There is a refrain that I hear often on gaming sites: “turn-based combat in RPGs is dead.”  As anyone who has been paying attention knows, it is a favorite hobby of games journalists and bloggers to proclaim the death of this, that, or the other.  For instance, adventure gaming has been declared dead on more occasions than I can count, and yet seems to be enjoying quite a resurgence at the moment; episodic Monkey Island games, some fantastic-looking titles like Machinarium, and a host of others are popping up for download on a weekly basis.

So why the eulogies for turn-based (TB) combat?  The general consensus seems to be that TB combat is simply too boring in this new world of HD graphics and multiplayer FPSes. People want speed and twitch gaming, the writers say, and turn-based is just too slow and old-fashioned to keep people interested.

This is a pretty shallow way of thinking, I’d argue.  Yes, turn-based combat is by definition slower than real-time, but that does not automatically make it boring.  Boredom is in the eye of the beholder, and for those used to speed and action, turn-based systems must feel like a long walk through a muddy swamp.  But depth and choice can be exciting, and TB systems can usually offer those in spades.

USE YE ITEM

In the early days of turn-based RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior, TB combat was pretty darn simple. Choose an option: Fight, Item, Magic, or Escape, then watch as your little men stepped forward to carry out your choice (or not step forward at all, in the case of Dragon Warrior).  Feedback from the game was fast – the damage you dealt would appear, and the enemy would either die or not die.  Pretty simple, really.  Playing through a round of combat took almost no time at all, and entire combats could pass fairly quickly.

As the games got more complicated and the number of actions available in battle began to increase, players needed more time to consider their exact strategy for a round.  In Final Fantasy IV, I spent large chunks of time carefully weighing whether it was more worthwhile to have Rosa cast Shell to give us a defensive edge, or to heal up Cecil just in case the next attack came against him.  Battles were a strategic affair that focused on adapting plans to situation that changed each round.

When Final Fantasy VI came around, Square made a few tweaks to the classic TB system and introduced the concept of the Active Time Battle.  While still turn-based, the ATB system added a gauge that indicated how often a character would get to act.  While the player could see the ATB gauge for their party, they could not see the enemy’s.  Though the ATB system could be turned off for players who wanted to take as much time as they needed to play out their turns, in its standard mode it added a sense of urgency to the normal turn system, urging the player to make a decision before the enemy got a chance to go again.  This system showed up in several other Square games, including Chrono Trigger.

Frankly, at that point in my gaming life, I couldn’t imagine playing RPGs in any other way than with different forms of turn-based systems.  The PC side of things had a few games featuring real-time combat, such as Ultima VII and its brethren, but the combat in those games felt both secondary and shallow.  Point, click, hope for a kill.

WAITING FOR SUPER NOVA TO FINISH AGAIN

What I think began to sour turn-based combat in many people’s eyes could first be seen in Final Fantasy VII.  It followed the same ATB system as FFVI with relatively few tweaks here and there, like the Limit Break system.  And regardless of whether you love or hate the game, one thing everyone agrees on is that the unskippable summon animations were just too long. Instead of a rapid-fire progression through rounds, players had to sit and watch as the Knights of the Round came tromping out for the 800th time, taking up what felt like ever-longer stretches of battle.

Obviously, FFVII was incredibly popular; possessing a turn-based system certainly didn’t hurt it.  Its successors followed suit all the way through XII, and therein lies part of the problem.  While the systems didn’t change all that much, the animations, effects, and all the other bells and whistles became more detailed, and worse, lengthier.  Players saw the same old system, but rounds took longer and longer to play out.  It seems only natural in this situation that people would start to find things a tad… stale.

Compared with some of the flashy, real-time systems that were becoming more common, and it’s understandable that many people began to view turn-based as the past, headed for the junk pile.

WHAT NOW?

The trick is to freshen up turn-based systems with something new.  Fortunately, there have been a handful of games recently that have shown some excellent ways of doing this, and it’s worthwhile to take a look at what they’ve done.

One of the easier ways to enhance turn-based is to draw the player in with some realtime elements.  Some of the earliest, primitive examples of this go aback to FFVI and Sabin’s blitz system, which required the player to input fighting-game style commands to pull off moves.  More recently, Mother 3, released in 2007, used the classic Earthbound combat system (which is really just the Dragon Warrior combat system) with an addition called “rhythm combat.”  Whenever players launch an attack, they can continue to press the attack button in time with the rhythm of the background music playing.  Successfully keeping up with the rhythm results in additional hits and greater damage.  Keeping the beat is not as easy as it sounds, as the songs don’t keep to simple 4/4 time or anything so pedestrian. The key here is that players can ignore the system entirely if they choose to do so, but for those willing to try a little twitch-gaming, the opportunity is there for reward.

In a similar vein, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story also uses an interactive turn-based system.  The Mario RPG series has been developing this style of play since its early days on the SNES. At the most basic level, whenever players commands Mario to jump attack an enemy, if the players time their button press correctly, they can bounce Mario off an enemy’s head and gain an extra attack.  On the defensive side, players can often avoid enemy attacks with a well-timed jump, or even turn things around and reflect an attack back at an enemy with a skilled swing of the hammer.  I’ve been playing this recently and am just about at the ending, and the system has kept me focused on every single battle as an exciting affair.

Just as in Mother 3, players can choose to ignore these elements, but this will make their life pretty difficult.  They’ll be taking a lot more damage and dealing out a lot less.  Fortunately, the twitch skills required are generally easier than the rhythm system of Mother 3, so everything feels pretty well-balanced.

On the other side of things, rather than add interactive elements, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor takes the standard turn-based system and breaks it up into two phases — the battle map and the combat screen — allowing short rounds to be interspersed with strategic movement.  This allows a longer battle that may take many rounds to feel more digestible, with small chunks of combat followed by opportunities to rethink strategy.

In these simple ways, designers allow the player the have all the time they’d like to sit and think about their actions while still keeping them focused on the combat at hand. These fights become far more involved affairs than simply selecting Fight over and over again.  I can say, in all honesty, all three of those games kept me thoroughly engrossed in every battle, from the simplest peon enemies to the toughest boss battles.  Compare that to, say, Star Ocean, which had realtime combat that I found far more repetitive and boring.

DON’T DIG THAT GRAVE JUST YET

The overall message here is that people calling for the death of turn-based combat should really be calling on designers to try shaking things up, rather than relying on the same formulas they’ve been using for twenty-plus years. Being turn-based doesn’t inherently mean something is boring, just as being real-time doesn’t inherently mean it’s exciting. It’s all up to what the designers do with it.  Some designers have shown that it doesn’t take much to spice things up while maintaining the classic elements of TB systems. If a few more can learn to break out of the mold, I think those media experts will have to put their shovels away until the next target of their doomsaying comes around.