Now I am by no means a hardcore JRPG player, but it is still a genre that has such potential for variation that when it does I can really get into it. What I hate about so many JRPGs is how they handle the battle system. There are so many different ways to encounter enemies and gain experience, but many still cling to old-fashioned methods, most especially the Turn Based Combat and Active Time Battle.

The way combat was handled was fine back in the last two decades before the introduction of 3D gaming. Chrono Trigger, despite using the Active Time Battle system, is still one of my favorite JRPGs due to its fantastic story. In reality, that is all that can save a game with these systems. However, this is the 21st Century, we have the technology and we don’t need to fall back on these boring battle systems. You can see part of what I’m talking about in FFXII, as it allowed the characters to maneuver themselves instead of locked in static combat, but it still implemented the ATB system to interact with creatures. To contrast, let me give you examples of what I mean when games do it right.



First, we must look to the year 2002. The PS2 was in its infancy, and after a chance encounter between the employees of Square Enix and Disney, Kingdom Hearts was released. It realized everything that could be done with the third dimension. Instead of tying combat to boring turn based affairs like how Final Fantasy X debuted, it gave us direct control. Fighting would be in real-time, and while most battles would amount to nothing more than mashing the X button, it was still an infinitely more creative and fun way to play a game. Every button press felt like the player itself doing the damage, instead of feeling like the manager. Sure, it came at the expense of the at-times stupid AI of Donald, Goofy, or whatever shmup you decided to swap out Goofy for, but their patterns were highly customizable to compensate.



Now, when JRPGs come to the DS, you could be forgiven in have a bit more leeway in how it also has similar technological limitations as in the past. You could, if The World Ends With You didn’t automatically void anything of the sort. TWEWY, for short, was a marvelous game. The game is set in Shibuya, a ward of Tokyo. For someone like me who isn’t very keen to Japanese culture, I really struggled with the setting and the references made within, but I’m not talking about story here, this game’s saving grace was a really revolutionary gameplay that made fantastic use of the DS touch screen.

It really makes me realize what a giant corporation Square Enix is to have such dichotomies between their different games, even within the DS. They have the 3-d rendered yet traditional TBC Dragon Quest games and the sprite-rendered, real time combat TWEWY. The gameplay is really simple, you collect pins which give different powers. Some heal, many hurt, but they all differ in interesting ways. Some shoot energy, others are for direct physical damage, some heal, basically the entire move-set rainbow. You could argue that the cooldown effect using a pin has, where after a certain time or number of attacks the pin can’t be used, is a form of active time battle, but it really differs in how you interact with the enemy. You can move around the screen at all times, and, really, using the pins is all about strategy, you want to put up a chain of attacks so when one is spent another is waiting to be used until the first one recharges, repeat ad nauseum. There are two controllable characters, f you have some mad multi-tasking skills you can theoretically use them both at once, but for those like me whos right hand can’t even tell what his left is doing, you’re mostly just letting the computer fiddle around with it.



The heart of my problem with TBS and ATB is the end of which they are a means, grinding. It is simply not fun whatsoever flipping through menus and pressing a button continuously. If you do find it fun, more power to you but I would seriously consider getting your head checked because when I think of doing a repetitive motion constantly to obtain a goal I think of my old job bagging groceries. Kingdom Hearts and TWEWY are really no different in the set up, there be monsters, kill them to grow. It’s the execution that sets them apart. They bring the character actively in the experience of dispatching of creatures and the gaining of experience. Most of the time I don’t even notice it’s grinding until I’ve killed my 200th Ice Giant or my 50th Neoclassical Drake, because the way it’s presented to me makes it fun.

You might have noticed a similarity between the two games, and maybe this is the key flaw with TBS and ATB, you have partners, but they can just be AI controlled to do their own thing. Most JRPGs just have too many characters to control. They need to limit what the player controls to just one character so that they can use them in real time while the allies back you up.



All I have to do now is hope for the future. With Final Fantasy XIII Versus taking a similar battle system to Kingdom Hearts, if it can deliver that kind of interaction with a good Final Fantasy story, it could easily change the way people think about JRPGs and easily become a new top favorite in my collection.