Desperation attacks

[awall]

I'm curious; what do people look for in a desperation attack system?

There are seven rpgs that I'm familiar with that include some form of desperation attack. I'll give a quick synopsis of them for those who aren't familiar with how they work, and then try to explain what I think an ideal desperation attack system should be like.

FF6's Desperation Attacks: The only one of these systems without an "official" name, this is (I believe) the first RPG ever to include something like this. When your character is in near-fatal condition - that us, under 1/8 of their HP remaining - and you select the Fight command, there is a 1/16 chance that instead of executing a normal attack, they'll do a special move that is waaaaaaaay stronger than their basic attack. Sometimes it even hits all enemies.
Good points: Gives you an incentive to take risks and leave your characters at low HP. Also gives you an incentive to use the "Fight" command instead of special abilities (which tend to be better).
Bad points: Desperation attacks don't come up often enough to be worth leaving your characters at low HP, nor are they really worth it once you reach the middle of the game and start getting special abilities that do as much or more damage than a desperation attack. Also, all desperation attacks do the same thing moreorless. Granted, this is supposed to be a "beefed-up" form of the basic attack, so it makes sense that they should do damage; but it'd be nice to see a bit of variety.

FF7's Limits: As your characters take damage, their "limit" guage rises. Once it fills up, their "Attack" command is replaced with "Limit." Each character has several different skills available to them, most of which deal damage to one/all enemies, but some of which are tactical attacks (i.e. bad status or MP damage) and a few are even defensive techniques.
Good points: You get to choose what you want your characters to do when they use a Limit. Provides differentiation between characters that is missing from the materia system used by the rest of the game.
Bad points: Despite your "choice" in what your characters do, there seems to be a "right choice" most of the time (i.e. one attack is more powerful than the others). Also, because Limit can be saved up, this advocates the strategy in which you don't use your Limits at all until you get to the boss and then all of your characters unload at once. However, one way by which they (successfully) deal with this is by making your learning of more Limits partially dependent on how often you use the ones you have.

FF8's Limit Breaks: Whenever your character's turn comes up, there is a chance that they will be able to execute a limit break. While I don't know the exact formula for determining whether this will occur, it is something proportional to your Spirit stat and inversely proportional to how much HP you have remaining (i.e. less HP = greater chance of being able to do a Limit Break). Limit Breaks vary greatly by character, and range from uber-powerful physical strikes to strategic spells.
Good Points: Huge diversity in what Limit Breaks can do. Many of them are more interactive than a normal attack. Gives you an incentive to keep your characters at low HP.
Bad Points: This system suffers from a rather severe bug: it recalculates whether you are able to perform a Limit Break attack every time it brings up the menu for your character. If your character's turn comes up and they don't have Limit Break as an option, you can press circle to switch to the next character (even if no other character is ready) and when the first character's menu comes up again, it will determine again whether they can do a Limit Break. By exploiting this, you can ensure that your characters at low HP will execute a Limit Break every turn, which makes battles way too easy.
Disregarding this bug, there are very few flaws in this system. While the specifics could stand to be tweaked (the main character's are far too powerful compared to other characters', and some of them have painfully long animations), I can't think of any major weaknesses in the theory of the system.

FF9's Trance: Like FF7, your characters have a guage that rises as they take damage. Unlike FF7, this does not represent a single attack, but when it fills up they get three turns of being "Tranced." While tranced, a character gets some sort of bonus; this ranges anywhere from double damage to being able to cast two spells at once to other interesting effects.
Good Points: With the exception of the main character, Trance typcially doesn't make anybody powerful to the point of trivializing the battle. Rather, it just gives you an edge for a few turns. I really like the effects Trance generates on your characters.
Bad Points: Trance is useful when it happens, but it's incredibly difficult to manage. It takes a loooooooong time to build up your bar, and when it does fill up, it automatically puts you in Trance mode. This means that you will often find your trance wasted (you tell your character to use a hi-potion, and they get hit into trance before they have a chance to execute the command; the hi-potion turn will then count as one of their three trance turns. Worse, a character will often get Tranced right before the battle ends, causing him to waste his entire Trance guage without getting to use it once).

