werezompire Glad to see you made it over!
I like FFXII's grid-based progression system so I think that's a good decision. Three questions/thoughts:
1. How much of the grid will be visible from the beginning? Will you only be able to see what's located in adjacent squares? Can you see everything right off the bat? If everything on the grid is visible from the beginning, I think the player might see something they
really want and then feel like they have to grind towards it, rather than organically exploring the grid and appreciating every small increase they get (this was a problem with the sphere grid from FFX imo). On the other hand, if nothing is visible except the adjacent squares, then leveling up becomes less satisfying because it feels like randomly flailing around rather than executing a customization plan.
2. Will level-ups unlock a square adjacent to "the character," or a square adjacent to any square you have previously unlocked? Again going back to the sphere grid from FFX, one annoying thing was how things unlocked based on where the character was on the grid, not where the character had previously unlocked things. So there was a lot of backtracking involved on the sphere grid in the late-game because the character's little icon had to move across large swaths of the sphere grid before reaching new areas that hadn't been unlocked yet.
3. I'm a fan of the ability to respec, but being able to total-party respec between every mission might be too lenient, it's possible it would remove any sense of gravity from the decisions about what abilities to unlock. Respeccing is good but I'd probably limit it in some way.
The concept for the game sounds great, I'll definitely be picking it up.
Labadal Thanks for bringing this over, I'll link to it in the OP. You can either post them in here or put them in a separate thread, either way I'll highlight and link to it, so it's up to you.
After looking into this thread I feel like there should've been separate JRPG and (W?)CRPG OTs. It feels like 80+% of the OT is mostly about JRPGs and a lot of JRPG players are mostly console players that rarely play or have interest in classic party type of CRPGs so there's little overlap among the users here. It's not even that I think they are just too different to lump them together.
CRPGs can have a separate thread if someone wants to make it, similar to how Japanese DungeonRPGs have a separate thread, and I'll link to it in the OP as well.
I think 80% JRPG talk is a bit high though, I would peg it as more 60-40 towards JRPGs, but maybe that's because I participated in a lot of the CRPG discussions, but don't participate in the Trails discussions since I haven't played them yet.
I also think there's very few JRPG players who are outright hostile to CRPGs. If anything, most people want to play them but are intimidated by the various sub/systems and D&D-based mechanics. Ideally some people will play CRPGs mentioned ITT that they wouldn't otherwise, which I think is preferable to breaking CRPGs off into a separate thread so that it's easy to pretend they don't exist unless you're already into them.
I'm near finishing ELEX and would probably like to try to jump into a JRPG next, asking for suggestions for PC.
My experience with JRPGs is almost exclusively the Final Fantasy and Persona franchise.
If you want something shorter than the Trails games, the Spotlight RPG right now, Xanadu Next, is also by Falcom and is apparently 15-25 hours. It's an action RPG rather than turn-based, but I started it over the weekend and it's very good so far.
Which Final Fantasy games have you played? You could also hit one of the other entries in the series, most of them are on Steam.
Planning to replay and re-platinum FFXV, does the digit premium edition has all the content released? Also do they have plans to at least integrate the dlc to the story? Having them all of them on a menu is immersion breaking.
I don't think they've said anything definitive regarding DLC integration, but the digital premium edition includes the Season Pass for everything up to Episode Ignis. At one point there was an interview where Tabata stated that even more DLC was incoming and that there might be a second Season Pass (lol) though, which wouldn't be included with the digital premium edition.
If you're holding out on XV waiting for it to be complete, I would say just go ahead and play it. It's a functional, acceptable game now, not a hollow husk like it was at launch.