Going off of what someone said a while back about glitches as a plot element, I think I'd really like a Pokemon fangame where you're a professor trying to find, catch, and study glitch Pokemon. There probably wouldn't be a lot of battling, just exploration and puzzles, trying to figure out how to trigger all these glitches to appear, and also finding glitched places or trainers. But with a heavy horror bent, so that all the NPCs definitely can see what's going on and are appropriately terrified of the player character and the horrible shit they keep deliberately unleashing onto the world.
A game that used primarily linguistics based puzzles instead of the mathy shit that tends to get used elsewhere. I do not even care what it is. It could just be puzzles. It could be a Lovecraftian horror where you play as a linguist. I just want linguistics puzzles.
Oh, right, just remembered this one: Magical girl JRPG. Instead of the usual equipment types, you get ribbons and gems and frills and little mini-wings and general sparkly bullshit to add to your magical girl outfit and weapon, which grant various stat boosts and resistances and such. You gain new sparkly magic attacks mostly by leveling up, but sometimes by equipment or story (in the latter case, probably everyone would basically get a rank up into a better base outfit because Plot and all unlock some fancy new special ability that works differently from the normal ones). Your various party members are a team of themed magical girls a la Sailor Moon, and they have combination attacks a la Chrono Trigger. The setting for your shenanigans is sort of in the style of Persona 2- you're running all over the city fighting the forces of darkness, and the dungeons are normal places that happen to be full of an outrageous amount of monsters most people can't see (and possibly spacetime is wigging out a bit). The justification for you getting into fights in the middle of school and/or the street with no one batting an eye is that the fight woosh is everyone transforming and going into a parallel-dimension time-bubble for the duration of the fight so it won't affect bystanders.
All I want from a video game is the Space Channel 5 / Guitar Hero / Elite Beat Agents crossover. Because first of all they all seem to be manipulating the same music/energy forces; the Agents use music to empower people, while Ulala and Guitar Heroes seem to work the other way around, using the power of the crowd (star power, ratings) to strengthen their music. Also, at the end of Guitar Hero 2, after Freebird, the protagonist is lifted into the sky by aliens. This is clearly part of the same alien attack that caps off Elite Beat Agents. Then the whole thing could be reported by Space Channel 5, because what could be a bigger scoop than music-hating aliens? It would end in Ulala, the EBA, and Casey Lynch performing the most brainmelting concert of all time. My other video game pipe dream is a sequel to The World Ends With You, an excellent game that will forever be unmatched. Also I no longer trust Square Enix with sequels.
(My favorite game apparently got pitched to Squeenix before getting adopted by Atlus, which explains a lot, but man I'm glad Squeenix weren't the ones to pick it up. The budget would have been like 5 times higher but it would probably have been so much worse.)
The only Squeenix games I trust anymore are Dragon Quests. Thank gods Dragon Quest is still there for me.
I've heard a lot of good things about FFXIV from Sibling, but it's got a different dev team from most of their single-player games.
Wait, but what if the passerby are still there, just greyed-out, unaffected by things and functionally statues? I admit I like this idea mostly because it means you can use your homeroom teacher as cover in a demon attack. Just try to be back in your seat when it goes down. Also then crowds make for a nice naturalistic way to do the Arbitrary RPG Impassable Walls.
Speaking of naturalistic explanations, I realized while talking to @KarrinBlue on Skype that you could also do pretty good explanations for some other common genre conventions. Like, even though your entire team is running around with you all the time and show up in cutscenes, only three of them show up in battle because the source of your sparkly magic powers is weakened (possibly having to do with a Tuxedo Mask knockoff who spends, like, the entire game kidnapped or brainwashed) and can only support three people transformed at a time. And you can't drop the main character from your party because, again taking a page from Sailor Moon, only she has any finishing moves, so when she inevitably gets kidnapped at some point and the rest of the gang has to rescue her, nobody gets any rewards at the end of battles and everyone's freaked out because they'll beat down the monsters which then regenerate like a minute later. And then there's a boss fight against a monster that immediately comes back stronger whenever you kill it where you need to free her, then have everybody detransform so the time bubble goes away and she can transform and banish it. There was also a suggestion for a dark magical girl who you redeem with the power of friendship and overwhelming firepower, which seems like an excellent idea to me. :::PPP
Swoons adoringly over magical girl game concepts. Which, did anyone else notice Pathfinder apparently has a mahou class now, and if I had a gaming group, I'd be all over that like white on rice. Dark magical girl being a Disc 1 Final Boss would be awesome too, because you've got all this leadup to the big bad and... whoops! It wasn't her after all, there's someone pulling her strings and you'll need her (and her special moves) to get past certain enemies. Hell, having that be a mechanic: some of your teammates have certain specials (either regular skills a la Sailor Mercury being good at computers or special magical girl skills a la Mew Lettuce being able to breathe underwater) that you need to get past certain rare enemies or certain puzzles.
Frankly I think Pathfinder is ill suited to getting the idea of magical girls - too much focus on stats and numbers is anathema to the whole magical girl THING.
Oh yeah, I'd definitely do it more in a FATE setting if I could, but either way, the gaming group refuses to manifest. :'( I don't remember what exactly the stats were, but I do know that somehow DETERMINATION/FRIENDSHIP did play a part in power levels.
Oh oh also: the dark magical girl is a human like you, so she can attack you out of the time bubble. Including during your transformation sequences. So like, in interface screw terms, she launches her first attack in the middle of the boss fight whoosh. Or, hell, maybe just starts fucking attacking you in the middle of the pre-fight cutscene. Also, recurring boss who gets stronger each time you fight her leading up to @PRelations's suggestion of her as the fakeout endboss. On a similar interface-fuckery note, although maybe not for the same game: a turn based RPG in which one of the major bosses has some kind of time magic. You know this long before you fight them story-wise, and there's plenty of in-story leadup to expect time magic attacks in this boss fight. And then they start doing real-time/cooldown based attacks while you're still stuck in the turn-based rpg interface. Think fast!
Dark magical girl pulling a Homura on Sayaka at the end of the third movie, like, "Hey, yeah. I'm the Big Bad, what are you going to do about it? You can't cause a scene here because you're Just Another Schoolgirl and no-one will believe you (because your magical girl fights make you bad at math/miss tests/upset your family/etc) when you say that I'm evil. How can you fight me now?" And you can't! Because she isn't transformed, she's just the transfer student and it looks like she's asking you about where to get lunch! What the fuck are you supposed to do now! And then of course we've gotta unpack all that with the magical healing of friendship once she comes to our side.
>_> Maybe with a social link mechanic, you could get better team attacks if you befriend/romance the other magical girls. Or you could only get the best ending if you maxed out your relationship with the dark magical girl enough that she'd join your team for good, rather than fucking off once the Big Bad is defeated.
Or play matchmaker between them for improved combo attacks with eachother. Or maybe set them up with NPCs that give them static bonuses instead of combo attacks.