FFX's Overdrives: This is almost identical to FF7's Limit system, with a few differences. First of all, it is possible to raise your Overdrive guage through means other than taking damage. Also, Overdrive doesn't replace attack; even if your overdrive guage is full, you can still ignore it and attack normally.
Good Points: Gives you several options about what to do and when to do it. In other words, you have a lot of strategic control of how you use your Overdrives.
Bad Points: Just about everything I said about FF7's Limits also holds true for FFX's Overdrives; since having your gauge full doesn't compromise your ability to perform normal attacks, it's even easier to save it up for boss fights. While the alternate means of filling up your gauge are interesting, it's not such a great idea in my opinion. The purpose of these attacks is to allow for comebacks in dangerous situations and/or to reward risky behavior. Some of the Overdrive modes allow this, but others allow you to fill up your gauge by healing party members, winning battles, or even just by taking turns. This sort of defeats the purpose of a "desperation attack" in my opinion.

FFT:A's Judge Points: I'm not sure that this officicially counts as a "desperation attack," but I'll include it anyway. As you KO enemies (or occasionally perform other actions) you accumulate Judge Points. You can cash these in to execute a very powerful "Combo" attack. Alternatively, if you can build up to 10 (the max) then you can unleash it all at once to blast all enemies for what usually amounts to about 2/3 of their max HP or MP (the former is obviously preferable, but not everybody can do it).
Good Points: Well... I suppose this is a way to include desperation attacks in a tactics game... but I really don't like this system. It works well with the plot... that's about the only thing I'll give it.
Bad points: Where do I start. First of all, only your party can do it; not enemies. For a game where enemies are supposed to have access to all the same stuff you do, that doesn't seem fair (enemies can build up JP... they just never use them). Secondly, these points carry over from battle to battle, so there's a lot of the "save 'em up for the boss" thing going on. Finally, this system doesn't hand out judge points to help the underdog catch up - it hands out JP when you KO somebody. This means that it's helping the winner get even more ahead! So much for balance.

This last isn't a Final Fantasy, but I felt I should include it anyway.

Xenogears's Hyper Mode: Characters have an "Attack Level" which starts every battle at 0 and increases by one every time you attack, up to a max of 3. You can cash it in at any time to unleash a more-powerful-than-usual attack called a Deathblow. Higher attack levels allow more powerful deathblows. However, there's another use for this: any character at Attack Level 3 (i.e. that means you can't spend your attack levels on deathblows) has a certain chance every turn of entering "Hyper Mode." This chance increases as your character's HP gets lower. Once in Hyper Mode, you have three turns of being amazingly uber-powerful (not just attacks, but other stuff too), sorta like FF9's Trance. Afterward, your Attack Level resets to 0.
Good points: The point of a desperation attack system is to give you a chance to come back from a nasty situation, and encourage you to take risky or disadvantageous actions. This system does both: Hyper Mode requires that you build up attack levels but not use them, and it has a greater chance of activating if you don't heal when your HP gets low. I think it's really cool.
Bad points: Every character is moreorless the same in Hyper Mode. Some variety would have been nice.

------------------------

So, the recurring themes you may have noticed me talking about above suggest the following:
* A desperation attack system should help you come back from being behind. It shouldn't help (or at least not as much) if you're already winning a battle.
* A desperation attack system should encourage risky behavior. If you can trigger it just by sitting around and healing a bunch and waiting for it to kick in, then it's too easy to just play turtle.
* A desperation attack system should not carry over between battles. You should not be able to intentionally get behind and take risky actions in an easy random encounter in order to build up a gauge, then head into the boss battle and unleash it all at the beginning to devastate the boss.
* Desperation attacks are nice when they do something other than just causing a boatload of damage. Also, it's nice when there's variety between different characters.

Actually, forget what I said about describing my own system for this. While I do have a system worked out, this post has already gotten long enough and I'd rather get some feedback on my assessment of the existing systems before I go off on my own. I'll talk about my own thing some other time. Do people agree with my analysis of the afforementioned systems, or do y'all have other opinions? What other systems are out there that you think should be considered in this thread?

[Mistress Sheena]

I like Xenogears' system of Deathblows, because they're just that badass. I have yet to go hypermode though and use the Infinate combos. =P

[relm]

When looking at desperation attacks, i want something that is powerful, reliable, and fast.

I hated the FF6 one. It was so random.
However the FF7 limit breaks were such an improvement. Because they were so strong.
In FFTA they had skills like Last-Haste or Last-Berserk
which triggered a response @ low health. I liked that too. Fast & Reliable.

