This is an article by Felipe Pepe, who has written several articles on RPGs and their history. I always find them very enjoyable to read, and feel that they should be getting more exposure. I think this series (The Art of Turn-Based RPGs) will be particularly interesting.
The Art of Turn-Based RPGs I: Menu-based battles
The Art of Turn-Based RPGs I: Menu-based battles
One of the saddest things about being an old-school RPG fan is just how misunderstood one of the most traditional and exciting RPG systems is: the Turn-Based combat.
For many gamers, turn-based combat is best know as "JRPG combat". And it's often seen as outdated, slow, unrealistic, repetitive and many other unflattering adjectives.
There are many reasons for this. In the West, Turn-Based RPGs dominated the 80s but, with the rise of FPS and RTS games, they started to be replaced by Real-Time and Real-Time-with-Pause RPGs.
As TB games vanished from the shelves, misinformation, prejudice and hype-driven reporting stepped in - such as this infamous 2011 interview with InXile's president Matthew Findley, where he states that turn-based games were just a "technical limitation":
"I think these games always wanted to be action games at their heart. I think all those old turn-based games, it's just that's all the technology would allow."
Ugh.
In this first article I'll focus on the basics: the so-called "menu-based combat", where there's little to no movement - your party stands in front of the enemy and trade blows until one side is dead.
This is what many consider the typical "JRPG combat", though it actually originated in the US - first in PLATO games from the 70s, then it matured with Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord (1981), as it was the first RPG to allow its players to create & control a party of characters in battle:
I usually prefer holistic analysis, as game systems are (or at least should be) deeply interconnected, but for this article I'll just show some of the most common and interesting design choices regarding Turn-Based combat. It will be long, but hopefully it will be worth it.
Position & Reach:
Wizardry 1 divided your characters into front & back row, meaning only the three characters in the front could physically attack & be attacked. The problem was that this limited party composition. For example, Mages and Priests could still cast spells from the back row, but the Thief class was useless in combat - it was too weak to be in the front row, but unable to cast spells from the back row.
Final Fantasy I "solved" this by making front & back rows more subtle - everyone can hit everyone, but characters in the front row deal & take full physical damage, while those in the back take & deal less:
A better solution came in Wizardry V, with the addition of weapon range. Now characters from the back row could attack as well, as the game's manual anxiously explains:
Party Members
Turn-based games rely heavily on abstraction - mechanics over verisimilitude - or "gamistic" rather than "simulationistic", if you prefer. As such, they more easily acommodate mechanics like instantly swapping party members during battle - although it begs the question of WTF were they doing instead of fighting.
Pokémon, arguably the world's most popular Turn-Based RPG, uses character swapping as a core mechanic. You may have a party of six pokémons, but only one will fight at a time. This is complemented by the several Pokémon types, each with their strengths and weakness. A key part of the game is knowing which Pokémon to use and when to swap it.
If you push this concept to its ultimate limit, you get Labyrinth of Touhou. These games allow you to fight with a four-character party, but with eight more characters in the reserve, where they slowly regenerate. This is because characters are all very fragile - and there's no way to resurrect them mid-combat. You have to play smart, selecting characters with the appropriate attacks & resistances, then swapping them out a soon as their HP starts to go down:
