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Im probably a fool for posting this but this thread and these responses warm my heart. It's good to see so many people were affected by this era of gaming from Sega the same way that I was.

The battle system in the later SMT games, especially after 3 is one of the best turn based systems I've ever played. It was a refinement of FFXs in so many ways. It encouraged you to "break" it as it were.

Then there's games like Grandia 2... And Shenmue. God, I love Shenmue these days. The first one is brilliant in so many ways I didn't recognize when I played it when it came out. Absolutely wonderful game. The track that plays when Ryo and Guizhang fight the Mad Angels at the dock, "Earth and Sea", takes me back. For me, it's the most perfect Christmas game that Sega ever made

It's very common with RPGs of that era (and all eras really) that the developers don't test every edge case and end up leaving ultra-powered (and just as many or more close to useless) builds in the game. Every feature added increases the possibility of breakage by some quadratic factor. Once your battle system hits a certain level of complexity it's close to inevitable.

Even carefully developed modern games like Baldur's Gate 3 have game breaking build options.

To be fair to e.g. Baldur's Gate, finding game breaking builds appeals to many people in the core audience of that sort of game along with classic TTRPG players. Making those builds harder to achieve by accident is a good thing, but doing away with them entirely would probably be detrimental for the intended audience. True brilliance is also have systems that make that sort of build still fun to play, e.g. BG3 has some pretty amusing hidden interactions if you steamroll events you're not supposed to be able to win.

Reminds me of a game-breaking strategy in the (interesting, flawed) hybrid RTS/RPG War in Middle Earth (1988).

The RTS part involved moving armies and heroes around to fight Sauron / Saruman’s armies and defend your citadels. There was a game loss condition if you lost something like three citadels in battle.

But if you abandoned your citadels, their subsequent occupation didn’t trigger the loss. So you could simply aggregate all your forces into one giant army and take Barad Dur and Mt Doom by force.

Probably an under-appreciated game, historically.

IMO the way around that is to make breaking the game a requirement. If it's already an accidental part of the fun, might as well make it intentional!

I'd put Noita in that category. I usually describe it as "broken both ways", because (as a rogue like) you have very little healing, and the enemies are punishingly hard. Not only that, but it's a full falling sand+physics simulation, so certain elements will randomly combine and kill you in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. On the flip side, the wand system is near turing-complete, and gets abused in the most crazy ways, to the point that you can do millions of damage per tick. One of the most chaotic and fun games I've played!

That makes games that aren't fun unless you're a wizard with the systems. They have their place, but I'm not a fan.

Personally, I think devs should embrace some stuff being broken. It's a single player game, it doesn't need balance. One of my favorite RPGs is FF8 precisely because you can trivialize the game if you engage with the character building systems. It feels awesome to stomp things with your broken party.

Perhaps "requirement" was a poor phrasing of the idea. "Feature?"

> Personally, I think devs should embrace some stuff being broken. It's a single player game, it doesn't need balance.

Exactly! Bravely Default & Octopath Traveler's job systems are built around the idea that the system should be breakable. BD2 even has a push-your-luck system that adds a multiplier for one-shotting multiple encounters in a row: you can get like a 50 percent rewards boost from random encounters if your team is able to "go infinite" against the current enemy mobs. And there are skills to remove damage caps, so you know they thought about it.

OT did kinda tone that down some to add the timing and break mechanics; if you land enough hits on enemy weaknesses, they lose their current turn, and go into a stun status next turn (but go first the turn after that, so no stun locking!). But you still get end game builds that max out boost points every turn; you just can't usually one shot bosses.

I think Disgaea fits into that class. The solution to every problem is "more levels", but the game is basically built around that. I think it's also fun to craft your own challenges out of the raw materials given to you... to get as many levels as quickly as possible, to win at minimum levels, to win with only X, to ignore Y and Z, etc.

I think besides the mechanics, the other thing that makes the grandia/grandia 2 battle system so fun is how snappy all the animations and interactions are. You never really feel like you're waiting for things to happen even though it is semi turn based.

My first experience with Grandia was Grandia II as well but on PS2. I ended up getting the PC version as well, which at the time was fairly novel to see JRPG's on PC. Grandia II is still one of my nostalgic favorites. As you mentioned the typical turn based combat with positioning was a fun addition that could change your combat experience each time. Was like an evolution of the Chrono Trigger combat system.

I find myself designing a TRPG (Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea) with Grandia time & space mechanics in my head; take position even a bit more seriously than Grandia did, but build on a TRPG balance and skill structure. Basically end up with a much more dynamic take on the TRPG, which has always been a bit of a static experience. The canceling mechanics coming from Grandia would be banger in that sort of more dynamic TRPG.

There is, of course, a lot of games all around that space but I don't know of anything that quite matches what I'm laying out here.

(Although the cancellation mechanics would need some careful attention. It allows for a whole bunch of weak characters to keep a single strong character down by always cancelling what they're doing. I suppose just turning it into a skill check itself instead of being 100% as it is in Grandia would do the trick, though.)

Try the Lunar series. It has something similar.

Grandia II is the only JRPG I've ever really truly enjoyed the battle system of. I feel like with a lot of JRPG's I'm sitting around doing math.

Grandia 2 was largely just timing things such that if you did it right you would bonk the enemies turn back repeatedly and they'd never get to attack. Way more fun.

The very first area at the start of the game actually encouraged this if you experimented even a little: Combo is the default attack but it doesn't defeat those early enemies so they'll hit you back, but the battles start with just the right timing so if you use Critical first it'll knock them back so your next Combo would hit and defeat them without you taking any damage.

Grandia II battle system also breaks when you get Teo. An area effect Critical? Basically allows you to completely control every battle even if you haven't invested in a board wiping Uber character.

Grandia II's battle system was really great but the story and voice acting was so rough haha, I ended up not caring about any of the characters and skipping all that I could to get to the combat

I don't think I've ever heard good voice acting in a JRPG, with the notable exception of Ys I & II for the TGCD, and that was released in 1989.

When the core mechanics are that good, it's frustrating to see them undermined by soft balancing