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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

i also use FF7 here because i think low poly can actually serve this same purpose as well. as designers were transitioning away from this more abstract style of design but i don’t think they realized what they were leaving behind

it’s had this really awkward effect where as we increase the fidelity, the metaphor breaks down and suddenly the world seems less vast and the adventures less epic. a faraway city is just like… over there and we’ll have like one conversation on the way, instead of weeks of hardship and journey.

I feel like Elden Ring had a good balance. You can get to pretty much every place you see, eventually, but the art direction often distorts these vistas for dramatic effect. (For example, making the Erdtree far larger from certain vantage points than mere perspective would allow.)

Seeing the curve of the planet in the distance in FF7 as you walk across those vast, lonely continents. 😍

yeah while it doesn’t look nearly as beautiful as the pixel art games that came immediately before it, it still achieves the effect to some degree. i actually got to fly around the *world*

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…