Thread 11957391

ITT: Games with interesting/unconventional magic systems. Post your favs.

>Picrel
Has much more flavor than the traditional elements from ancient Greece every RPG defaults too, and the casting is limited by a very nice economy and bartering system for ingredients to play around of instead of just recovering magic points, meaning the spells are also balanced around the resources available in each area. I wish there were more games like this.

Every game has a magic system if you use save states

The magic system in Chrono Cross is pretty complex. It doesn't use traditional MP and there is a grid and you have to built up percentage points.

>>11957391 (OP)
>ITT: Games with interesting/unconventional magic systems. Post your favs.
Draw system from FF8. You can forgo the magic command to instead rely on draw casting, and it makes enemies more varied, because you can always check out what spells they've got and if you can use them to your advantage.

Treasure of the Rudras does mostly standard JRPG stuff excepting a few big gimmicks, one of which is that its spells are nonsense words that any person in its world can chant in order to cast spells, and although people with talent and training are much better at spellcasting than those without, the main thing that separates a mage from a normal person is that the mage knows which words make good spells. In reality this makes little sense (people would discover and publish all the spells within weeks) but in simplistic JRPG-land it works and is cool. Your characters don't really learn spells in the game world; instead you the player learn them in the real world, when the game gives you clues about what their names are (for example, when an enemy casts one in front of you).

All spells are available at the start of the game, though some may cost too many MP to be used. Speedrunners can use this system to demolish the balance of the game, but during casual play it works perfectly well, although it's somewhat lame that ALL your characters effectively know all the same spells as one another at any given moment. You can make up whatever spell names you like and they will all function in battle somehow, albeit only poorly in most cases; the game does a surprisingly not completely terrible (though it isn't very good) job of implementing some sort of systematic magical language in which related nonsense-words will often have related magical effects. So you can perform crude science by tweaking spell names in ways that are suggested by patterns you see across multiple names and then casting the resulting spells to see whether you've improved them.

It's not a deep enough system to be all that much more than a gimmick, but it's a great gimmick. A game that took the concept much more seriously, and applied modern technology to it rather than the barely sufficient CPU of the SNES, might do some amazing things with it.

>>11957436
Chrono Cross' system feels like they desperately wanted to include a distinctive gameplay gimmick but they had already invested most of their time and resources in implementing the big playable cast. Anyway the elements thing feels like a chore and a hurdle most of the time more than something "interesting" to explore, kinda like the double enemy/element affinity system in Vagrant Story.

This one in FFVIII >>11957441 was also chore-ish but tapped into the basic obsessive nature of the average JRPG player with the collectability component. The junction system made things even weirder and a focus on optimization seems like overkill in a game with adaptive difficulty but overall the whole mess certainly managed to be memorable lol

>>11957391 (OP)
Secret of Evermore has been one of my favorite games for almost 30 years since I was 5 years old in 1995.

A few weeks ago ?I made a similar ring menu and made it open source, picrelated

Secret of Mana fucking sucks btw (SD3 is good)

arx fatalis.

>>11957447
Words of power

>>11957452
>FF8
>tapped into the basic obsessive nature of the average JRPG player
That's the problem. FF8 is quite lenient with options, but some players can't see beyond that one option, grinding.

One poster here argued that grinding magic is necessary, otherwise one can't remedy a status effect during a boss fight. (You get Esuna from the boss, or use an item)

I like the ActRaiser 2 system. You're a sword guy and you can get yourself into various states while doing sword guy things: standing, crouching, looking upward, leaping. And also, since you have wings: gliding, diving, and air-braking in order to fall slowly. You have several spell charges per enemy lair and you can hold and release your attack button to use one of them anytime. But the form the spell takes depends entirely on which of those several states your body is in when you release the button. It's a cool alternative to requiring the player to, say, bring up a menu and select a spell, or to press the select button to rotate the currently equipped spell to the next item in a list of spells. Spell selection is part of what you're actually doing in the game world, not some abstract activity involving a UI that exists for the player but not for the spellcaster.

>>11957527
Oh and the image is of spells in Lagoon, which I was also gonna write about in that post but then didn't because my point was just that it was a system that feels cool and exciting until you get into it and see that it's too simple and also all the ultimate spells are boring screen-clearers. Basically you combine one staff with one crystal and that determines what spell you can cast. I do like games that sort of let you make your own spells like that, but this particular example may as well be a simple menu of 16 items. It did excite my imagination when I was a kid though, until I got far enough into the game to feel disappointed.

I recently tried a DS game called LostMagic that kinda uses the same system except it's more complex and also you have to draw the spell pieces rather than equipping them. It's pretty cool but the game mostly sucks so I don't mind not being able to talk further about it here.

>>11957465
I always thought the entire point was to add a "fallback" layer of grinding: the game adapts the battles to the character levels for people who don't care much about grinding, but you still get to spend time hoarding magic to boost your stats and get an edge if that's what you enjoy about those games.

It's a nice system, but a less stark look would have made it more mainstream-friendly really; something more visual with distinctive icons rather than essentially 100% text based.

>>11957549
Yeah I don't know why they went with such a lifeless metallic menu. Even just keeping the traditional blue would have helped.

>>11957549
Not enough space for the low res of PS1

Just one of the reasons why I'd like a FF8 Remake
>>11957553
>keeping the traditional blue
Can't you change the color in options?

>>11957441
the problem with FF8s draw system is that it discourages actually using your magic. certain spells esuna comes to mind as an early one that make for awesome junctions can be incredibly rare, depending where in the game you are. so using them in battle is just you bleeding some of your potential stats

it also encouraged spamming draw like a hundred times on every character to get max stock of whatever spell. combine it with its fucktarded exp/lvl scaling system, you had a game where youd
>run from/avoid most battles
>unless it was a mob that had decent magic
>then youd sit there spamming draw for 5-10mins
>then either just run away or turn them into cards or something
sure once you got the right GFs you could simplify it a bit and just synthesize magic from cards. but man, if thats not an extremely unintuitive system to lvl up, idk what is.

