(Not proofreading this post, because WTF, just look at how long it is)
Leomon, your reply shows me that either you only skimmed my post, or you completely missed my point. And some of the things you stated are just outright incorrect. Let me walk through it step by step.
That's bullshit. I was specifically refering to the battle system, not the job system. The job system is based on FFV, yeah, and the job system is actually great. It's the one thing I really, really love about Bravely Default and it's probably the best thing there is in the game. I was complaining about the battle system, though. How would anyone claim that the battle system was based on FFV? It's not. FFV used an active-time battle system. Bravely Default does not. Bravely Default uses the same kind of battle system that you would see in all RPGs of the 8-Bit era, like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy (I to III), Phantasy Star and (I think) Earthbound Beginnings. Now I don't know which game actually invented this battle system, but I call it Dragon Quest battle system because that's what I associate it with the most, because in Dragon Quest, this battle system is still used to this day (it was the very reason I was also frustrated by Dragon Quest VIII), whereas Final Fantasy kept trying new battle systems. Some of them were great (FFXII, FFX), some of them were horrible (FFXIII, FFI to FFIII), some of them were "okayish" (FFIV to FFIX), but at least they realised that the original battle system was flawed as hell and changed something. Now while I'm not really the biggest fan of ATB, either, it at least obliterates the one biggest flaw the classic DQ battle system has, which is not knowing anything about the order of actions (plus, Chrono Trigger is a good example of a game where the ATB was actually great).
All of that is completely besides the point, though, which is that Bravely Default is not "based on FFV", just because it uses the same (or a similar) job system. That's like saying Super Smash Bros. was based on Mario Kart, just because both games use items for attacking.
Bullshit, again. Freedom Planet is a spiritual successor (of sorts) to Sonic games, but it does not share the same problems as those games (at least judging from the one or two hours I've played it). Shovel Knight is a spritiual successor to the Mega Man games, but it isn't afraid of doing its own thing here and there, which in some ways actually make it better than most Mega Man games. Metroid Zero Mission is a remake of the first Metroid, but it managed to do about everything better than the original game while still staying true to it. The same goes for AM2R.
See where I'm going with this? A "spiritual successor" is not an excuse for making the same mistakes as some old games and not adding any meaningful innovations. Not only that, but in almost all cases, distancing yourself a little bit from the source material will actually lead to an overall better end result. Staying 100% true to the original is never the best approach, it's just the simplest and most lazy one. It can work, but it rarely does. Hence the Brave Default system. Hence the encounter rate option in the settings. Hence the auto save feature. See, it's not like Bravely Default didn't have any innovations, so I'm not quite sure where you were even going with that argument in the first place. It's just that in the one place where innovation would have mattered the most, they missed their chance, unfortunately.
Not to mention that "what were you expecting" is a typical fanboy argument that tries to shift the "fault" from the developers to the player, usually when someone is out of actual arguments (or just to lazy to come up with any). "I know that Faces of Evil is not like your typical Zelda game, but they never advertised it as such, so what were you expecting"? "I know that Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival sucks, but what were you even expecting? It was always advertised as mediocre rip-off merchandise game, lulz! It's your fault for playing it, not the developers' fault for making it"! Or how about "lulz, of course this free-to-play game is a rip-off, but it was always advertised as such, so why are you complaining"? Like, what kind of argument even is that? Why is a game immune to criticism, just because it actually advertised its flaws? That's no logic I can get behind.
Not to mention that, in my post, I clearly mentioned that I don't mind the game riding on nostalgia. Be it random encounters, the (mostly) simple plot, a turn-based battle system in general, the stereotyped characters, all of that is fine. Only when riding on nostalgia actively hurts your game, that's where you should draw the line, and I feel like that line was crossed with the implementation of the battle system.
I wasn't even really trying to say that those battle systems were better or even just that they were good, though I get where the confusion comes from. While I do personaly enjoy those battle systems, the only reason I mentioned that bit was to clarify that in my argument, I'm only looking at strictly turn-based battle systems that aren't based on action commands like that, to demonstrate that even when staying purely turn-based, it's not too difficult to come up with something that works better than the BD/DQ battle system and isn't frustrating.
