kajarainbow

So a while back, I tried Anachronox because I heard it was an overlooked game with a very good story and all. What I played of the game looked to have potential. I got up to those ancient alien ruin tunnels (so relatively early on, like the second dungeon if one counts the Junkyard as a dungeon).

Then I quit in frustration. Why? You can probably guess from my post title, but in short: Anachronox's a Western game, but it appears to have taken inspiration from JRPGs in its combat system, and not in a good way. The problem: every single attack has an animation time of several seconds at least. This combined with the painful combat interface was somewhat irritating (having to click hard-to-identify icons to select both actions and targets). Not to mention that it was one of those time-based battle systems which, really, mainly combined the worse attributes of both action-based and turn-based combat--having the timer tick while you decide on then select your (hard to identify) action but not letting you have full-time control of your action like you would in a more action-based game.

But it really came to a head when I came to a particular fight in the aforementioned ruin tunnels. This fight had more enemies than any prior enemies (I think about six). Not only that, they were the tiny hard-to-hit sort (translation: high whiffage rate). So we got a long dragged out tedious fight where I spent far, far more time watching the overly lengthy animations than actually getting to select any courses of action. It was so bad that I actually quit the program in frustration before the combat finished.

A short time after, faced with a shortage of space on my Windows partition, I decided to delete Anachronox. It might've had very good merits otherwise, but the combat system simply killed the whole experience for me.

I prefer my attack animations fast and furious. Some of my favorite turn-based combat systems actually didn't have much in the way of animations (I'm looking at you, ancient PC games), but real animations can be done in a way that's fun for me. Actually, I'll mention one of my most favorite combat systems: Suikoden. I'm focusing mostly on the combat system in my discussion here. I won't really cover the series' other qualities here (my full opinion on them would be another post entirely).

What I liked in the combat system of Suikoden 1 and 2 is simple: they had a system where you selected all of your party members' actions for the turn and then the turn ran in initiative order--both your and the enemies' turns running at the same time. Not only that, but very frequently multiple combatants would act at the same time, so you'd get a barrage from one or both sides and/or a few meleers hurdling themselves all at the same time. This made battles far more zippy than other JRPGs with comparable attack animation times (and the animations weren't excessively long). If you selected the auto-battle option, battles could be over in a brief time (great for breezing past weak enemies).

It gave the battles a chaotic impression where it was hard to keep track of every single attack (not that it was really necessary), but that just made it more fun for me. The most important overall elements were evident.

Those Suikoden combat systems were fairly standard JRPG systems in other regards, but just those elements served far more to make the games a pleasurable experience than most of the systems that had more intricacies.