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Who says Final Fantasy can't be strategic though? That's a failure of game design, and not related at all to turn-based combat! There are so many ways to make things more interesting, many of which have been done very well in other turn-based non-tactical RPGs. Here are 5 off the top of my head. 1. Give different types of monsters properties that affect who can hit them and when. For example, flying monsters that can only be hit by certain weapons or abilities, elemental creatures, etc. 2. Re-position monsters and PCs throughout the fight, like in Chrono Trigger, affecting the hit box of various abilities. 3. Change battle conditions during combat forcing people to make tough choices on the fly. For example in FFX, there was a boss that could reliably one-shot you unless you had the zombie status. But if you had that status, you couldn't heal yourself. It was cool. 4. Don't have obvious ability scaling like Fire, Fira, Firaga, where there is no reason at all to use the lower-level spells. Make more powerful spells and abilities leave the PCs open to attack, take longer to cast, take longer to recover from, etc. Make it more of a tradeoff to use those powerful abilities. 5. Limit the resources of the player. Restrict the max # of potions, or make them harder to get. Space rest points out more. A lot of JRPGs become really easy because you can stock tons of tents and potions and just heal up after every fight. Roguelikes are turn-based too, but they are frequently way more challenging because you have very limited resources. If every lost hit point and magic point matters, that encourages players to think more about finishing battles quickly (while expending resources) vs. conserving resources but taking more damage etc.

Biggest tip: Try not to not be an asshole. Your partner has his own legitimate ideas too. Give them room to voice an opinion if you choose to collab with them and listen to what they have to say. If you don't, you'll just end up alienating people. More generally, have a vision. Don't be like "I want to collab with you for no reason!" Assign roles. Maybe one of you is the arranger and another is an instrumentalist. Collabarations are usually two people together working their strengths to create something greater than the sum of its parts. In my case, If i'm not the arranger, I'm either laying down guitars or synths, cause thats where my strengths are Most importantly, COMMUNICATE. So many collabs end up getting fucked due to misunderstandings. If someone collabs with you, don't take it for granted and remove their contributions without at least telling them first because they will not want to collaborate with you again. Those are my two cents. If you communicate and have a good balance with sharing ideas, collabing can be a fantastic experience. However, you've gotta be a little careful sometimes. People are touchy, especially when it comes to their music. Just treat each other respectfully and their shouldn't be a problem.

Wow...I haven't been here in ages. Hey everyone. So I am ready to give my person his Secret Santa gift, but he doesn't accept friend invites so well. haha I'm going to give it a couple of more days. I wanted it to be a surprise, but this doesn't make it easy. Also, that's an awesome work desk Beth!

The whole episodic thing is a bit BS in my opinion but its a tell tale sign of the industry right now. With everything going the DLC route and VIP membership....Why make one game when you can sell 3 at 80 bucks a piece. The excuse that there is too much content for one game...I dont buy...FF7 was 3 discs and had a pretty expansive world for its day given its gameplay/graphics. They made it work, albeit on 3 discs, but they made it work. Thats just the work that used to be put into one game back then and I think that day and age has passed...

So...for a lack of activity on this album, I am going to close recruitment, and begin to refocus on one, recollecting and finishing tracks, and two, getting the website and the art finished. Grand plans often lead to failure, so I'm going to satisfy myself with 8~9 track album. After all, any album produced by a "newbie" will break the status quo, right? Honestly, I'm actually really glad ITC has gotten this far, despite missing its original release date. And don't worry, I'm not going to get sappy on you guys. I'll leave that for the release of the album. Which will happen, I swear it. touchstone Dang, that second-to-last line sounded much more dramatic typed out than in my head.

Kind of glad if that's the case. For one, the every sweet step closer this game is to Crisis Core makes me want to buy it more and more day one. Besides that, FF's illusion of exploration was never all that compelling to me, and trimming the fat is always a good thing. If your towns/overworlds consists of freely accessible at all times NPC's that say basically a looped dialog excerpt UNLESS it is the specific time in the story when they're actually relevant, there wasn't really any point to it at all besides a really annoying, incessant reminders of "haha you're in the wrong place!". Besides occasional side objectives or mini games, there's no reason to beat yourself over the head with all the mash-x-random-encounters that are required to "explore". And when a game like FF tries to tell you where to go through vague dialog, and you inevitably have no clue what it's telling you, you end up "exploring" anyway and it's a miserable waste of time (though I guess grinding for levels is a plus). I pretty much agree. I only really think turn-based combat was ever okay in two situations: -Pokemon, when everything you're doing is actually giving commands to your little critters and watching them fight (that's the point) -Super Mario RPG, where the monotony of watching numbers flash was pulverized by Nintendo's genius introduction of timed hits (which was so good as a gameplay riff on turn based combat that they used it basically verbatim with improvements in all the Paper Mario incarnations). For those who don't know, you could block enemy attacks with timed presses of the A button. In Thousand Year Door, you could even press B (with a smaller time window) to counter and react with damage to enemy attacks (with the benefit of absolutely no chip damage and with the risk of missing it and taking a full hit). Most special moves in all those games relied on rhythmic, sporatic, or other variations of timed hits. This completely de-motivated "mash A to win" and instead made you pay attention to the combat, even at the lowest level of enemies. It made random combat less of a button mashing chore and more of a practicing of your skills that you're gonna need later. Sticker Star made timed hits actually coincide with the game music, which was kind of cool.

Yoichi Wada said that, and he hasn't been with Squeenix for a several months now (and stepped down as president in 2013) so that's what happened to it. The guy who said it isn't with the company anymore lol

Oh, but there is a website. Though as mentioned earlier, I was having a hard time IRL and couldn't keep working on it. Rozo was happy with it at the time, so I don't understand the silent treatment. Here's proof Gildervine didn't eat the site:

Im not gonna say im committed to this one, but it already sounds like something I would make, so i could maaaaaybe find the time to whip something up that fits the MNP vision.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much good music I've discovered. Like 1/5th of what I review gets downloaded and I'm usually picky about what I download. 80 down.

Great, great!! Any chance for a zip file DL? The zip option doesn't seem to work on the website. Thanks! EDIT: Nevermind, it worked!

YAY! Just posted my 100th review

I got my Secret Santa gift today, that was super quick! Thanks Tables, I love these plushies so much! They're a great addition to my plushie collection at work!

Now this is a villain theme! Dark DnB with pure evil mechanical sounding arrangement, and I'm so there. That shot at Samus with Vincent Price laughing is classic. I have to admit, Mazedude always seems to nail it right on the head when you need to add a little chaos to the mix. Well done.