It actually changes everything, and that's the best part about it. You don't have to change the battle system dramatically to actually take 90% of frustration out of it. See? You can fix the battle system and still have your game be 100% nostalgia and a spritiual successor. It's like you could have your cake and eat it, too.
How exactly does that change anything? Well, 90% of my frustration is based around actions being performed in the wrong order due to RNG-controlled ordering. With a simple change like that, all of this would be a thing of the past, since you would know the exact ordering in advance and could plan your turn accordingly rather than just hoping for the best or performing all your actions based on a strategy you came up with before battle. Bravely Default doesn't even have a soft reset button combination, for some reason, so if you enter a battle and notice that your current strategy is shit and you won't stand a chance, you have no other choice but to either completely restart the game or to let yourself get killed (which you would actually have to do twice if you have the time travel ability).
If you really think so, go and play Pokemon for a few hours and then come back to Bravely Default and play that for a few hours. Don't tell me you won't notice a difference. The thing I have overlooked for a major part of my life is that Pokemon games actually use a variation of the Dragon Quest battle system, but while of course even the Pokemon battle system isn't perfect, it has never frustrated me as much as the Dragon Quest battle system and I still love the Pokemon games to this very day. I'd say that this is for mainly two reasons.
First of all, most battles in Pokemon games are single battles. Ordering isn't really that important there. But even if we look at double or triple battles, things aren't very different, because healing isn't really a major aspect of the Pokemon battle system, and most support moves have priority, anyways, so there are few occasions where the order within your own team actually becomes important.
However, what mainly differentiates Pokemon from other games with that battle system - and this is the point I was getting at - is that Pokemon games do NOT have a randomised battle order. To determine the order of actions in Pokemon battles, the games apply strict rules. First and foremost, your speed stat is taken into account, and the Pokemon with the higher speed stat will go first. Always. Even if the difference in speed is just 1. For this reason, you can be sure that if your Pokemon is faster than your opponent's Pokemon this turn, it will also be faster the next turn. Now there are a few exceptions to this. Mainly priority moves, moves that reverse battle order and moves that reduce speed. None of those is based on RNG, though. The only time when RNG affects your battle order at all is when two Pokemon have the exact same speed stat, and that happens so rarely that it pratically doesn't matter.
As for Bravely Default? Sure, your speed stat does affect the battle order, but the game also applies an additional RNG offset to that speed stat every turn. Yeah, your fastest character might end up going first 75% of the time, but when it actually matters, you might get one of those 25% cases where your fastest character actually goes after the boss or after the second-fastest character in your team. An unlikely scenario? Considering how much it frustrates me, obviously not.
In Pokemon games, even if you enter a battle without any prior knowledge on any of the Pokemon, it takes you just a single turn in a battle before you can estimate the order in which actions are performed. In Bravely Default, observing a single battle turn is pretty much worthless, since everything might end up entirely different the next turn. The more similar the speed stats of your characters are, the less reliable the ordering gets.
True, but remember how I mentioned that Brave can actually amplify the negative side effects of the battle system? This is another area where that is the case. If you go full Brave with a character, that character potentially won't be able to do anything for the next three turns, so the buff's effect will probably have already ended by the time that's happened. Even if you store maximum BP first, you will still waste four turns of the buff's effect if your attacker happens to go before the person casts the buff.
Now it's true that I could just make the attacker wait one turn, as stated by imamelia, but see below for why that isn't always a solution.
Still don't understand why you bring up FFV or even FFVI. Those games used an ATB system. Bravely Default does not. The battles aren't similar at all. ATB isn't a perfect system, either, but at least it's predictable. The Bravely Default system is not.
Not to mention that I played, both, FFX and FFVI, in entirely different ways than Bravely Default (can't say anything about FFV as my time with that was very limited, but it would probably be more similiar to my FFVI playstyle). None of those games gave me as much frustration as Bravely Default, and if there was any frustration at all, it rarely was related to the battle system itself.
Correction. I'm giving the game shit for lacking innovation in the one place where I would have really loved to see some innovation, I'm giving it shit for Square Enix not even taking the time to look at some of their better turn-based battle systems for inspiration, and I'm giving the game shit for wasting a lot of its potential just for the sake of nostalgia. The game could have been both - a great game gameplay-wise, AND a rise on nostalgia - but now it's only one of those things.
