Yeah, combo attacks would link better with friendship (so you wouldn't feel overpressured to go certain romance routes for Max Gainz) but it would be nice if each romance route had a Special Attack, including the one with Basically Tuxedo Mask. Like, that particular romance would necessitate a long buildup before you ever got to the Actual Final Boss, so maybe it would be a massive combo hit to the Actual Final Boss, but other Specials would have uses outside of it. Incentive to romance people beyond special scenes (which are already their own incentive) but not so much incentive that it railroads people into particular romance routes to better min/max their game stats and power levels.
A metroidvania kinda game where none of your attacks can damage any of the enemies, only the environment, so you have to destroy parts of the environment to trap, kill or bypass them without trapping or killing yourself, or blocking your own path. Probably you'd want a bunch of different weapons that could interact with the environment and a bunch of different substances with different physical properties. So like you've got a magnet gun that attracts iron objects to you (and vice versa) and attracts or repels or flips magnetic objects depending on polarity, and then like a laser cutter to melt or burn what it's aimed at, but which can be refracted through transparent materials or reflected off of reflective ones (or part reflected, part absorbed and part transmitted and refracted, probably), and then power gloves that let you impart major compressive, tensile or shear forces on things you can pull or push, and maybe a combo cold beam/flamethrower that slowly leaches heat from a target and stores it, and then can release it all of a sudden as flames. Maybe put diminishing returns on it, so the more energy it has stored, the slower you can cool things, so if you wanna run around freezing everything you need to find someplace safe to flare off the stored heat.
this idea cmae from my vent thread, adn the metaphor i was using So you satrt with some kind of bad brain situation either random or you pick one, not sure and you try to rebuild your walls/buildings and make your brain kingdom thrive again and random events would happen sometimes like maybe you had a structure that was "Relegion isnt important to me" and then a random event happens, and people from a different kingdom have shot a canon at that building and it has a big hole, and collapses, and the shrapnel flies out and damages your other walls the more secure some of buildings are, the less they usually get damaged by random events also, when other kingdonms wreck something, doubt soldiers can come in, and affect your workers your 'Relegion isnt important to me" building gets broken through, they come in and suggest that maybe instead you should build this christianity wall you have to decide whether or not you think that will help your kingdom thrive more than the other building things like that and you could decide where to put your workers you might have tons of different budding buildings of hobbies and you could either split your workers up even betweeen them to build all of them slowly or pile them all onto one, build it faster, then the next and you might have this really big strong structure up for something but then you dont have anyone going for repairs and maintenance checks so it becomes less sturdy and later you try to use it for a support in something else but it is no longer strong cause of deterioration and it collapses when you try to build on it you could have workers, maintainers (stop ^that from happening), envoys (you want to go give something to another kingdom), traders (you trade some of your workers for a while, and they send you upgrades for a wall, something like that) You could have regular trading partners (SO, family, friends, moirail) and you could also have bad kingdoms that would try to break stuff down, and stomp on your workers while they tried to fix things Ooo new thought, maybe this could be a ds game, where the top screen is your mid kingdom, and the bottom is a slice of life type thing, where your person interacts and goes about their day, and random things can happen, and you can plan things, (you decide to go to store for food to imcrease your eat healthy wall, but you accidentally bump into someone and they yell at you and it blows a hole in one of your buildings (self esteem, etc). LGBTQ+ options, and brainweird stuff, but bad things can also happen relative to it. your self esteem wall might go down if you wake up and have particularly bad dysphoria that day. or you go out for a date with your partner and somone is awful to you you can pick people with different brainwierds, and you have to watch out for those some are like lil enemy forces slowing chippng at some of the buildings or building walls around them so you cant do them anymore some might just show up out of the blue and wreck something stuff like that (i dont know if anyone would actually like playing this game.............whoops)
realtalk: skyrim-style star wars game. choose to be jedi or sith, support the enpire or republic, explore planets and lore and spaceships.....
I think most sufficiently expansive and distinctive settings would make cool open-world games, honestly. Like, take, say, Pokemon, and remove all the arbitrary barriers and stuff where you have to have done Thing to pass, and add some more directions to go and potential objectives. So now you can win all the contests without bothering with any of the gyms, say, or you can join any of a number of warring teams and groups in the region (or more than one of them), or you can basically play Pokemon Snap and try to take pictures of every possible Pokemon in the wild, or you can become a Pokemon breeder, or you can farm berries for hours upon hours.
I would love a PvP with really nonstandard physics. Like something built on the engine of A Slower Speed of Light: Edit: Warning: bright, trippy colors
@Exohedron this may not be exactly what you're looking for but you might enjoy playing super hot (the music in the trailer's kinda loud just fyi):
An idea my girlfriend and I talk about every so often is Super Mahou Shoujo Taisen. Basically just apply the SRW treatment to magical girl anime. Something grand, flamboyant, and fanservice filled. A bunch of stupid references. That sort of fanservice. Not the tits. Actually taking care to find out weird relationships. Like think of how fucking adamant Usagi would be on defending Homura. As well as just how much she'd love her in general. Imagine Homura's why this. Weird alternate what if scenarios! Like what if Nanoha witched in this timeline! And some and entirely stupid threat. We also need weird edge case magical girls like how SRW has weird edge case robots. So fuck it. Utena? She's in. Got to find some old and obscure motherfuckers too. Like wow look there's Sally the Witch. Imagine fighting aliens to this shit.
Thanks to my word-replace extension that replaces "feminist" with "necromancer" and recent discussions in Tumblr.txt (and the amount of time I spent playing AdventureQuest in middle school, where "necromancer" was, like, the default Big Bad), I am now picturing a game where you do battle with an evil transphobic necromancer.
A game entitled Rage Quit consisting of a series of bosses that you have no way of actually beating. Instead, you have to figure out what annoys each boss and just continually meta-level frustrate them into giving up. So stuff like infinite heal loops so they can never kill you, a boss where you have to reduce the framerate of the game itself to painfully slow levels until they give up, a boss where you repeatedly quit right before dying and it just gets increasingly Done as it realizes it can't even get you to the "you died" screen, etc. Bonus points for a multiplayer pvp mode (where you still can't actually kill each other, just annoy).
Reviving this thread to say I'm rereading The Poisoner's Handbook, and want a puzzle/adventure game inspired by these guys.
Seriously, half the stuff they did sounds like an adventure game puzzle solution or a dialogue tree from Monkey Island. Once one of them jumped in a frozen river so the other guy could rush him in to beg a drink for his poor, freezing friend, and they regularly straight-up told people at the door that they were Prohibition agents and the bouncer laughed and let them in. Maybe don't use the actual people and the actual historical situation, but you could totally adapt it.
