouldn't be turn based like older RPGs but the amount of cutscenes is pretty intense so far. I came to this game after just beating Lufia 2 and Final Fantasy 4 on my SNES. It seems like the game lets me go kill some monsters and level up for an hour and then I get hit with a cutscene for 5 minutes, then I get to move to the next area and then another cutscene. I'm already 7 hours into the game and I was hoping the frequent cutscenes were just to get you started and the story going but it keeps happening.

Something I loved about old RPGs is that you just need to talk to a few townspeople to advance the story and the cutscene is maybe 30 seconds and it consists of "Oh hello Hero, I heard the item you need is in the cave North of our town. Get it and then come back to talk to me" and then you spend a couple hours dungeon crawling and exploring.

>>4455565
I actually meant to put rpgs, not jrpgs. I meant to say that rpgs often have more interesting enemies.

As far as your complaint I get where you're coming from but honestly I don't mind more silly aspects like that. In a way it's like the real world, we see multiple animals that live in ecosystems they shouldn't but somehow survive just fine.

>>4454284
fucking this.

My absolute favourites were the games that knew how to hold a pace, knew when to slow it down or speed it up.

>>4455648
Cunt off with that "I NEED 2 SPOIWER THINGS BEYONBD TWO THUSUND ;.; ;.; ;.;" autism.

Deep ass stories from random town folk

>>4455748
Like that

OP you need to realise what makes Chrono Trigger good and Earthbound good are very different things. CT has an adventurous anime tone, and even at the worst of times, the characters always look for the silver lining. Earthbound is more about the transplantation of JRPG style writing to a relatable setting and the quirkiness that comes with it.

The thing I love about Chrono Trigger is that it's borderline not a JRPG with how it plays and controls. Earthbound because there are tons of great NPCs to talk to pre and post game.

Chrono Trigger and Earthbound do share two traits:
You can walk in any direction
The end game bosses are scarier and creepier than any of the previous bosses

OP you need to realise what makes Chrono Trigger good and Earthbound good are very different things. CT has an adventurous anime tone, and even at the worst of times, the characters always look for the silver lining. Earthbound is more about the transplantation of JRPG style writing to a relatable setting and the quirkiness that comes with it.

The thing I love about Chrono Trigger is that it's borderline not a JRPG with how it plays and controls. Earthbound because there are tons of great NPCs to talk to pre and post game.

Chrono Trigger and Earthbound do share two traits:
You can walk in any direction
The end game bosses are scarier and creepier than any of the previous bosses

My favourites are the ones where enemies are visible and semi-avoidable (or at least, in limited numbers until you leave the room) instead of random encounters that just interrupt your exploration out of nowhere. Chrono Trigger and Mario RPG are probably my top two.

If you're going the flashing-screen random encounter route, at least make the encounter rate dynamic. Have the rate drop after you reach a certain average lvl, or after you've beaten a certain number of battles on a single room (so you can at least explore the room at your pace after being interrupted enough).

The usual, endless stream of enemies thrown at you is a residual design from the era where games were a lot slimmer in content and grinding was pretty much 80% of what you had to do with the game (first few Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games). By the 16bit era, that design didn't make much sense since the games had so much more to offer in terms of exploration and (hopefully) storywise.

>>4455648
They changed the "dive into the story at your own pace" approach of older games, where the details of the story and world building were contained in optional conversations and text pieces, to a "shove as many cool looking, voice acted cinematics as the DVDs can handle", which is a classic case of "we must show what the new technology can do at all cost" (like Nintendo-forced touchscreen/waggle shennanigans) that after a generation should (or should have) been dropped.

Games like these are interesting examples of the era they were made, but not necessarily good games for current standards.

>>4456865
Shit, I wrote this thinking you were talking about the PS2 XenoSaga games, for some reason.

It's fucking dissapointing that you're talking about a way newer game.

>>4454208
No bullshit, just a straight up journey, big ass dungeons, towns, NPCs

>>4455720
Don't drink and post.