Which is a pefectly valid thing to complain about, if that's something that makes the games into a worse experience for them.
Which, as stated further above, doesn't really invalidate any of my points. Just because I "saw it coming" (and yes, I actually played the game's demo before buying the game) doesn't mean I can't complain about the negative aspects that I did see coming. Like, I saw Trump becoming a president coming, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it.
You can also look at it from this perspective: the only reason I'm complaining at all is because I really want to love the game. There were some parts of the game I really enjoyed and I do see a lot of potential in it. I'd love to see those concepts being expanded upon, but I don't really feel like going through that frustration again. With just minor innovations, though, even I could end up totally liking the series, and it doesn't really require breaking the games in any way. That is really the only reason I'm complaining at all, not because Square Enix doesn't bend the game to my will or because they didn't deliver a second FFX.
I get what you're saying there, and I think there is some validity to your point, though I say that you have to differentiate between "playing by the rules" and "working around a flawed mechanic". For example: if I was playing a Mario game and decided to never use the jump button, thus making the game a lot harder for myself, then "you should paly by the rules" would be a very valid point to make. If, on the other hand, I was playing a platformer in which the collision detection was so bad that you'd constantly fall through the ground while running so that using the jump button would still help me a lot, you couldn't possibly argue "you should just play by the rules" to hide the fact that such a game was just seriously flawed. I feel like this difference applies here. Yes, I'm aware that I could probably have an easier time with Bravely Default by just changing my playstyle (for example, by doing more grinding), but I don't consider that "playing by the rules", I just consider that "working around a flawed core mechanic". A great and well-done game would simply allow you to go with multiple playstyles instead of forcing you into going with a single one. That's one of the things I love about FFX. It still allows you to just grind to get through most battles, but if you choose to do so, you can also come up with strategies to play through the game on an extremely low level - something which I feel Bravely Default doesn't encourage, unless you're absolutely insane about the game and invest a ridiculous amount of time (or exploit the hell out of certain jobs).
To give a more personal example: Secret of Mana. A game we both know just all too well. It's one of my favorite games ever and I love it. No matter how much I play it, I never get frustrated by it. However, even I am perfectly aware of all the flaws the game has. The game is ridiculously broken, core gameplay mechanics just bug out completely or put the player in a constant disadvantage, some attacks are completely impossible to dodge. So why do I still enjoy the game? Because I somehow learned to work around those flaws as a kid. I know that you just have to level up your spells to have an easy time with bosses, I know that you just have to keep your distance from enemies to not get caught up in an endless combo, I know that you should always try to keep your items maxed out all the time because you will need them a lot, I know that certain weapons have a worse hit detection that other weapons and should be avoided. Does any of this make the game less flawed, though? Certainly not. I feel the same way about Bravely Default. I could work around its flawed core mechanic, probably, but it will still remain a flawed core mechanic.
Yeah, to be fair, I dramatically exaggerated that to emphasize my argument. The point I was trying to make was that it happened a lot of times to me and certainly enough times to frustrate me immensely. I don't know any other kind of battle system where so many of my actions went to waste. Wasted actions should only ever be a consequence of the player making a mistake, not the consequence of battle system shenanigans.
That's true and that's actually my most common strategy, which is also the reason I specifically mentioned the Brave Default system as a "workaround" of sorts. It doesn't work 100% of the time, though. For example, your healer could currently have the Fear status, preventing him from using Brave at all. Even if not, going maximum Brave with your healer is risky, as it could make your healer unusable for a bunch of turns. Especially in certain boss battles, you just can't afford that, since you basically have to heal your team every turn, thus not even leaving much room to even generate BP with your healer. If anything, I'd consider Brave a "risk/reward" game (assuming you don't have enough BP already). You can gain a lot from it, but can lose just as much.
That would probably help a lot of times, true, but again, it isn't a 100% solution, especially when facing a stronger boss. Strong bosses can easily kill a character in a single turn, even in Default, and unfortunately, when a character dies, they lose all their buffs, even with Reraise active. So often you find yourself in a situation where you can't wait for the next turn to attack. This is not even considering the fact that some bosses use Dispel on you, which clears all of your buffs. Especially in boss battles like that, you can't afford to wait that one turn before attacking - and don't forget the fact that if you go full Brave, you actually waste four times as many actions.