>>11957565
None of what you said is an issue if you play the game the intended way, but instead you decided to play the retard meme way told to you by strangers on the internet

>>11957574
no
i decided to not play the game at all and just played the in-game card game until FF9 came out
FF8 sucked ass

>>11957565
>the problem
I'd call that the interesting part really: weighting the benefit of using your magic stock against the benefit of keeping your stats maxed. Not that using it a couple times when in a pinch will dramatically "drain" you that badly though.

>>11957579
>I decided not to play this game I'm pretending to have informed opinions about
/vr/ in a nutshell

>>11957565
>it discourages actually using your magic
>esuna comes to mind as an early one
Anytime I've needed Esuna, I got it from the opponent.

Alternatively you have items and GF powers to cure status.

squaretards ruin another thread.

>>11957391 (OP)
ultima underworld

>>11957646
yea it has a neat system but by the time you get the last runes the game is essentially over anyway, which kinda sucks

>>11957454
Nice.

>>11957391 (OP)
I like the comfy grey menu and the ambience ost. Searching for ingredients is super fun.

>>11957446
Came here to mention this. Rudra is certainly unique in what it does.

>>11957447
fukken saved

>>11957565
>spamming draw like a hundred times on every character to get max stock
this is a complete waste of time, the only magics worth spending the time drawing from enemies are meteor and ultima

>>11957452
I've heard nothing but bad things about magic/elements in Chrono Cross, but Vagrant Story is fairly easy once you figure out which elements and classes do not negatively effect one another and build weapons around that. Undead Evil even comes with a decent starter weapon in the silver ones.

IIRC it was:
> Human Phantom
> Undead Evil
> Beast Dragon

Then there's the Type, which is blunt slashing or piercing. This is harder to prepare for.

Also you can use Analyze spell on enemies to see their stats and gear, which makes things easier. Still very menu heavy though.

>>11957441
>>11957452
>>11957565
FF8's system failed because it made the number of magic drawn matter. It would be better if junctioning any amount of a spell gave the same bonus, and this was determined by the rarity, power, and attributes of the spell. Then you can draw one spell for junctioning, and then cast as many as you want as a sort of economy; but enemies drawing from you harms your economy and if they draw enough your stats.

Obviously the cap for draw should be much higher, limited by your magic stat.

Also for fuck's sake fix the nomenclature:
> Junction -> Equip
> GF -> Summon, Esper, or Eidolon
> Draw -> Steal Magic
> Stock -> Store

And the issue with GFs is you can equip as many as you want, even ones of opposing elements and attributes. That should be nixed: limit the number of equippable espers to 1/3 the total espers, and don't allow opposing espers to be equipped.

>>11957391 (OP)
SaGa Frontier doesn't have the exhaustive and strongly categorized spell systems of the Final Fantasy games, instead you have schools of magic where any spell can be pretty much anything. The only limits are in opposing schools: you technically can't know spells of two opposing schools, like light and shadow. However, you actually can due to something called the gift, which is awarded for some schools after completing a trial to get it. If you do that, you can go out and buy the basic spells of the opposing school for which you got the gift, then use an item which has the spell for your gifted school and re-learn those spells.

Some spell gifts are tied to species, or to one single person in the entire game.

>>11957447
>>11957446
How does this work? Do you enter the words ahead of time?

>>11957564
Not in 8. 9 has default grey menus as well but offers the blue option in the config menu.

Of course both of that feels like a huge step back from FF7 which just let you config the menu color into whatever combos you wanted.

>>11959326

Yeah. During battle, you can learn spells by observing their names as enemies cast them, but if I remember right you can't actually do anything about it right away, since your spell list can't be altered during a battle. You have to finish fighting and then manually retype what you saw into the spell editor, to record the spell into the list of ones usable by your current adventuring party. Spell names are short enough that this is not difficult to do. (You can also learn spells during conversations in towns, from ancient inscriptions in dungeons, through your own exploration/invention, etc.).

The spell editor must have been tricky to recreate using an English alphabet. If I understand correctly, the set of possible spells in the English version is subtly different from the Japanese one thanks to whatever the romhackers did to make that work. I think they had to increase the character limit from 6 to 12 or something vaguely like that? I forget. I accidentally got the editor to lock up on me once, requiring a forced reset at the emulator level, so I guess they probably didn't do a perfect job. But it must be close enough, since that only happened to me a single time during two full runs through the game. Anyway it's one of multiple reasons why a person probably shouldn't be surprised that this game never officially left Japan.

>>11957446
>>11957436
>>11957452
Holy hell do they also have to look like total crap ?

>>11959290
>limit the number of equippable espers to 1/3 the total espers
1 GF for stat junctions would streamline and balance the game nicely. And caps grinding.

If I ever replay again, I'll unlock the card mods, STR/MAG-J, and then just go for the special abilities like Counter Attack. The other ones feel like wasted AP.

Protip: you can get +60% STR/MAG and Status-Js for GFs by refining certain cards. Cuts down AP grinding.

>>11959690
>>11957446
>So you can perform crude science by tweaking spell names in ways that are suggested by patterns you see across multiple names and then casting the resulting spells to see whether you've improved them.
Sounds like the magic in Nahlakh.

M

>>11958515
And Aura and Triple and Pain and Flare.

>>11960128
Another protip: these GF commands are really fucking good. Recovery is free Full Life, Treatment is Esuna, Mad Rush is Haste + Berserk + Protection on whole party. Auto Potion + that passive that doubles item effects is nice.