I seem to have missed this one, lets see:
1)Spiky haired (preferably blonde), slightly effeminate guy with massive sword.
Check. Not sure if he is replete with mysterious past or not but money would be bet on my part.
2) Token spell casting females complete with tight fitting, revealing outfit:
check.
3) Fate of world/kingdom/gaia/universe in hand:
Quick scan of text says all signs point to yes.
Check
4)General costume: pseudo medieval/steampunk:
Check.
5) Mythology influenced creatures for enemies
check.
6)Tomboy female:
Check
Despite my reluctance to play yet another one of these sorts of games I am very curious to see if it delivers a nice old school RPG:
with a decent difficulty level (not level/stat grinding but strategy based)
some complexity: I am sick of overly simplified RPG magic systems: something like Dungeon Siege mixed with Phantasy Star and Elder Scrolls would be stunning in my book). 5 stat things also want to not be there, the DS game Contact a good example.
decent selection of weapons that serve purpose throughout and upgrades are good: (town1: rusty dagger with crystal: 500 giant rats later and it is mine, town2: steel dagger with spinel: 500 black rats now and it mine, repeat until town20. Maybe even expand skies of arcadia and have a weapon "shipments", KOTOR's upgrades/weapons, Vagrant stories manufacture elements are all prime examples. "cursed" weapons like Shining force cursed weapons, PSO less against certain creatures, life draining, speed draining, FF7 high attack power low or lacking materia slots are good examples.
How much to upgrade is a good one, occasionally I spend ages upgrading my manufacture skills to their limit at the cost of other stuff before making only to make a sword of fire +40 sneak my way through a cave to find a Inferno sword of the dragon built by an uber mage "400 years previously", cue head bashing against wall or scrambling for an earlier save. Some (penalty incurring) method of getting over this would be welcomed too.
Enemies can be different: final fantasy 12 had it halfway there with leveled enemies (a wold type may be level 7 outside a town but go to the river and you are facing a level 16 one). Personal gripe: medabots on the GBA, you have robots built from parts which confer certain abilities/attacks: randomise the things and give me something interesting. Something like a toned down version (or a version that includes high level stuff in addition to the low level fodder) of Elder Scrolls leveling is also of interest.
Random battles I can do without but include something like FF12, Magi nation (fantastic GBA rpg I am working on: the devs were nice enough to include a fully pointed ASCII English script) or Grandia (enemy icons) and we can talk. If you have to have random battles give me a quick town to town route (or even an enemy free path through to it) and a cave+grinding+ interesting stuff route.
Lost in the crowd: I may be the worlds most ultimate ninja/mage/wizard/archer/gunman/thief/witch/werewolf/vampire (bar bad character (s henchman)) but when in towns being just one of many (FF12, or the upcoming Assassins creed and to a slightly lesser extent Elder Scrolls) is something nice on occasion (by all means add certain conditions that drop this: vampire on Elder Scrolls, stars on GTA, thief in countless RPGs. Another aside: I am in a "massive" city of two districts: do not make it obvious that it is the case (reuse some textures with a "randomly" generated section: it would be but a few lines of code and you could compress and store in save memory and include a curio shop or two in a sub section but allow a "get out of town" option when changing sections: shooter I know but the old delta force games did this (had mission are + infinite random generated terrain) and they were great, reference Diablo and Dungeon Siege as well. Things seem to be moving away but make characters say some slightly different: Welcome to aultureon city, hope you have a nice time.
Welcome to aultureon city, hope you have a nice time
Welcome to aultureon city, hope you have a nice time
Text, be it 8 or 16 bit is eminently compressible and when you have a good bit of space to play with on modern consoles you can afford to throw an algorithm in there that uses a random number to point to something else.
Shops: I like to buy absolute junk (or even junk is disguise) for some reason or something as simple as 60 types of food that pretty much all do the same thing (until I become a potion maker).
