Let’s talk about the black sheep of the Kingdom Hearts franchise: Chain of Memories. This one still sticks out like a sore thumb next to the other installments: it had sprite-based graphics, strange (but oddly charming) writing, and especially card combat. The card combat part has proven quite polarizing among the fanbase, which is kind of understandable. The first game, which was the only other one out when CoM was released, had quickly and easily accessible gameplay that didn’t run roughshod too much all over the wonderful aesthetics and sweeping crossover ambitions.
CoM is almost a direct antithesis, recycling the same worlds wholesale and slapping on excuse plots for those (leaving the freshest material for the non-Disney segments) while its gameplay mechanics demanded the player’s full attention. Every action you take is determined by playing a card, and almost every card exists as part of a numbers-oriented system of “greater than, less than.” If you play a 4, an enemy can play a 6 and “break” your card, for example (“0” cards have the distinction of breaking any card but also being broken by any card depending on when they’re played). Your ability from the first game to Guard attacks directly is gone, and Dodge Roll is much less useful, so card breaks are an essential mechanic to self-defense. For added fun, you can combine up to three cards (sacrificing the first card chosen for the rest of the battle) in a “sleight” for a special combo attack – as well as higher numeric strength, given that the three card values are added together for the attack.
To the player who enjoys more “pure” action games this probably sounds like torture, but it actually works very well, and here’s why in a word: visibility. Most JRPGs, for all their reliance on numbers, tend to make those numbers highly opaque. If you want an example, just look at the EV mechanic in Pokemon or the way character stats affect their offense/defense in Final Fantasy. A complicated series of behind-the-scenes equations drives most of the character progression and leaves the player with just a vague sense that a higher STR stat means harder hits.
With CoM, all cards are on the table. So to speak. If you play a 7 and your enemy plays a 9, your card gets cancelled and you immediately know why. If you want to access a certain sleight, the game tells you exactly which cards of what numeric values to combine to use it. If you want to engineer your entire deck around a set of boss-annihilating DPS sleights, or only load cards with higher numbers than what you know enemies can play, that’s entirely doable. To wit, the mechanics are conveyed well enough that you can master them early on by using strategy and basic arithmetic, rather than simply follow them with varying degrees of awareness throughout the game.
And the rules of the game are consistent for enemies too. Mobs have access only to pre-determined card values, thankfully never 0s, that are also shown on screen – such that you can learn them after a couple battles and revise your deck to counter if you want. Bosses have the same options as you in terms of playing 0s and sleights, but also the same weaknesses. Their 0s and sleights can be broken, they can be attacked while reloading, and they still have finite cards in their deck to play before doing so. If you take the time to optimize your deck, you can trivialize battles. And no enemy in the game is exempt from all these rules. It’s all-in-all more fun to learn the combat system here because it’s always expressed clearly.
A “what you see is what you get” approach serves RPGs better than you’d know from examining a lot of entries in the genre, since the defining trait of their gameplay is that it’s based on strategy rather than timing or execution. How they tend to play out, though, is that having stats is the key to victory, not employing them. The reason many of them can’t have clearer expressions of how their mechanics work is that it would reveal how little the battles are influenced by the player compared to Random Number Generators and the raw stats themselves. The near-automatic battles in Final Fantasy XIII get a lot of flak for their nature and exclusion of the player from the whole process, but it’s really just more honest about the player’s level of intellectual involvement than other installments in the series. These strange and large numbers floating above the characters’ heads don’t have to get in the way of the graphics and the narrative that way. And that’s fine, if that’s the kind of game you want to make.
Just, if you want to make one where you claim player involvement is supposed to be central, then make sure you communicate the rules of your game fairly enough that they can be involved and have it matter.
Gems and Relics 