This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Kilyle: Okay, would like to see some tropes put up here, but can't offhand think of which tropes they are (or, technically, if we even have all of these tropes yet):
- Units that level up over time and turn into awesome characters, but if they die they're lost for good and you have to start back with a low-level character and level him up all over again. This leads to an inordinate amount of mourning lost chances, assuming you don't just back up to the last save and try that battle anew.
- Having to deal with a low-level, low-action character for a while until he levels up to a cooler character with invaluable abilities. And trying to get these guys experience when you don't dare set them in the thick of battle. E.g., the weak pixie moving up to the fairy, who can make a character act twice in one turn.
- Having to stick your weak-defense character out in the thick of battle to get a devastating area-of-effect attack... assuming he doesn't die before his next turn kicks in. (The fairy's two-actions-this-round ability gets good use here.)
- Having to not move in order to use certain major attacks, so you get to choose between "move and use a lesser attack" or "stay put and use a better attack, but not in range to hit the units you want to hit".
- Any given side has characters you're probably going to hate dealing with (personality-wise; sometimes stat-wise). Not sure if these are The Scrappy or not, but you choose your side in part based on the characters you do want to spend time with, and in part based on avoiding the annoying ones you don't. Or you just send the annoying characters out on missions a lot (which has its own problems).
- Do we have a trope about character-combination cutscenes? The "if you bring Bob to the battle and Alice is there, they start talking about something unique to their relationship"?
- Upgrading your units to cooler animals? E.g., turn a roc into a phoenix.
- Related: Turning a unit into a 180-degree shift in morality or type. This game has items to turn an Angel into a Demon or the like.
- Some trope about artificial Cap - not sure if that's the right one or if there's a more specific one, but this game has at least three instances of it:
- First, you can only have so many animals total (across your whole army).
- Secondly, there's a cap on your... mana?... um, forget which word is used of the points whereby you buy and maintain pets, but it only goes up to 9999, so if you lose territory, have a lot of pets, and are thusly at negative income, you can drop to the red side of the ledger pretty quickly.
- And thirdly, each given character can only hold 6 pets, and they can only add up to a total of X points, where X is a given character's rune points (animal control points, basically), so you end up messing around trying to get the best combo for the amount a character can hold.
- The balance between devastating attacks and miss percentage. Golems would be more useful units if they could actually land their hits consistently, but then they'd be overpowered.
- Teeny, defenseless creatures having tweaked stats that make you not want to risk attacking them. In this case, pixies: They're difficult to hit for some reason, and if you attack them and don't kill them, they might hit you for like 10 damage... or they might whip out a critical for something like 165, out of nowhere. Similarly, unicorns not only strike back fiercely but can kick you a square to the side, possibly messing up your formation enough to cause problems for several turns (let the enemy through your ranks, not have your guy in the right spot for his spell, move your guy out of a defensive bonus area (or your castle), put him in the way of your breath attacks, etc.).
- Area-of-effect spells; also linear spells that strike two, three, four, even five spaces in a row.
- Geno spells that only affect the enemy (or, for healing, only affect your units) rather than everyone in the area-of-effect.
- Status ailments. I know we have the trope; anyone care to describe which ailments are in the game?
...anyway, those are the ones I can think of offhand. I'd also like to see the tropes organized into a more useful fashion, separating the character tropes from the gameplay tropes for example. Thanks!
