Also, another one of my Fire Emblem concepts is for a specific level. You get intel that the enemy army is going to attack a nearby fort in order to establish a forward base to attack the capital, and you gotta rush over there to fortify it before its overrun. However, the enemy army already sent a scouting force ahead, which has broken through some of the outer defenses by the time you get there. So you come in, you gotta clean out the smaller force that's already inside and attacking allied NPCs, and about 7 or 8 turns in, sudden the REAL enemy army shows up, and you gotta switch focus from attacking to defending. But, you can't get new items or units into the fray when this happens. You have to use what you already have, so it becomes this question of what units do you use and what items do you bring? Knights with heavy armor might be good at defending, but they'll be slow and won't be able to get to the inner defenses in time to wipe out the scouting force. Units like Pegasus Knights are quick and great at hit-and-run tactics, but they're too fragile to properly defend the choke points. What do you do?
Ok so I was joking about it earlier but: a mobile game where you play as a detective agency made up of 6 to 8 animes of indeterminate age. There would be like a story mode where you would have some mysteries to solve, all tying into one larger case, and then there would be a "Quick Cases" mode that play like a game of Clue, with maybe a couple token changes. There would be a large library of boards, portraits, weapons, and possible names, so hopefully most of them are p unique (maybe randomly generated backstories but they'd be silly more than anything)
Reviving this thread to say: stealth/infiltration game, but you're not a spy or an assassin or a thief or any of the usual stealth game professions. You're with the paparazzi.
(Bonus points if the overarching plot is about discovering and investigating a legit Evil Conspiracy, but the protagonist and their employers continue to have approximately the journalistic integrity of the National Inquirer as run by J. Jonah Jameson, and are just like, "AHAHAHAHA this'll be awesome for our circulation numbers! 8D")
An RPG/survival game hybrid where there's a really good reason for the With This Herring thing-you're like, an escapee from an evil empire or something, so you start out in the forest or wherever with like, a stick or something and some clothes. You can pick from several species-with differing stat pools, abilities, etc, so for example some species are poor climbers but others are really good climbers, some species have a high cap for some stats and a low one for another, and so on-and you pick your class by like, either making a crude weapon or finding an item or just not using a weapon at all. You have to also manage things like food and water and so on. You can get allies/party members and eventually even start a community free from the evil empire.
from a youtube comment about a pokemon glitch (where it reads your bag contents as map data): "Actually, that's pretty interesting. So you forge your path by changing values of your items in your bag? That would be an interesting idea to build a game upon. A game where you have to rearrange values that you control to keep moving until you get to the destination, it's a puzzle by itself."
Games that feel like FFVII. Games with prerendered backgrounds. A big fucking sprawling game with a worldmap.
Honestly I feel you super hard on the pre-rendered backgrounds thing. There's a sort of charm to those that our current way of doing things doesn't quite match. Which isn't to say aesthetics today are bad. Hardly. They're wonderful. Just that I feel there is some real artistic merit to pre-rendered backgrounds with static camera angles. Especially for horror games.
On a note that's only related in that it's about sprawling JRPGs with a worldmap: what I really wanted Ni No Kuni to be and was disappointed to find out it wasn't was a game where you were constantly popping back and forth between worlds. Like, at the start of the game when you get sent to the general store on an errand, I was like, "Oh, this is going to be an item shop later!" It was not. There was absolutely nothing to do in your home world for 99% of the game, except when it wanted you to jump through a plot hoop to get someone on the otherworld side to help you out by doing something involving their soulmate. Like, give me an otherworld fantasy game with those sorts of connections across worlds, and then make the mundane, homeworld side actually relevant.
Not to mention that just from a practical standpoint, it limits how much time the devs have to spend on stuff like texturing the back sides of objects, so they can spend more time and money on other content.
Legend of Mana remains one of my absolute favorite games to this day, and the gorgeous painted backdrops are part of why.
Yeah, or like. Give me something with the aesthetics of Chrono Cross. Hopefully less frustrating writing than Chrono Cross, but that is objectively a gorgeous game.
a photography game, maybe like secret of bird island, but set in a fantasy world there's like dragons and flying islands and monsters and stuff
Post apocalyptic farming simulator. Like, a zombie survival game, except the goal is the stake out some territory and build yourself a sustainable livelihood. Might not even be farming! Could establish yourself as a trader, raid all the drugstores in the map/maps for cigarettes and use that to start your trading empire. I like the idea of some stuff that's really profitable at the start of the game quickly becoming unsustainable if you're not careful and clever about it, like you start off raking in the big bucks traveling around scavenging, but then you can't find stuff anymore and you haven't build up any of the skills or acquired the materials necessary to make stuff yourself. A survival game that heavily features trading with NPCs and like building and/or interacting with communities in the midst of an apocalypse, that's something I'd like to see.
An RPG, only you play Girl Genius Jägers on errands by their Heterodyne. Hunting bats because they want bat sandwiches, raiding castles because the local prince/x/ss has piqued their Heyerodynes intetest. Hunting wasps because fuck those.
