And now a gigantic (yes, you can groan) block of text nobody will ever want to read about Ray Gigant's battle system.
So. It really tries to do something new. I'm not entirely sure it pulls it off all that well but I do think it deserves
some points for trying, and it does have a few interesting results.
Normally your health is important. In Ray Gigant, not so much. It even regenerates to full after every battle unless you go and get your characters knocked out.
In Ray Gigant what matters is AP. Everything revolves around the AP gauge.
Or, erm, the Active gauge, which I will continually
refer to as the AP gauge because
that's what it is. Anyway, that thing on the left.
You gain AP by either regenerating it during battles by opting to do that instead of attacking or, alternatively, by getting AP bonuses for ending battles within a certain amount of turns (turn 1 gets you 25AP, turn 2 gets you 20AP, and so on).
Everything your characters do costs a certain amount of AP, and your characters share a gauge that maxes out at 100. If you start a battle with a lot of AP you essentially have free reign to do what you want, whereas if you start one with low AP you have to be picker about your choices.
(And if you retreat from battle the gauge drops to zero).
Your character has a whole slew of skills, spells, and items they can use, but all of them have an AP cost. This means you have to weigh up what you actually want to achieve from the battle.
You have two sets of "tactics" available, which is a set of three moves tied to the square, triangle, and circle buttons. You have to assign the skills to them in advance but you have access to both "sets" in battle and can mix them freely.
Every "turn" each character can use up to five of their moves.
The AP gauge is the limiter.
You
could set everyone up with their best attacks or heals but those are
expensive, and depending on what your AP gauge looks like you could end up in battles where none of them are actually usable and characters are stuck getting hit by enemies while they attempt to regenerate AP.
Alternatively you could opt to give each character a balanced skill-set that would allow them all to act in a variety of situations, or you could front-load one heavy hitter with a load of big moves and assign cheapo moves to the other characters to give them something to do.
Additionally some moves don't play well with others -- the two freebie moves for example become the sole move for their turn (there's one for gaining AP and one for self-healing).
It's definitely an interesting idea, but in practice you tend to end up using the same moves over and over again, or relying heavily on one character.
I confess that in regular battles with Kyle I kind of defaulted to
[Not Kyle][Regen AP] [Kyle][Attack x5!] [Not Kyle][Regen AP]
Which... isn't the most interesting thing to do, but tended to work more often than not, and tended to keep the AP gauge at a relatively stable level.
Sometimes it does switch things up on you to stop you acting quite so brainlessly because some characters do lousy damage to certain enemy types with their base skill and would need to use a more specialised one to do anything (or, alternatively, to spend their time backing up another character who CAN damage that enemy) but that's about it.
Also, there are different types of battle. In battles with Blue enemy icons all actions cost half their usual AP. It's great, you can go crazy with all those skills you never use... or you can just spam your regular attack five times on each character which will kill almost everything. Yeah. If you want to be boring, you can.
With Yellow enemy icons all actions cost their regular AP. Whatever.
The Red ones are the interesting ones, because then all actions cost double, which makes it a lot trickier to decide what you want to do. You have to be more careful, and weigh your options a little more.
Sometimes you can just choose to avoid enemies, but on other occasions you have to battle them to progress, so if you've left yourself with low AP it can be trickier (and if you do skip a load of enemies you'll have less resources to spend on your character trees so will end up with worse gear).
Also, later in the game the kind of traps that would normally damage your health in other dungeon crawlers do damage to your AP instead, which is kind of cool.
Now the other way of mixing things up is the Parasite mode, which... actually, I enjoy using far too much.
You have a "Drive" percentage that rises every turn, and when it hits max all your moves start costing health instead of AP.
It's far more fun, because then you have to balance everything against your health instead. Do you use all those skills and leave yourself low on health? Do you mix it in with heals (that cost health to recover health x_x) to try and keep your characters topped up. Which characters do you do that with? Are some of them slower than others?
... unfortunately it's never quite as tricky as it could have been. Each set of characters has at least one who can play healer to top everyone up, and as long as you're paying even a little bit of attention it's relatively easy to keep things balanced on that front.
Even so, I honestly enjoy parasite mode a whole lot, and it's great fun for boss battles where if you balance things right you can just keep going and going.
That said, if you don't balance things properly you can box yourself into a corner with it, because if you aren't careful your characters can just keel over and die because you've blown all your health and don't have enough left to use any more skills, or left yourself too low so an enemy can finish you off
Also, the Blue/Yellow/Red Enemy system applies to Parasite mode too, so if you're against a red enemy everything will cost twice as much health and that can be
nasty - if you're particularly unlucky/un-careful you can leave yourself without enough health to do ANYTHING except retreat unless you have enough points on your SBM gauge to bail yourself out that way (because activating slash beat mode clears parasite mode and resets the drive gauge).
The main disappointing thing is that for the most part Boss battles aren't actually more challenging. They're just longer by virtue of the bosses having more health.
They do look cool though.
So. Erm. Yes.
It tries a lot of interesting things, but if you don't really want to engage with them you can do really boring things with it because most of the interesting things don't actually NEED to be done, which is a shame.
So far (I'm on Chapter 17) I have to say that yes, the game has been easy. That hasn't stopped it from being enjoyable, but it is a little disappointing that it hasn't provided more of a challenge.
The thing is, I might have actively broken my ability to determine some of how difficult it is because I compulsively grind, and I went out of my way to reset dungeons to get more gems so I could buy out my characters command trees and boost their weapons/armour. So maybe if I hadn't done all of that it might have been a bit trickier? Maybe?
(But I kind of suspect not).
That said, it isn't without challenge.
Chapter 11 did have me busting out some paper to map on because one of the dungeon floors was driving me nuts, and Chapter 17 (where I am now) is the first time the game has actually sent me running out of a dungeon with my tail between my legs after I got very sloppy and severely overestimated my party. I'm sure it will be fine once I switch up some
skills equipment, but it does mean that I'll at least have to think about it a bit
Also, not
entirely battle related really, but the music throughout the game is really, really excellent
(And sometimes the 'talking' during battles sounds really, really creepy x_x)
