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[Air]

Okay, so basically every RPG has three things: Battle system, story, and other shit.
We're only talking about the battle system in this topic, so keep the story and other shit out of it.

NAME GRADE REASON

MegaMan Battle Network A+ Real-time grid based trading card shooting system. That's just perfect!

The World Ends With You A Real-time touch/mic based trading card shooting system/Some kinda DDR ripoff system. The bottom screen's system was awesome, but I didn't really use the top screen too much.

Kingdom Hearts B+ Real-time action based slash slash slash! system. A fun system that can actually still make me want to battle after 40+ hours of game play. The only console RPG to do this yet.

Dragon Quest Swords B Real time motion based slashing system with cool limit breaks. A very fun new system for the Wii.

Final Fantasy 1-10 C Turn based (or real time) menu system. Nothing good here, but it's not torture to play through until your 10th RPG like it.

Final Fantasy 12 F- Crappy MMORPG wannabee system where you do more watching than actually playing.

[Doom]

So do you think Sephiroth will be in Kingdom Hearts 3?

[Norondor]

Final Fantasy 12 F- Crappy MMORPG wannabee system where you do more watching than actually playing.

yeah but see you have to actually play the boss fights or you'll get shit on, and it's not like you actually have to pay attention in random battles in standard RPGs either so all Gambits do is remove the work of having to click on attack a bunch of times, then load the menu to use a potion

[Brentai]

It was actually one of my greatest joys to see my guys coordinating flawlessly in that game without me doing a damn thing.  Plus what Nor said about th bosses.  For some reason I felt more "involved" in the fight with the Mimic Queen than in most other video game boss fights.  Even the freakin' God of War hydra felt a little hollow to me.

Of course I think this might be due to the fact that I fought the Mimic Queen by taking control of Vaan chasing down the little spawn fuckers while the other guys spammed damage onto the boss itself.  Somehow I always feel more satisfied playing a supporting role in a battle than being the one in the spotlight.

[Thad]

Hi Sora!

You just ranked Final Fantasy 1 ("you keep trying to hit dead things") higher than Final Fantasy 12 (best innovation to JRPG combat system in 20 years).

I know you get this a lot, but just to reiterate: you, sir, are an idiot.

Moving along:

Chrono Trigger: I liked this game when it was new, but it's REALLY blown me away how well it's aged.  While even personal favorite Final Fantasy 6 shows its age in unpleasant ways, Trigger was one of the first to foreswear random encounters, something it took the rest of the genre a decade to catch up with.

The rest of the genre has STILL not caught up with combo attacks.

[Brentai]

I'm the only person who actually liked that you had to plan ahead far enough to not waste all your firepower on dead things, aren't I?

[Thad]

Apparently not.  SoraCross thinks it's as good as Active Time and better than Gambits.

[Doom]

SoraCross's idea of a B+ effort is Kingdom Hearts.

Or Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square, Hit Square,  HOLY FUCK I CAN HIT TRIANGLE TO ACTUALLY HURT THE BOSS

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Final Fantasy 12 had a fine battle system. The biggest problem with it was that you had to play the rest of the game to experience it.

[Büge]

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood uses both turn AND quick-time based combat.

[Niku]

Sadly, he's pretty spot on about Battle Network.  I LOVE that battle system.

[Beat Bandit]

The high standard of RPG battle systems for me is Radiata Stories.

No random encounters, a gambit system of sorts on your comrades, and a combo system that actually made sense (Swinging your sword up then back down was a perfect combo with no attack time delay, where as doing the attack where you slam your axe into the ground and trying to tie it into the attack that makes you spin the weapon in a circle takes about ten minutes, which it should.) and being able to pick a fight with any NPC in the game didn't hurt, either.

[Envy]

Star ocean for snes though I cant give it a solid grade since it is mostly based on Luck and a bit of skill. Id give it a b+ because it was quite interesting how I could totally massacre a battle then get slaughtered the next.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Man, I wish my instructors graded assignments like you grade combat systems.

[Brentai]

No random encounters, a gambit system of sorts on your comrades, and a combo system that actually made sense (Swinging your sword up then back down was a perfect combo with no attack time delay, where as doing the attack where you slam your axe into the ground and trying to tie it into the attack that makes you spin the weapon in a circle takes about ten minutes, which it should.) and being able to pick a fight with any NPC in the game didn't hurt, either.

