I was half asleep the other day when an idea came to me you know how battles in 2d games were against static sprites? Yeah that always made battles in these games less interesting than the 3d games and square seem to recognize this issue and that's why I think they vastly improved upon battles in 7/8/9 with them becoming more cinematic and all...
But how to improve the 2d games battles? Maybe not through a remake like FF4? Well here is where my idea comes into play what if you can bring all these static sprites to sprites similar to the player character and the party? With animation and all....we already see something similar to this in the cecil vs cecil fight or kain vs cecil so the engine must be capable of doing this.
I already had an idea for some animations for Xdeath , basically you want to copy paste the sprite stance into the artstyle similar to playable character but with the same pose they have as the static sprite , alright now what if Xdeath wanna melee attack? So picture him in this new artstyle and what he does is he raises his hand the one on the sword not the other one , he raises it grabbing his sword and in an instant the sword goes 180 degrees and he cuts left or right here you can make the animation portray how strong Xdeath melee attack is by making the cut super fast...or his spellcast animation can be his other hand where he makes it into a fist surrounded by a small black ball you know he is a bit of X zone fan so that can work , also Xdeath isn't human I think he is the only one to not be a human in terms of antagonists? So he may not exactly feel pain when hit like humans you can make this into his "hit" animation where he takes damage he hardly flinches you can make him slightly flinch or hurt but it should be quite subtle to get him to this intimidating feeling where he hardly is effected by your attacks , of course changing spirtes style similar to ours would mean wounded animation the animation that plays when one of the party members is on low health I don't have any ideas for this so I will leave it to you to picture those.
In FF6 the vector soldiers already have a model all you need is some extra animations and you done , oh and the magitek armor could use some changes to make it look similar to its art depiction , these games don't have an exact death animation more of "ow I got hit" then is already laying on ground next frame , this means death animations may not be possible save for boss fights , but fallen enemies can make the battle look better like there is this many dead enemies you killed or you can make them dissipate after few seconds of them dying.
I also thought of how the empire of palamecia from FF2 would have its soldiers look like now since the FMV intro shows the soldiers to not exactly be humans uhm indicated by red eyes and strange sounds they make not to mention their strange resistance one gets stabbed in the neck and just walks away like nothing happened...you can make the soldiers have red eyes I think that be good change I will let your imagination do the work for they should look like , now when an enemy attacks you may want them to move forward like our character does when they attack its a good indication that someone did a move.
With this idea in mind it makes the pixel remaster feel like a wasted chance to finally have the same sprite style for all objects in battle.
Is this even possible? And how much of it is possible....I'm not into modding RPG games especially since I see no need to change or add anything to The FF games so maybe there might have been an attempt at this that I'm not aware of....
I did spend 3 days looking for the black stone went around the whole world and fought thunder hawks a bunch of times before I recruited yuffie otherwise I would have probably been level 60 when I got to sephrioth
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