This is the exact reason I have always preferred turn based. I can look up from the screen without pausing.
eyup. can have it going and play for a bit and do other stuff and play for a bit. I love activities I can fit into whenever. Seems more efficient.
My gripe with turn-based combat is that it devolves most of the time into a repetitive slog in the endgame. At some point, I always fell into the same pattern of moves for the last third of a game. Up to that point, there is always something that keeps it fresh. Be it new spells/skills that open up new combinations or new enemy types that need new approaches. Most titles though seem to have run out of steam in the endgame, and by that point the entire gameplay seem to be just a repeat of the same old debuff enemy>buff party> glasscannon-finisher combo in every fight.
I like turn based RPGs sometimes. The biggest gripe I usually have is they often devolve into a state where I just want to play it in fast forward.
Like in ff7, somewhere in the second half I got Ultima+mp_absorb. From then on pretty much every trash fight is trivial. But you still need a lot of XP to level up stuff. Or ff5 I think, you can get double-cast if you spend an hour or two fighting trash mobs, but that’s really boring.
This isn’t inherent to turn based games, but it does come up a lot.
I’m currently playing through Pokémon SoulSilver and the battle animations are kind of slow, so I am absolutely playing on fast forward and feel bad about it because I’m missing out on the music at normal speed.
You can turn off the animations, the problem is the snail’s pace the HP bar drains in Gen 4.
I thought 12 handled this well with their macro system. Once you got comfortable you could focus more on the meta game. What this or that enemy was or using specialized spells like steal felt easier. And when you got new items or spells you could slowly incorporate and experiment with them.
I like this aspect of turn-based games. But I don’t like how boring and repetitive JRPG battles become after the first few hours. Its just clicking buttons on a menu with a more or less static screen. This is why I prefer Strategic RPGs instead, and really wish more JRPGs would so something so the battles aren’t so repeptitive.
I am cool with it, as someone looking for games to turn off my brain while I recharge. Really easy decisions. Meditative. Kind of like !knitting@lemmy.world an easy pattern, except that my hands do not hurt by hour 2.
ATB ruined final fantasy
I’m actually really enjoying playing the remake of 7 - I’m on intergrade right now, and what’s cool is that the characters all attack constantly if you leave the controller alone, and you have the ability to pepper skills, items, and spells into combat as needed.
Yes, I know it’s still ATB based but it seems to flow well. And you have the ability to slow or stop the action if needed.
Yes, if you walk away during a tense fight you’ll get smoked - but if you take a moment out you won’t get slaughtered.
