Okay time to talk up SaGa Scarlet Grace. Since the purpose of this thread is to highlight interesting and well thought out game design, I think it would be a better contribution than repeating the same shit people already said about Doom or whatever other popular game there is. Square Enix is lame so the game is currently a Japanese Vita exclusive, which means most people can't play it. Boo!
Before Scarlet Grace was released, I think most SaGa fans expected the worst but decided to support it just because it's a brand new SaGa game by Kawazu, in the year 2016, with awesome art and music. Everything else looked pretty dodgy. It's a world map driven game with no explorable dungeons or towns. The battles load 3 times before a turn even starts, and the videos made the game look like something developed by interns fresh out of a Unity development camp.
But having put over 20 hours into it, I can safely say that this is by far one of the more interesting and well thought out RPGs designed in Japan in a very long time. The most important point it gets right in the design is the joy is discovery in a RPG. Something that most RPGs these days no longer focus on because it is easier to lure players in with carrot and stick design via an exciting linear plot and instant gratification rewards. Scarlet Grace isn't very interested in that sort of design, but instead wants to offer players a world filled to the brim with interesting discoveries to be made, and a battle system which is mechanically strong enough to support a huge selection of party members and a free form growth system based on what sort of strategy the player wants to roll with.
To begin with, the game doesn't automatically let a player select the protagonist from a menu. Instead starting a new game presents the player with a series of personality questions, with the answers reflected by the movement of the stars. At the end of the quiz, a constellation is chosen based on the answers, and one of four characters is recommended to the player. At this point you can choose to reject the choice and pick any of the others, but accepting the recommendation would start that character with a specific set of stat bonuses based on the constellation. This is an interesting approach to the character selection design because while it does not force the player to accept the character reflected by the choices, it still gives immediate meaning to the choices made by the player by offering an advantage if they accept the game's rules. This introduces the concept that while player interaction and choice is an important component of the game, there are also things which will be out of the player's control - a simulation of free choice meeting destiny. Or luck. This is something which thematically governs the game design in all aspects of the game from this point on.
Like all SaGa games, the perspective of the protagonist defines the structure of a given scenario. In Scarlet Grace, the way the game scenario is designed, is that the four protagonists hail from different parts of the world, and each have a personal quest linked with one of four major quest lines which will occur in the world. So depending on which character you are playing, from the very start, you will have completely different goals and encounters. Once this primary quest is complete, the first part of the scenario for that character ends, and the next parts begin. The next parts become pretty non-linear, allowing the player to travel around the world to discover what major event they want to follow next. It will be one of the three remaining ones, and that should take the player around the rest of the regions of the world which they might not have discovered. Eventually I believe all paths lead to the same conclusion, but I'm not quite there yet.
What is really interesting about the scenario design here, is that while there are the main quest scenarios, the bulk of the game is in fact made up of a gazillion sub-scenarios all over the world. In each of the 20 regions the world map is divided into, there are stories small and large which you can discover and choose to get involved in. Freed from having to design maps for every town and dungeon and to populate NPCs everywhere, the game instead feels like a really cleverly designed board game where you move to places of interest, trigger events or battles, and just move on as you see fit. The economical nature of the game allows it to be incredibly dense, similar to titles such like FTL and Infinite Space. What I'm most amazed with is how interesting the quests actually feel. It would have been easy to design lazy scenarios similar to MMOs or dungeon crawlers where the player has to keep doing repetitive things for a quest giver to get rewards, just to bloat the time value of the game. Instead, every quest feels like something specifically linked to the region's purpose in the world, or as a means of introducing the player to quirks or cultures of that region. The rewards for completing a quest don't always come in useful items or equipment, but rather in the sense of satisfaction that you're playing a fun scenario designed by a good GM. It's the sort of feeling I haven't had in quite a while, especially in a JRPG format like this.
But where the game design really shines, and what ties the entire game concept together, is the battle design in the game. This is probably the most satisfying JRPG battle system I've played since Bravely Default, and in many ways I think it surpasses it. Scarlet Grace uses a 5-person party, which you can freely change and set up at the start of every battle. There are no character levels in the game, being a SaGa game, but instead characters gain max HP increments and weapon specialization levels after battles.
There are 8 different types of weapons, each with a bunch of skills a character could learn when using them. Different individual weapons have different sets of skills that can be learned, even in the same type. Bare-handed combat also has its own skills. Staves have different elemental attributes which allow for the discovery of different types of spells. There's also a hidden dual wielding ability for long swords which some characters have. This adds up to about 10 different types of skills/spells of which there's probably a dozen or so for each class.
