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[Durante]

In my opinion, the best way to fix this is to increase the state space of combat.

Because if you look at the issue, then a succinct description of it is that the possible space of (meaningfully different) states in combat is too small, and as such states repeat, and obviously in the same state the same sequence of actions is ideal.

How can you increase the state space?

1. Have meaningful positioning.
   This seems like an obvious point, but it's remarkable how much meaningful positioning (and therefore, also meaningful targeting and areas of effect for skills) increases your state space.
2. Make the environment the battle takes place in directly influence it.
   E.g. in Baldur's Gate, or pretty much any RPG where the battles take place on the same map you are exploring, the layout of the battle location (is it open or narrow corridors? is there a location where you can easily bottle up enemies?) has a huge influence on what type of tactics you have to employ. Divinity: Original Sin takes this even further.
3. Increase the number of possibilities within existing classes of possibilities.
   That would include adding more enemies, more skills, more status ailments or buffs, etc.
   A disadvantage of this compared to the other two options is that it doesn't add an entirely new dimension to the state, so it's additive and not multiplicative, and in many cases (e.g. enemies) requires lots of assets.

On the other hand, as you say in the OP, adding timed button prompts, or the ability to speed up combat, are merely mitigation strategies against boredom which don't fix the actual underlying problem. That's not to say that they aren't welcome -- a game with very fast but often boring combat is far more playable and fun than a game with slow and often boring combat.

Make more combat like Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter.

BoFQ has my favourite battle system in JRPGs, and unsurprisingly, it fulfills both point 1 and 2 above.

 

[redcrayon]

Another thing you can do to help avoid this that Final Fantasy 4 did well is keep changing up the player's party. If the player's "tools" keep changing, it's more difficult for them to fall into a rut.

I really like this about Suikoden and Suikoden II at the moment. Too often a JRPG has your party consist of healer, mage and several physical attackers, repeating the same motions in every battle, and characters that aren't used drop behind so far that they become useless. A game that then forces you to use such useless characters feels silly- how on earth did the main team get so much more skilled in just a few days of adventuring? I particularly dislike games that then force you to use these hangers-on with no warning that it might be necessary. FFIX springs to mind, but the worst offender by far is the final boss of Ys 7, where the issue isn't the lack of experience (reserves scale roughly with you), but that the other guys don't have decent equipment or any experience in using their important skills, and neither do you. If you had been forced to change up the party at some point you might have suspected it was coming again later on, but no. Terrible end to a game I otherwise really enjoyed.

In Suikoden, often two or three spots in a party of six are locked to characters relevant to the section, meaning that I then fill in the gaps with party members that complement them. Levelling is scaled so that, after half a dozen battles, everyone is roughly the same level, which really encourages experimentation and eliminates the feeling that non-regular party members are useless. Also, party members can swap skills freely- they don't have hours of sub-level experience in abilities that can't be replaced relatively quickly.

 

[ppor]

There's a reason they are perceived differently, the pacing couldn't be more different. A turned based battle generally takes quite a bit more time than a single match 3 or action game combo.

I'd argue turns in match-3 RPGs takes more time and brainpower than turns in FF. And can feel just as epic if done right.

Match-3 take into account positioning, environment manipulation, resource accumulation/denial, combos, and the need to plan for future moves. By tweaking any of these variables for a special encounter, you can make a fight seem like a unique setpiece, because now you're seeking different goals in your gameplay loop.

I find JRPGs, even with boss fights, don't really drastically change their gameplay loop. You might need to heal more often, or watch out for randomly-changing elemental weaknesses, but the turn-by-turn gameplay goals are generally the same.

