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a stark change from chess to many grid based strategy games is how movement immediately gets homogenized. in chess every piece type has very different movement rules, but as soon as you remove the abstraction and put people in there like FE/FFT, suddenly it’s too weird for people to move that way

i bring this up because a part of my distaste for realism in games is how it has this homogenizing effect on the game’s design. as soon as your world starts to look real, you’re sort of making this promise that it will also behave more real. and so we drift away from grids and turn-based even

one of the reasons i really like pixel art is its abject refusal to go too far down that path. it always requires that you put your imagination forward, and leaves room for metaphors and mechanics that would feel entirely wrong in a less abstract environment

when you don’t give away all the details, it allows the imagination to fill in. the story here is “you adventure across a vast land with your allies, it takes days, maybe weeks” but in actual gameplay it takes like 1 minute but not when your game is realistic, and promises a realistic experience

Something I always really loved about Shining Force compared to FE was that the higher level spells could cast in ranges and hit multiple targets at once. Felt a little more "tactical". I still need to play Triangle Strategy, being able to make barriers etc in the demo was fun.

yeah magic was interesting. it did fixed damage that didn’t scale with levels, but to compensate it was not affected by physical defense, so was effective against high defense enemies. in the second game, this means that it doesn’t scale well as the HP pools balloon…