Well, there is never anything wrong with trying a game, honestly. I don't even regret giving Bravely Default a try. It's always best to try something for yourself rather than to jump to conclusions based on what other people have said, so I don't see myself not at least giving those games a try if I get the chance. Even in the case of Bravely Default, there is a lot of potential to be found in the game, and it's worth to play at least once just for that. At least in my case, this potential was unfortunately drowned in a sea of frustration, but I did gain a few new perspectives from playing the game, and even when playing games you don't like, there is a lot to learn from that, especially when you're working as a game developer. Like, if I was developing a classic J-RPG in the sense of Bravely Default, I knew exactly the one or two things I'd change to make the game a more pleasent experience (by my standards).
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!
Leomon, your reply shows me that either you only skimmed my post, or you completely missed my point. And some of the things you stated are just outright incorrect. Let me walk through it step by step.
Originally posted by Leomon
BD is based on SNES FF, specifically 5
Not DQ
They have similar battle systems but they're far different (FF feels more flexible imo)
Not DQ
They have similar battle systems but they're far different (FF feels more flexible imo)
That's bullshit. I was specifically refering to the battle system, not the job system. The job system is based on FFV, yeah, and the job system is actually great. It's the one thing I really, really love about Bravely Default and it's probably the best thing there is in the game. I was complaining about the battle system, though. How would anyone claim that the battle system was based on FFV? It's not. FFV used an active-time battle system. Bravely Default does not. Bravely Default uses the same kind of battle system that you would see in all RPGs of the 8-Bit era, like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy (I to III), Phantasy Star and (I think) Earthbound Beginnings. Now I don't know which game actually invented this battle system, but I call it Dragon Quest battle system because that's what I associate it with the most, because in Dragon Quest, this battle system is still used to this day (it was the very reason I was also frustrated by Dragon Quest VIII), whereas Final Fantasy kept trying new battle systems. Some of them were great (FFXII, FFX), some of them were horrible (FFXIII, FFI to FFIII), some of them were "okayish" (FFIV to FFIX), but at least they realised that the original battle system was flawed as hell and changed something. Now while I'm not really the biggest fan of ATB, either, it at least obliterates the one biggest flaw the classic DQ battle system has, which is not knowing anything about the order of actions (plus, Chrono Trigger is a good example of a game where the ATB was actually great).
All of that is completely besides the point, though, which is that Bravely Default is not "based on FFV", just because it uses the same (or a similar) job system. That's like saying Super Smash Bros. was based on Mario Kart, just because both games use items for attacking.
Originally posted by Leomon
It was marketed as being a spiritual successor to Square's older titles
Like, what were you expecting?
Like, what were you expecting?
Bullshit, again. Freedom Planet is a spiritual successor (of sorts) to Sonic games, but it does not share the same problems as those games (at least judging from the one or two hours I've played it). Shovel Knight is a spritiual successor to the Mega Man games, but it isn't afraid of doing its own thing here and there, which in some ways actually make it better than most Mega Man games. Metroid Zero Mission is a remake of the first Metroid, but it managed to do about everything better than the original game while still staying true to it. The same goes for AM2R.
See where I'm going with this? A "spiritual successor" is not an excuse for making the same mistakes as some old games and not adding any meaningful innovations. Not only that, but in almost all cases, distancing yourself a little bit from the source material will actually lead to an overall better end result. Staying 100% true to the original is never the best approach, it's just the simplest and most lazy one. It can work, but it rarely does. Hence the Brave Default system. Hence the encounter rate option in the settings. Hence the auto save feature. See, it's not like Bravely Default didn't have any innovations, so I'm not quite sure where you were even going with that argument in the first place. It's just that in the one place where innovation would have mattered the most, they missed their chance, unfortunately.