[Atma-Noah]

Well some other games that have a similiar system that i know of would be:

ToS(Tales of Symphonia): I would say this has two types of Desperation style attacks. The first would be the Union Attack which is a bad that is filled through attacking and once filled and used allows the player to have each of the party members attack. From certain attacks used combos may form doing even more damage.

The second would be overlimit. This allows Sheena to summon but happens to every character. It prevents any flinching from the opponents attacks and allows you to link a good amount of hits together. Enemies can also be overlimited.

Legend of Dragoon: If memory serves. Each character had a bar and once filled would allow your character to change to the dragoon form and use a special attack.

I'm sure there are others aswell.

I do agree with you about the Desperation attacks you listed. I think that being able to keep the bar filled in certain games was easy and took away from the challenge but I also found that later on in the games it was almost necessary to have those bars filled or close to it in order to beat certain bosses at all. Which made you rely on them to much.

[Angantyr]

Originally Posted by Atma-Noah

I do agree with you about the Desperation attacks you listed. I think that being able to keep the bar filled in certain games was easy and took away from the challenge but I also found that later on in the games it was almost necessary to have those bars filled or close to it in order to beat certain bosses at all. Which made you rely on them to much.

I would have to agree with you here, I have never even attempted to try beat Ultimecia without using Squall's Limit break, and even though I haven't done it yet I would find it very difficult to beat Nemisis or all the Dark Aeons after Bahamut, and even then the time it takes to level up that powerful is longer than the entire story of FFI, I mean I still like using them but they are overly long, esspecially KoTR, but like most things they have their good points and their bad points. Lionheart is still my favourite attack in the entire series, this may change though.

[awall]

Originally Posted by relm

When looking at desperation attacks, i want something that is powerful, reliable, and fast.

Makes sense. Unreliable stuff (a la FF6) can work, but it really has to be worth the risk. If it almost never comes up, then it's not worth trying for. Fast and powerful are nice, but you need to be careful; if it's too easy to get into your hyper/limit/overdrive/whatever state (is that what you mean by "fast?") or the attack is too powerful once you get it, then you run the risk of having the battle system be completely dominated by desperation attacks.

Originally Posted by Atma-Noah

I do agree with you about the Desperation attacks you listed. I think that being able to keep the bar filled in certain games was easy and took away from the challenge but I also found that later on in the games it was almost necessary to have those bars filled or close to it in order to beat certain bosses at all. Which made you rely on them to much.

Agreed; you shouldn't be able to use your desperation attack if you're not desperate. Generally, I think desperation attacks should come out at the end of a fight rather than the beginning, which is why I dislike the "save 'em up" system.

I've got something that I think addresses many of these issues, but I don't have time now. I'll edit it into this post (or else make a new post) later tonight.

[Andromeda]

A few points I just like to make on the Limit Break Systems for FFVIII and FFX. For FFVIII, you have the system like you it recalculates everytime the character comes up. Though the percentage is greatly reduced compared with higher than yellow HP, yellow HP has probably at 40-50% activation rate. Which Aura, can do as well, Aura is automatic yellow HP, without having the low HP to begin with. In all the times I have played FFVIII I have only seen the limit break pop up once when I was not in yellow HP, and I have tried a lot to get. The odds are like .01% or something, so inspite of the flaw they made sure you could not exploit it just be sitting there. Though during yellow HP, it is easier to exploit because of this.

FFX, there was one thing that you had to keep in mind when using Overdrives. Overdrives are powerful abilities that you use and as such drain you a little, so you end up losing a turn normally after using it. So strategy entered in, you may not want to use it on a powerful boss at a bad time when you could die or would need to do something important the next turn. Which was something key that most systems forget, that these powerful attacks go out with no repercutions.

Something I found interesting during DQVIII is that only monsters have desperate attacks, while these are not limit breaks to say. They are powerful attacks that normally do 3-5 times more damage that their normal attacks and were also a little random. They could do them at anytime in the battle, I really did not see a cause for them doing it.

But personally I have not great interest in a Limit Break, as long as I have some abilities and the possibility of critical hits, that is enough for me. Limit Breaks tend to be either long winded or just so cheap that the enemies are all dead instantly. In FFVIII you cannot use Lionheart or Zell's Duel on normal monsters because it is a complete waste of time. Omnislash it completely wasted on anyone but bosses and by the time you get, it is only used for Sephiroth or a weapon. In FFIX Trances are so unreliable that you just hope you get it are the right time or else it is completely wasted. FFVIII and FFX at least allowed you to ignore it if you wanted. And FFX allowed for different methods which I found to be more useful. Getting the attack overdrive rather than the stoic was always better.

