"Not a representation of the idea"

I played a decent amount of Action RPGs in 2008. Among these were games such as “The World Ends With You”, “Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core”, and “Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates” (subtitle within a subtitle? Yeah… they went there!) to name a few. At some point during the year, playing these games got my creative juices flowing. My brain gave birth to an idea and I felt compelled to write it down. There it sat, alone inside a notebook. But today, faithful readers, I will share with you my dream.

First off, I have not developed any type of story for this game. However, the mechanics require at least a somewhat modern level of technology. This is due to the fact that nearly all of my ideas revolve around a portable music player that the main character would have on hand the entire game.

I imagine a seamless transition into battle, much like Kingdom Hearts or Rogue Galaxy. There would not be a seperate battle map as seen in the “Tales and Star Ocean” series’. Once the battle is initiated, the music changes to a battle song. Here’s where it starts getting interesting. The song that is played is selected randomly from a playlist that you manage. Each Song in the playlist has a different modifier effect on the battle. A heavy metal song might add to your attack, while an orchestrated piece might cut MP usage in half. None of these songs loop. Every song has a limited duration. If it comes to the end of the song during battle, a new song is chosen randomly.

As the game progresses, new songs can be both found and purchased. Every song would take up a specified number of “megs”. You can only fit so many megs worth of songs in your playlist, but as you progress, your storage capacity would increase. Each song would also have an appearance rate to determine how often it would play. A very powerful song might have a low appearance rate. One song with zero modifiers attached to it would be forever in your playlist. Any leftover megs would add to your appearance rate of that song to prevent “cheating the system”. An additional control measure could be to have different classes of songs. For example, your playlist could only contain one song of the highest class, and three of the second highest. There would be no limit set on the lowest class.

To add to the epic intensity of boss battles, every song would have an alternate version that would play during them. Some songs might not be usable on boss battles. These alternate versions could have different durations. Since your modifier is based on the song playing, duration would play a key role. Song information might be laid out along these lines:

The actual values in the chart were chosen pretty randomly, but I think it gets the idea across.

In addition to the stats mentioned, each song would have a unqiue finisher move. In order to activate the finisher move, certain criteria must be met. Whether it’s collecting orbs like Rogue Galaxy or taking damage like Final Fantasy VII is unimportant. What’s important is that, once initiated, the inputs change to that of a rhythm game. You would have to hit a string of buttons in time with the song that was playing. Your accuracy would determine how effective the attack was.

Finally, the audio of the actions performed in battle could be extra instruments in the song. Every type of action would be a different instrument, much like in Lumines. If an orchestral song is playing, for example, each succesive swing of your weapon could be a stab from a string section that fit with the music. This could also lead to timing of combos being directly connected to the flow of the current song.

I’m pretty confident that I will never be in a position to make this idea happen. So if any developers are reading this, please make this game! I volunteer to work on the soundtrack. But seriously, folks. What do you think? Leave your comments below or email me at mainfinger [ at ] wingdamage.com!

Tags: action rpg, Crisis Core, Final Fantasy VII, game ideas, Kingdom Hearts, lumines, musical arpg, rhythm game, rogue galaxy

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.