Dream Master

Verbs

• attack
• restrain
• charge
• search
• item
• escape

Stats

• EP (hit points)
• SP (experience points)
• Str
• Def
• Lck

Thoughts

okay, there’s some interesting things going on here. It’s one-on-one, but you can aim at different points on the enemy. You have 3 attacks: regular, “restrain” which is low-damage but high chance to hit, and “charge” which is the opposite: low chance to hit but high damage. Enemy special attacks give you a quick-time event! 3 directions to dodge; fail and you get hit. Also interesting is the luck attribute: this appears to be set per fight; low luck means restrains will likely be more useful, high luck will allow you to get away with charge attacks more.

At this point, strategy seems to center entirely around the luck stat, but I haven’t delved further in. It seems like items play a pretty large role later once you start collecting them, and I don’t know what “search” does…

Dragon Warrior 2 combat analysis

Verbs

• fight
• run
• parry
• item

Stats

• strength
• agility
• HP / max HP
• magic power
• MP / max MP
• attack power
• defense power
• XP
• items (…)

Comments

A little has changed in the sequel. Most notably, enemies now attack in groups and so this offers a little bit of strategy: the player can choose to either take out the strongest enemy first, or pick off the weakest quickly & then take down the strongest. Additionally, the verbs have changed – instead of magic, there’s now parry. This appears to be a simple defend option (makes the player harder to hit).

It appears that both player & enemies choose their actions, and then agility (randomly?) determines action order each turn, but I could be wrong. It seems that in the first, asides from surprise attacks, player always goes first.

Now, I believe that further down the road, the player can pick up more party members. (pretty positive – there’s no magic option in combat but there’s MP) But for the purposes of this exercise, I’m gonna leave that open for now.

Dragon Warrior combat analysis

This’ll be the first in a handful of simple RPG combat analyses. I’m starting with Dragon Warrior because it’s basically the ur-CRPG. It doesn’t get much simpler than this. Again, I’m gonna try & start out simple and I may come back and expand these as my process evolves and I hone in on whatever it is I’m looking for. First pass

Verbs

• fight
• spell
• run
• item

Stats

• strength
• agility
• HP / max HP
• MP / max MP
• attack power
• defense power
• items
  • weapon
  • armor
  • shield

Rules

Simple, turn-based. Combat in Dragon Warrior is 1-on-1. There’s a chance that the enemy will attack first – probably based on agility. It’s straightforward player action / enemy action rounds after that. There’s not much more to say – Dragon Warrior is the baseline against which I’ll judge other RPGs.

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