Six Innovations: 2/3

When I last left off, I was extolling the virtues of FF6, and it's great multiparty dungeons.   They do this again, with a slightly different twist, in the form of a one-screen battle royale, except this time, the enemies are actually on-screen. Now, I know, lots of other games before have had you fight creatures you can see (as opposed to random encounters, which occur seemingly randomly).   But this?   Very cool.   It's Terra!  And she's in trouble!   And you have to protect her! A fair amount of strategy can go into this too.   You can charge boldly forward, trying to outrun the guards coming the other direction (who are taking their sweet time, I'll add). You can do what's being illustrated in this screenshot, and just block the damn path, effectively stopping the forces of the evil Empire from being able to walk past you and your two stuffies. Or you can, if you're doing a low-level game, memorize their moves and walk past every soldier to battle the commander hassle free. It's cute, it's fun, it's vaguely gimmicky, and it'd suck if it was used any more than it is, but it's a bit of a delightful diversion from the walk ~40 steps, get in a fight, lather, rinse, repeat.

I know what you're thinking,             and that is so not kawaii.

You wouldn't believe how many    screenshots I have of him dealing this                   much damage...

It may strike some of you as surprising, but I'm going to throw this on my list.   Ridiculously broken game mechanics. Setzer, amazingly, is one of the godliest characters in the game.   He has the (somewhat unlikely) potential to deal 39,996 damage per turn at his lowest level. That's right.  This all comes from the fact that the damage from the dice are not halved when you use the offering (4x attack), and that the damage is:  2x Level x Dice 1 x Dice 2 x Dice 3.   So a level 10 Setzer that throws 4 4 4 would deal 1,280 damage... except that he gets another 4x for rolling all fours.   That's 5,120 damage instead. Now, sure, most of the time you'll hit less than a thousand, but more often than not you'll bust out some crazy numbers.   5120.  9999.   And with four tries per attack?   And if you slap a Black Belt on him, letting him counter attack?   He's crazy deadly. Setzer isn't the only one who can deal damage like this, of course, but those are under slightly less crazy broken game mechanics.... but since I've already done my post for today, you'll have to wait for the next one.