[awall]

Okay, I know I've been claiming this has been coming for a while, so here it is. My answer to the desperation attack issues discussed above.

In the context that I use this system, I refer to the resource that you accumulate as "fury points" and the attacks that you execute as "fury strikes." However, these are simply names; you could replace "fury points" with "limit guage" (100 fury points = a full guage) and replace "fury strike" with Limit and it'd be like FF7's system. Sort of.

There are several differences. First of all, instead of accumulating FP by taking damage, you gain FP every time your turn comes up. This means that everybody gets a few FP. However, the lower your HP is, the more FP you accumulate every turn. If you want to build FP quickly, you can sit around at low HP, but that puts you at greater risk of getting KO'ed. Worse, getting KO'ed makes you lose all your FP, so you don't want to overdo it. (You also build FP slightly faster if you have negative statuses like poison, and slightly slower if you have positive statuses like haste).

The second thing is that you get to choose how much FP you want to build up before using it. Each character has 2-4 unique attacks called "Fury Strikes" that they can expend their FP to do, and each of those attacks has four levels; Lv1 costs 25 FP, Lv2 costs 50 FP, Lv3 costs 75 FP, and Lv4 costs a full 100 FP (your FP can't go higher than 100). Higher levels of fury strikes are more powerful but take longer to build up to.

The final interesting feature of FP is that simply having FP has an effect. FP increases your chances of causing a critical hit every time you attack... but also increases the chances that anybody attacking you will cause a critical hit. So while Lv4 fury strikes are powerful, building up that many FP means you're gonna be eating critical hits left and right. Hope you can survive that, 'cause remember: you get KO'ed and your FP go back to 0.

FP start at 0 every battle and build up from there. I don't really know how much you get every turn, but I'd imagine it increases as the game progresses and you level up.

Recall that there were four main points I was trying to cover:

* A desperation attack system should help you come back from being behind. It shouldn't help (or at least not as much) if you're already winning a battle.

Those who are behind get more FP, so they can perform fury strikes more often (or use more powerful ones). Yes, the critical hit rate against those characters goes up, but their critical hit rate goes up as well, and if a character is already at low HP, critical hits against them don't make them any deader than normal hits would.

* A desperation attack system should encourage risky behavior. If you can trigger it just by sitting around and healing a bunch and waiting for it to kick in, then it's too easy to just play turtle.

If you perpetually keep your HP at full, you'll barely build any FP at all. You have to allow your HP to get low and some of those bad statuses to hit in order to get your FP accumulation rate up.

* A desperation attack system should not carry over between battles. You should not be able to intentionally get behind and take risky actions in an easy random encounter in order to build up a gauge, then head into the boss battle and unleash it all at the beginning to devastate the boss.

FP reset at the beginning of every battle. If you want to use a fury strike in a fight, you have to earn the FP in that fight.

* Desperation attacks are nice when they do something other than just causing a boatload of damage. Also, it's nice when there's variety between different characters.

Every character has between 2-4 different fury strikes that all do very different things. Just to give an example... the "thief/ninja" character has a basic damage-dealing fury strike, a fury strike that is a variant of "throw" that hurls several projectiles at once, a super form of "steal" that targets all enemies and makes multiple attempts to steal just about everything from items to GP to weaponry. You get the idea.

I believe this system addresses many of the flaws in existing desperation attack system. Because this is a work in progress, I'd definitely be interested in hearing feedback. Even if you think the system is cool, tell me what sounds the coolest and what sounds the most annoying so I can re-evaluate it. Also, if you think that this doesn't adequately solve some of the issues inherent to desperation attacks, suggest how this could be modified. I'd love to hear what y'all think.

EDIT: Also, if I didn't explain clearly, please ask for clarification. I designed this system, so obviously it all makes sense to me. But if something seems confusing to you, it's probably because I left out a fairly important detail, so I'd be happy to explain it.