Not to mention that "what were you expecting" is a typical fanboy argument that tries to shift the "fault" from the developers to the player, usually when someone is out of actual arguments (or just to lazy to come up with any). "I know that Faces of Evil is not like your typical Zelda game, but they never advertised it as such, so what were you expecting"? "I know that Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival sucks, but what were you even expecting? It was always advertised as mediocre rip-off merchandise game, lulz! It's your fault for playing it, not the developers' fault for making it"! Or how about "lulz, of course this free-to-play game is a rip-off, but it was always advertised as such, so why are you complaining"? Like, what kind of argument even is that? Why is a game immune to criticism, just because it actually advertised its flaws? That's no logic I can get behind.
Not to mention that, in my post, I clearly mentioned that I don't mind the game riding on nostalgia. Be it random encounters, the (mostly) simple plot, a turn-based battle system in general, the stereotyped characters, all of that is fine. Only when riding on nostalgia actively hurts your game, that's where you should draw the line, and I feel like that line was crossed with the implementation of the battle system.
Originally posted by Leomon
Ah yes pressing one button at a specific interval to gain like a 50%+ upgrade to my damage output
That changes so much /s
(sorry for the attitude, I don't like Mario RPG battles much)
That changes so much /s
(sorry for the attitude, I don't like Mario RPG battles much)
I wasn't even really trying to say that those battle systems were better or even just that they were good, though I get where the confusion comes from. While I do personaly enjoy those battle systems, the only reason I mentioned that bit was to clarify that in my argument, I'm only looking at strictly turn-based battle systems that aren't based on action commands like that, to demonstrate that even when staying purely turn-based, it's not too difficult to come up with something that works better than the BD/DQ battle system and isn't frustrating.
Originally posted by Leomon
All that'd change is that you can see the order of the attacks????????
It barely changes anything?????????????????????????????????
It barely changes anything?????????????????????????????????
It actually changes everything, and that's the best part about it. You don't have to change the battle system dramatically to actually take 90% of frustration out of it. See? You can fix the battle system and still have your game be 100% nostalgia and a spritiual successor. It's like you could have your cake and eat it, too.
How exactly does that change anything? Well, 90% of my frustration is based around actions being performed in the wrong order due to RNG-controlled ordering. With a simple change like that, all of this would be a thing of the past, since you would know the exact ordering in advance and could plan your turn accordingly rather than just hoping for the best or performing all your actions based on a strategy you came up with before battle. Bravely Default doesn't even have a soft reset button combination, for some reason, so if you enter a battle and notice that your current strategy is shit and you won't stand a chance, you have no other choice but to either completely restart the game or to let yourself get killed (which you would actually have to do twice if you have the time travel ability).
Originally posted by Leomon
It's not RNG, it's the speed/agility values of each character
The higher their speed stat, the earlier they attack
The higher their speed stat, the earlier they attack
If you really think so, go and play Pokemon for a few hours and then come back to Bravely Default and play that for a few hours. Don't tell me you won't notice a difference. The thing I have overlooked for a major part of my life is that Pokemon games actually use a variation of the Dragon Quest battle system, but while of course even the Pokemon battle system isn't perfect, it has never frustrated me as much as the Dragon Quest battle system and I still love the Pokemon games to this very day. I'd say that this is for mainly two reasons.
First of all, most battles in Pokemon games are single battles. Ordering isn't really that important there. But even if we look at double or triple battles, things aren't very different, because healing isn't really a major aspect of the Pokemon battle system, and most support moves have priority, anyways, so there are few occasions where the order within your own team actually becomes important.
However, what mainly differentiates Pokemon from other games with that battle system - and this is the point I was getting at - is that Pokemon games do NOT have a randomised battle order. To determine the order of actions in Pokemon battles, the games apply strict rules. First and foremost, your speed stat is taken into account, and the Pokemon with the higher speed stat will go first. Always. Even if the difference in speed is just 1. For this reason, you can be sure that if your Pokemon is faster than your opponent's Pokemon this turn, it will also be faster the next turn. Now there are a few exceptions to this. Mainly priority moves, moves that reverse battle order and moves that reduce speed. None of those is based on RNG, though. The only time when RNG affects your battle order at all is when two Pokemon have the exact same speed stat, and that happens so rarely that it pratically doesn't matter.
As for Bravely Default? Sure, your speed stat does affect the battle order, but the game also applies an additional RNG offset to that speed stat every turn. Yeah, your fastest character might end up going first 75% of the time, but when it actually matters, you might get one of those 25% cases where your fastest character actually goes after the boss or after the second-fastest character in your team. An unlikely scenario? Considering how much it frustrates me, obviously not.