Any character can equip any weapon and potentially learn these skills. But some characters are inherently better at certain weapons at the start. There are over 70 possible party members in the game, and pretty much every named character you ever run into, be it in a quest or in a story scene, or a town merchant, can probably be a party member in -some- route. What differentiates characters from each other would be their stats, their starting weapon affinities and skills, and their roles. Different characters have different "roles" which can be equipped for passive bonuses, and they can earn more if they do certain things in battle.
But the most useful thing about collecting more party members is that each party member who joins brings with them a formation. Sometimes you might get a dupe, but every new formation you gain is one more strategic option for all future battles. Formations are basically a micro ruleset for how your party operates in battles. Most offer some sort of bonus to specific types of characters, for example if you have Counter Hazard, characters in the first slot and last two slots of that formation will have the BP cost of their reserve skills (counters, interrupts, protects) greatly reduced. It also gives the party one extra BP each turn, which is the standard rule for most formations. Brave Rise on the other hand, is a formation where your BP doesn't increase with each turn, but rather you are encouraged to put your two strongest attackers in the first two slots, and every time either of those attackers kill an enemy, BP is increased by 2 the next turn. There is also a much larger max BP pool for this formation, and it is useful when you are facing a lot of weaker enemies and want to build up BP very quickly.
Once all the setting up is done and the party actually enters into a battle, that's where things get really fun. Each turn, the player can see the turn order at the bottom before making any decisions. The BP pool available is for the entire party, which means you pick which of your characters you want to execute actions, knowing what order they will be acting in. The player is also able to see what the enemy choices are before completing the turn, which is interesting because in theory this gives the player a huge tactical advantage over the enemy. In truth though, the balance of the game is such that this information is essential because knowing is only half the battle. If you have a good party setup to handle the situation perfectly, it can be a breeze and you feel really relieved, but it's when things go a little wrong or you realize that you don't have the best party for what you go into, where it can really feel like a super fun high tension series of turns where you know what is going to hit you, and you try your best to mitigate or get around problem so you can kill all the enemies before they wipe your party.
The battle system is filled with really fun stuff which I think any long time JRPG fan will really appreciate. There are standard things like physical affinities (slash, pierce, smash) and elemental affinities, there are debuffs, buffs, and status ailments, there are attack all skills, spells have casting times which take multiple turns, and there are reserve skills. Reserve skills are probably the most interesting standard component of the battle system because they add a great layer to the strategy. Counters, interrupts, and protection skills are reserve skills. If an enemy is using a reserve skill, it will show up as ????? instead. To get around reserve skills, there are skills which are indirect attacks. These are attacks which avoid triggering reserve skills while also cancelling them if they successfully hit. But this also means you have to be careful about the turn order of the character using an indirect attack, since a character attacking before that will trigger the reverse instead, but a character attacking after the reverse is cancelled will not have any issue.
Another really fun system in the game is the rush system. In essence, it is similar to the team attacks in Persona or Trails of Cold Steel, where multiple party members rush and attack an enemy together. How this works in the game involves removing gaps in the turn order timeline. If a single enemy is sandwiched between party members on a given turn, killing that enemy off in that turn and hence "joining" the party members back together will give those party members a free rush attack.
For example if the turn order looks like this:
[P][E][P][P][P][E][E][P]
Killing the first enemy in that order anytime during the turn (even if it's the very last guy who does it), will join four party members together for a rush attack on one of the other remaining enemies. This will also reduce the BP cost of all skills for the participating party members in the next turn.
If it looks like this:
[P][E][P][E][P][P][E][P]
And if you have either weakened all the enemies, or they are simply not very strong, you can kill the last enemy in the order to get a 3 person rush attack, which would be enough to kill one of the other two enemies. If the rush attack hits the first enemy, that's unlucky because you'll only trigger a subsequent one with the first 2 party members instead, which might not be enough to kill the middle enemy. On the other hand if you killed off the middle enemy with a rush attack, you will have triggered a second 4 person rush attack which would almost certainly finish off the first enemy as well. So there's a bit of luck involved, but knowing the possibilities also means you plan out for possible outcomes.
And to top it all off, the best thing about the battles for fans of optional challenges, and mechanic exploitation, is that every single battle in the game comes with 3 challenge conditions. Clearing the conditions will reap bonus item rewards. Conditions are stuff like "activate a counter in battle", "avoid triggering the enemy's interrupt", "inflict attack down on an enemy before they use an attack all skill", "use a all female party", "use a all male party", etc. There are times where trying to go after these bonuses WILL get you killed if you're not prepared, so it's a nice bit of risk/reward psychology.
