JRPG Party-Based Combat

About two or three months ago, I had been playing a lot of Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. I'm a firm believer in handhelds, thus why I love my DS so much. Handhelds allow focus to be on gameplay rather than graphics, which is something that I value highly. Dragon Quest V sent me on a kind of retro journey into adoration. I've long preferred the Dragon Quest series to Final Fantasy because I like the gameplay and the stories better. I find the monsters charming; I adore Slime.

There are a lot of things I love about Dragon Quest V. The little things that count can be counted upon in this game. The Hero, who has extremely bad luck in game, has a very, very low Luck stat. The inn prices-- in Whealbrook, post-burning, the inn price is extremely cheap, due to no one wanting to stay in the town and the innkeeper needing to take what she can get. In Coburg, where the taxes are high, the inn is about eight times more expensive than in Whealbrook. You can actually talk to your party members. One thing I don't like is the combat system.

JRPG battle is almost always turn-based. It is always party-based. In the combat menu, selections are divided up into different types of combat. Usually, the rule is Attack (physical), Magic (either assault or supportive), Item (to access your inventory), and Flee (to flee battle). Different characters will have different abilities. Some will be powerful magic users, either combat or restorative, and some will be tanks (high attack, defense, or both). However, different variations can turn combat in a JRPG from a button-mashing mess into a fun time. I've broken it down into the two major things:

1) Lineup. Standard JRPG lineup is just who goes first-- one, two, three, four. Enemies tend to focus on the ones in the middle in my experience, for whatever reason. However, good JRPG lineup also has front and back positions that the characters can take. If a character is in a "back" position, their physical attacks are weaker, but enemies' attacks will hurt them less. That means that the back position is good for archers and those who are primarily magic-users. Ideally, this also means there are archers.

Why DQV Failed: They didn't include this, simple as that, even though there was distance weaponry (boomerangs) and magic.

2) Unbalanced party members to make up a balanced party. Yes, this makes sense. Just hear me out. Each character should have strengths and weaknesses. And they should be important and their weaknesses should be fatal if they aren't supplemented with other members of the party. This is why a JRPG is a party-based RPG. If the party itself doesn't matter, why do I need to have one? Why don't I just dump everyone off somewhere and journey alone. The hero always needs to be relatively balanced, since for at least some of his journey, he will be alone and need to fight alone. However, he will be fighting against groups of enemies and thus will be outnumbered. He needs his party. His party should also need him, and each other. If each member of the party is perfectly balanced, why bother? Having unbalanced party members (Stat-wise. Not mentally. Though that would be cool.) gives the player a resource to manage. That way, you need to figure out which party mix-up would work best in various situations, in addition to figuring out which attack to use.

Why DQV Failed: For many, many hours in the game, it's just you, the balanced hero, Harry, the balanced prince sidekick, and whatever monsters you recruit. Dragon Quest V could have done something awesome with this, since recruiting monsters gives you a gigantic party to work with, each (presumably) with different strengths and weaknesses.

Of course, given where my brain has been recently, I related this to MMOs. MMOs are, by nature, party-based, though some obviously emphasize PvP rather than cooperative play. One of the reasons I like Korean MMORPGs is actually because there is very little cooperative play, so I don't have to deal with other players if I don't want to.

Relating this to Elder Scrolls Online, how will a game famous for their single-player games, where you can be anything and need to be able to journey alone, manage party-based combat? Will even a fighter still be able to learn restorative magic? How will Elder Scrolls Online walk that line between self-sufficiency and cooperation? How will they deal with the hero mentality of their long-time fans and the MMO world's need to have a little army? As DQV shows, you can't really have both. To wait and see is the only thing I can think of to do, and even then, it bothers me. Because unless some friends decide to jump on the Elder Scrolls Online boat, I don't want to play with other people, necessarily. And I don't think the game will be a success as an MMO unless it makes parties a necessity.

Oh well. If Elder Scrolls Online fails, I can always immerse myself in Skyrim again. There's always that.