In Pokemon games, even if you enter a battle without any prior knowledge on any of the Pokemon, it takes you just a single turn in a battle before you can estimate the order in which actions are performed. In Bravely Default, observing a single battle turn is pretty much worthless, since everything might end up entirely different the next turn. The more similar the speed stats of your characters are, the less reliable the ordering gets.
Originally posted by Leomon
Also buffs aren't wasted in one turn, they (and several other support spells like Reflect and such) last for a few turns before fading away
True, but remember how I mentioned that Brave can actually amplify the negative side effects of the battle system? This is another area where that is the case. If you go full Brave with a character, that character potentially won't be able to do anything for the next three turns, so the buff's effect will probably have already ended by the time that's happened. Even if you store maximum BP first, you will still waste four turns of the buff's effect if your attacker happens to go before the person casts the buff.
Now it's true that I could just make the attacker wait one turn, as stated by imamelia, but see below for why that isn't always a solution.
Originally posted by Leomon
The main issue here is that you're playing this like FFX rather than FFVI or FFV
Still don't understand why you bring up FFV or even FFVI. Those games used an ATB system. Bravely Default does not. The battles aren't similar at all. ATB isn't a perfect system, either, but at least it's predictable. The Bravely Default system is not.
Not to mention that I played, both, FFX and FFVI, in entirely different ways than Bravely Default (can't say anything about FFV as my time with that was very limited, but it would probably be more similiar to my FFVI playstyle). None of those games gave me as much frustration as Bravely Default, and if there was any frustration at all, it rarely was related to the battle system itself.
Originally posted by Leomon
And you're basically giving the game shit for not being like FFX and showing you the order of everyone's attacks
Correction. I'm giving the game shit for lacking innovation in the one place where I would have really loved to see some innovation, I'm giving it shit for Square Enix not even taking the time to look at some of their better turn-based battle systems for inspiration, and I'm giving the game shit for wasting a lot of its potential just for the sake of nostalgia. The game could have been both - a great game gameplay-wise, AND a rise on nostalgia - but now it's only one of those things.
Originally posted by Leomon
This is almost as bad as Merc and imamelia playing FFVI and Etrian Odyssey, respectively, and then complaining about random encounters existing
Which is a pefectly valid thing to complain about, if that's something that makes the games into a worse experience for them.
Originally posted by Leomon
You saw what you were getting into duuuuude
Which, as stated further above, doesn't really invalidate any of my points. Just because I "saw it coming" (and yes, I actually played the game's demo before buying the game) doesn't mean I can't complain about the negative aspects that I did see coming. Like, I saw Trump becoming a president coming, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it.
You can also look at it from this perspective: the only reason I'm complaining at all is because I really want to love the game. There were some parts of the game I really enjoyed and I do see a lot of potential in it. I'd love to see those concepts being expanded upon, but I don't really feel like going through that frustration again. With just minor innovations, though, even I could end up totally liking the series, and it doesn't really require breaking the games in any way. That is really the only reason I'm complaining at all, not because Square Enix doesn't bend the game to my will or because they didn't deliver a second FFX.
Originally posted by Leomon
Like real talk: my first time through Romancing SaGa 2 I played it a bit close to how I play FF and I ended up hating it and dropping it, but sometime later I came back to it and tried to play by its own rules
I get what you're saying there, and I think there is some validity to your point, though I say that you have to differentiate between "playing by the rules" and "working around a flawed mechanic". For example: if I was playing a Mario game and decided to never use the jump button, thus making the game a lot harder for myself, then "you should paly by the rules" would be a very valid point to make. If, on the other hand, I was playing a platformer in which the collision detection was so bad that you'd constantly fall through the ground while running so that using the jump button would still help me a lot, you couldn't possibly argue "you should just play by the rules" to hide the fact that such a game was just seriously flawed. I feel like this difference applies here. Yes, I'm aware that I could probably have an easier time with Bravely Default by just changing my playstyle (for example, by doing more grinding), but I don't consider that "playing by the rules", I just consider that "working around a flawed core mechanic". A great and well-done game would simply allow you to go with multiple playstyles instead of forcing you into going with a single one. That's one of the things I love about FFX. It still allows you to just grind to get through most battles, but if you choose to do so, you can also come up with strategies to play through the game on an extremely low level - something which I feel Bravely Default doesn't encourage, unless you're absolutely insane about the game and invest a ridiculous amount of time (or exploit the hell out of certain jobs).