Personal preference, a character may lean to a certain type (magic, ranged, thief....) by all means but allow me to lean back or customise heavily. Mixed jobs like in FF5 and to a lesser extent Might and Magic: godlike, try not to neuter them to much: a red mage is all but useless in later levels. Try and let the magic/ranged guys take a punch or two as well: they do not have to be able to take as much as token sword guy but having to make provisions to heal and or make live again during a boss battle is irksome at best. Training out of battle and training you by what you do (Elder scrolls and Shining Soul) is a good thing as well.
Mingames: if they are there make them decent: arcomage (Might and magic), FF8's cards, KOTORs cards. They are not especially complex (I certainly do not have a great desire to play Bridge or Go with someone in game but:
Bad FF7 snowboard, FF7 "RTS" section (ok that was not bad but not great). If going for the humour angle: GTA: SA They come from Uranus or something like Shenmue arcade and I will forgive a fair bit however.
Sidequests: games that have them: Kotor, Phantasy Star 4, Phantasy Star Online, Elder Scrolls, Might and Magic, FF12 (starting to see the idea). Make them good and even better long lasting and/or leading. As a minor aside something like FF12 best spear quest (where you can only get it if you did not touch the treasure in the castle you snuck into) is OK but if you made me fight (those that did not have the option) 60 enemies for my transgression (for which I was warned) earlier or if using leveled weapons make it a much lower level than it would be that would be good.
Puzzles: square peg in square peg hole: no way, what fiendish 2 year old made that one up. I am not saying go Phoenix Wright on me and maybe the likes of KOTORs maths puzzles or Enter the Matrix's DOS "emulator" are a shade above what is needed.
Animation: I realise this might be a bit harder with a limited size cart but try and mix it up and match it somewhat to enemies (watch something like Clouds limit on a rat: oh wow the sword went over the head). Not an RPG per se but pokemon stadium missed the boat with this one.
Story: Characters may die (quite in fact it can add so much to a game) but try not to make it too obvious: why is this character getting ultimate moves at level 30? or why is this character level 60 while the rest are level 30 and all have been here from the start? The token getting a ship, getting a new ship, losing ship/being captured can stay though.
Branching story (action or stats dependent) if you are a good dev as well.
Failing in battle: cue scene ships lands in new continent and cousin of giant rat is pissed about all the funerals, 3 party members venture out.
Screen wavy, 140 beats per minute der der der der duh der der der der.
Giant rats plague infested cousin springs up.
Party takes a pounding
Ship: 1) oh dear spiky haired massive sword guy is getting hammered out there 2)screw him I have some cake here and I will be damned if that new cat guy is going to eat it.
1) Oh dear party is dead.
Main menu springs up.
Training section: do it right if you do have to do it or give me some manuals a la resident evil.
DS: touchscreen, good for menus, names and moving perhaps (possibly add battle stuff like FF8s summons and martial arts stuff from FF4 I think it was) but no need for token additions like Castlevania ice sections.
Sleep mode is good but a one time out of town save or maybe a provision like Summon Knights save books (that you buy) is great.
To tie into save above: I would like to see a pseudo penalty for saving, nothing harsh but something like -30% on experience for 20 battles is of interest. Give me the option to gamble (+30% experience/money should I not save) but then to recover (with penalty of say half experience on current level lost + usual penalty or some such) if I do screw up and life is good.
Finally the not in a million years request:
give me an RPG that blends a fighting system from zelda and a simplified version of [insert fighting game of choice] and you will probably get something like this:
thanks from me
no thanks from friends and family due to time wasted and general disregard for personal hygiene on my part.
thanks from bank manager: I will be stuck paying for the stuff to do it justice for a while.
lawsuit from someone when I die of DVT.
What purpose that just served (other than to perhaps make me question my career path not in RPG making and probably wasting a lot of your and my time). Hopefully one day should some beleaguered dev read this and act upon it then all would be worth it.
Alas my rom hacking skills do not presently afford a lot of the radical changes I describe on modern games or something may have got done: level design, graphics, text stuff and stat (character or enemy) rebalancing is not that hard but upgrading weapons systems, character building methods (maybe not so much the classes abilities) is a serious project.