 

[Basileus777]

I really like this about Suikoden and Suikoden II at the moment. Too often a JRPG has your party consist of healer, mage and several physical attackers, repeating the same motions in every battle, and characters that aren't used drop behind so far that they become useless. A game that then forces you to use such useless characters feels silly- how on earth did the main team get so much more skilled in just a few days of adventuring? I particularly dislike games that then force you to use these hangers-on with no warning that it might be necessary. FFIX springs to mind, but the worst offender by far is the final boss of Ys 7, where the issue isn't the lack of experience (reserves scale roughly with you), but that the other guys don't have decent equipment or any experience in using their important skills, and neither do you. If you had been forced to change up the party at some point you might have suspected it was coming again later on, but no. Terrible end to a game I otherwise really enjoyed.

In Suikoden, often two or three spots in a party of six are locked to characters relevant to the section, meaning that I then fill in the gaps with party members that complement them. Levelling is scaled so that, after half a dozen battles, everyone is roughly the same level, which really encourages experimentation and eliminates the feeling that non-regular party members are useless. Also, party members can swap skills freely- they don't have hours of sub-level experience in abilities that can't be replaced relatively quickly.

Suikoden games have a different problem, in that none of the combat outside of Suikoden 3 requires any thought. Use multi-target unites or auto battle against randoms, spam your most powerful runes against bosses. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Elaugaufein]

Suikoden games have a different problem, in that none of the combat outside of Suikoden 3 requires any thought. Use multi-target unites or auto battle against randoms, spam your most powerful runes against bosses. Rinse and repeat.

This is a pretty fair criticism of Suikoden I think. There are some exceptions, usually when you've had a dramatically underlevelled character dropped on you, who you need to stop from dying until they catch up in level , or sometimes when a new tier of equipment is available and you don't have the money for it , and a handful of the boss fights actually require a bit more thought but that described about 90% of the battles for me.

Suikoden does makes it really difficult for itself, because there's a lot of combat characters that are obviously intended to be weaker than others, for story reasons, but still have to be usable.
There's also some characters (usually mage knight types) that are incredibly powerful even compared to where they are supposed to be story wise because the interaction of Runes (and runes and skills in later games) was poorly thought out (e.g in Suikoden V Kyle is probably the most powerful character in the game (story wise he's probably supposed to be be in the top handful but not number one )). Between those two factors, if you're even mildly careful about party composition you'll murder everything that gets in your way in those areas where you've got a choice or where the story forces one of the super characters on you. They do seem to have noticed the problem in V to some extent, they gave Georg Prime (who's supposed to be an incredibly powerful warrior but not magically inclined) a fairly hax ability that has no mechanical explanation at all, to make him more formidable.

 

[SatelliteOfLove]

Suikoden games have a different problem, in that none of the combat outside of Suikoden 3 requires any thought. Use multi-target unites or auto battle against randoms, spam your most powerful runes against bosses. Rinse and repeat.

Which is exactly what 3 broke inelegantly to be fiddly time-consuming busywork.

 

[Durante]

I feel like difficulty is an orthogonal problem to the "loop"/state space issue. A system can be extremely varied and free of loops (when acting optimally), but if the difficulty is so low that it doesn't actually require the player to act optimally it can still get repetitive.

Personally though, I get significantly more annoyed when the optimal course of action is repetitive than when I simply have to option of acting repetitively because the game is too easy. But obviously neither is ideal.

 

[redcrayon]

Suikoden games have a different problem, in that none of the combat outside of Suikoden 3 requires any thought. Use multi-target unites or auto battle against randoms, spam your most powerful runes against bosses. Rinse and repeat.

That's true, it is a major flaw that I've played through 90% of the fights on auto-battle. I would prefer it to have half the number of random battles, but have them be more challenging too. You also have the problem of a limited amount of healing magic with no way to recover it, which means that tougher encounters would run you dry before you reach the boss of the lengthier dungeons.

I do like being able to try out different parties without havng anyone who isn't in constant use being underleveled and with no chance of catching up, I think that's why it's felt so refreshing. Also the lack of load times in battle, and being able to let weak enemies go- I can't go back to the FF games that take 20 seconds to load each minor random battle, but Suikoden feels more like Bravely Default in that at least they over in seconds.