To give a more personal example: Secret of Mana. A game we both know just all too well. It's one of my favorite games ever and I love it. No matter how much I play it, I never get frustrated by it. However, even I am perfectly aware of all the flaws the game has. The game is ridiculously broken, core gameplay mechanics just bug out completely or put the player in a constant disadvantage, some attacks are completely impossible to dodge. So why do I still enjoy the game? Because I somehow learned to work around those flaws as a kid. I know that you just have to level up your spells to have an easy time with bosses, I know that you just have to keep your distance from enemies to not get caught up in an endless combo, I know that you should always try to keep your items maxed out all the time because you will need them a lot, I know that certain weapons have a worse hit detection that other weapons and should be avoided. Does any of this make the game less flawed, though? Certainly not. I feel the same way about Bravely Default. I could work around its flawed core mechanic, probably, but it will still remain a flawed core mechanic.
Originally posted by imamelia
Though I'm not sure how you ended up making half of your moves useless.
Yeah, to be fair, I dramatically exaggerated that to emphasize my argument. The point I was trying to make was that it happened a lot of times to me and certainly enough times to frustrate me immensely. I don't know any other kind of battle system where so many of my actions went to waste. Wasted actions should only ever be a consequence of the player making a mistake, not the consequence of battle system shenanigans.
Originally posted by imamelia
I would just use Brave to do both things for the second example
That's true and that's actually my most common strategy, which is also the reason I specifically mentioned the Brave Default system as a "workaround" of sorts. It doesn't work 100% of the time, though. For example, your healer could currently have the Fear status, preventing him from using Brave at all. Even if not, going maximum Brave with your healer is risky, as it could make your healer unusable for a bunch of turns. Especially in certain boss battles, you just can't afford that, since you basically have to heal your team every turn, thus not even leaving much room to even generate BP with your healer. If anything, I'd consider Brave a "risk/reward" game (assuming you don't have enough BP already). You can gain a lot from it, but can lose just as much.
Originally posted by imamelia
and for the third, buff one turn while having your attacker store BP, then attack the next turn.
That would probably help a lot of times, true, but again, it isn't a 100% solution, especially when facing a stronger boss. Strong bosses can easily kill a character in a single turn, even in Default, and unfortunately, when a character dies, they lose all their buffs, even with Reraise active. So often you find yourself in a situation where you can't wait for the next turn to attack. This is not even considering the fact that some bosses use Dispel on you, which clears all of your buffs. Especially in boss battles like that, you can't afford to wait that one turn before attacking - and don't forget the fact that if you go full Brave, you actually waste four times as many actions.
Originally posted by imamelia
(Not much you can do about the first, unfortunately...at least until Bravely Second.) But hey, to each their own. Coincidentally, my two favorite non-Mario RPGs (well, one game and one series) actually do use what you wanted, a turn bar. But since my opinion is contrary to everything...*ahem*...Oh, dear me, but Radiant Historia and the Trails series are just simply the most awful games! The stories, the characters, the battle systems, the music...everything about these games is thoroughly dreadful! I would greatly suggest that you darlings never play any of those unseemly excuses for video games. *faints on couch*
Well, there is never anything wrong with trying a game, honestly. I don't even regret giving Bravely Default a try. It's always best to try something for yourself rather than to jump to conclusions based on what other people have said, so I don't see myself not at least giving those games a try if I get the chance. Even in the case of Bravely Default, there is a lot of potential to be found in the game, and it's worth to play at least once just for that. At least in my case, this potential was unfortunately drowned in a sea of frustration, but I did gain a few new perspectives from playing the game, and even when playing games you don't like, there is a lot to learn from that, especially when you're working as a game developer. Like, if I was developing a classic J-RPG in the sense of Bravely Default, I knew exactly the one or two things I'd change to make the game a more pleasent experience (by my standards).
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!