Good on paper, but in practice ended up boiling down to predefining the best combo you can and spamming the attack button on enemies while occasionally calling out for healing.  Basically like Kingdom Hearts, only you trade the the ability to cast spells directly for the ability to play with your combo a little.

The .hack games were kinda fun - basically the exact same shit, but it flowed much better.

Always wanted to see another ORPG with PSO's deliberate combat pacing, but without the awkwardness.

[Kazz]

Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door

There is a system which begins something that desperately needs to be taken to its logical extreme.  I can't get enough of timed button presses.  In other RPGs, I don't feel like I'm fighting, I feel like I'm telling the fighters what to do.  Not that I feel that Paper Mario is terribly immersive, but it is an important step closer.  At least I'm involved.

FFCC: My Life As A King is basically the opposite of this.  There is an entire RPG being played out before your eyes, with real characters and stats and spells and parties equipping themselves and exploring and fighting and having a blast, and you are involved in exactly none of it.

[James Edward Smith]

Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door

There is a system which begins something that desperately needs to be taken to its logical extreme.  I severely can't get enough of timed button presses.  In other RPGs, I don't feel like I'm fighting, I feel like I'm telling the fighters what to do.  Not that I feel that Paper Mario is terribly immersive, but it is an important step closer.

If the timed sequences don't have any real flavour to them, that is to say, the controller things you are doing don't seem to have any real connection to what your character is doing on screen or are too simple in their concept such that they are just a button press and that's it (see God of War), then this is lame. But Paper mario seemed to do it right, just like all of the Mario RPG games did, by making what happened on screen really tie into the button presses and d-pad twists so that it really felt like you were doing something and not just waiting for some uninspired "HIT TRIANGLE NOW!" dialog to pop up.

I would really like to see an Strat-RPG where there are many different kinds of attack participation on the part of the player and some sort of logic to it where say, fire magic stuff has X sort of flavour too it, holy prayers are sort of like Y, yamabushi spear techniques are like P and sumo style pushing attacks are like Q. I would like it so that players experiment a little in the beginning of the game and then once they have found which style they like and/or are good at inputting with a higher degree of consistency, they would try to form their army up of mostly those types of troops and heros.

[Thad]

Paper Mario: Thousand-Year Door

There is a system which begins something that desperately needs to be taken to its logical extreme.  I can't get enough of timed button presses.

As Geo points out, you are taking the third game in a series as "beginning" something that was present in the previous two.  That aside, it's a good point; I know Brent, for one, has been ranting for years about the problems with combat systems that don't allow you to dodge attacks.

Penny Arcade Adventures: OTRSPOD does a pretty solid job of this too, but IMO it gets awkward since the controls are mouse-based -- I have to pay attention to the action and hit Space Bar at the right time WHILE I'm trying to move the mouse to select Attack and then point at the guy I want to hit.  I imagine it works much better in the XBLA version, with a gamepad.

I expect we'll see a lot of this sort of thing in the Sonic RPG.

[Brentai]

I guess I should reiterate my earlier rant (during debates for The Mayor's battle system, so most of you never heard it) that I don't think timed button presses are exactly the best thing to put in every attack in an RPG.  It's fresh and cute for the first five hours but for the last five hours you tend to be FUCKING TIRED OF IT.

How that ended up was that FF8, of all things, was the game that struck the best balance - it added little microgames for each character's limit break / whatever-it-was-in-8, which accomplished several things: gave the player something to do for parts of battle, gave each character a seperate playing style and established some level of in-game individuality, and limited the use of extra bullshit to semi-rare instances where the player directly manipulated a powerful attack.  Of course it also had timed button presses for the main character's standard attack, which yeah also got obnoxious after a while.

I wish I had a better ability to look objectively at each part of FF8 and decide which of the billion stupid ideas that were implemented in that game were actually brilliant ideas that looked stupid in the company of all the other stupid ones.

[Rico]

I have to pay attention to the action and hit Space Bar at the right time WHILE I'm trying to move the mouse to select Attack and then point at the guy I want to hit.

Also that you can't remap Spacebar is fucking retarded even before you get to Gabe's later moves.