[T.G. Oskar]

Seeing this thread made me do a quick observation, and I realized something that's quite strange. If you look closely at the desperation attacks from FF7 and FF8, you can see that the characters are actually following a Job system. Let me explain in detail:

In FF7, whenever you filled out a Limit bar, your turn reached faster and you could unleash a stronger attack. Now, notice that most of these attacks are similar in spirit to classes from other games, say FF5 or FF6? Cloud, for example, uses a wide variety of swrod-based attacks. They are a variety of advanced sword techniques, much like the Hiten-Mitsurugi Ryu style in Rurouni Kenshin, except that all techniques are mutually exclusive to each other rather than variations or combinations of basic skills. Where does this trend is seen? The Samurai in FF5 had techniques that would have represented typical Samurai attacks, adding skills that no other job could use; and Cyan in FF6 had the Swordtech command, which was a series of sword techniques. In that essence, Cloud is from the Swordmaster job. Following that same trend, it is evident which other classes the rest of the members follow, at least some: Tifa=Monk or Blackbelt; Aeris=White Mage; Red XIII=Beast; Cait Sith=Gambler; Cid=Dragoon; Yuffie=Ninja. The only two discrepancies are Barret (his Gun-Arm is a homage to other users of arm cannons such as Mega Man and Samus Aran, so the skills are based upon such games. Barret's first two skills behave like MM's Charged Mega Buster), and Vincent (because his skills are of transformation, his Limits are based by his form and not by his class).

FF8 continues with this same trend. Squall follows Cloud as a Swordmaster yet again (except he wields a gun-sword hybrid): Rinoa behaves at first as a Beastmaster, then a Sorceress (actually a Berserk Sorceress since she can't control her powers); Zell follows Tifa as a Monk/Blackbelt; Irvine becomes a Sniper (Hunter? Ranger?); Quistis behaves as a Blue Mage, and Selphie is a combination that involves Gambler and all kinds of Magic. But, even the NPC represent classes: Seifer is a Mageknight; Edea a Sorceress that specializes in Black Magic; Laguna as a Soldier (the soldier we have in our armies now); Kiros as an Assassin (methinks that the Assassin in the Ragnarok series follows closely Kiros or viceversa); and Ward is a Sailor.

FF7 and FF8 had a Desperation Move system in order to keep on with the touch of the job system that made the series so popular, yet allowing the characters to be defined by their backgrounds rather than in the stereotypes of a class. Also, they saw in the DM system a way to refresh the game mechanics. When the job classes were reinstated in FF9, the Desperation Move system was no longer needed. Thus, they replaced it with a Trance system. IMO, Trance is not a Desperation Move system per se, it's more like a Super Saiyan meets FF1's class change kind of system. The characters, in a moment of desperation, reach an advanced version of their current class, and are given new commands to reflect that change: the "power-up"aspect of SSJ with the new aspect and added/improved moves of FF1. As FFX returned to the FF7/FF8 dynamics, so did the Desperation Move system. However, the jobs in the game are not the typical ones found on the latter games: Tidus mixes swordsmanship with his unusual speed and Blitzball dexterity; Wakka mixes Blitzball and Gambling; Auron mixes swordsmanship and martial arts; Yuna accesses the powers of High Summoning; Kimahri uses Blue magic; Lulu takes a page out of the Red Mage and further improves (if Doublecast was already an option to everyone, then a Red Mage wannabe must have an improved version, so why not a N-tiplecast?); and Rikku becomes an Engineer like Edgar and Mustadio before her. Thus, Squeenix made the DM systems to reminisce older players of the Job System, the most persistent and easy character development system ever made. Blame D&D for that. Or not.

As for other kinds of Desperation attacks, you should not forget Valkyrie Profile's "Purify Weird Soul" attacks. They redefine what a Desperation Move is supposed to mean. Wild Arms has also the Force system, which was originally a Desperation Move system that evolved into a game mechanic with the years. And the Saga series with its combo attacks, which often appear at desperate times. Also...D&D has sort of a desperation move system when it introduced the "Action Point" system, but expanding the importance of such.

To give my personal opinion about desperation moves, they are the symbol of a hero, what allows them to stand besides the crowd. They represent the heroic strength they are destined to wield. Cheesy, maybe, but doesn't that is what keeps us fans looking for more, when the heroes seemingly overwhelmed overcoem the odds placed upon them with a power that defies all known laws of probability and physics, with the little add-on of known there will be other occasions?

[V_Translanka]

When you think about it, these are just conditional special critical hit abilities. Personally, I don't think they're really necessary. They're just another way to have the characters have another ability w/o including another command function, really. The conditions placed upon you to activate these abilities are kind of interesting, I guess...But I'd rather see the return of Sabin/Mash's Blitz's than the continuation of Desperation Attacks/Limit Breaks/Trances/Overdrives/Whatever...