Iris Havengard Current Progress

So if I'm understanding it right, we aren't going to have a menu at all?  Will Fuse work with the equipped Esper then?  I was thinking that we'd select one of a limited selection of Espers from a menu.  The awkward thing about using the equipped Esper is that most Espers have no elements, so they'd be hard to cram into a couple pre-defined categories based on elements.  Ramuh would be Thunder elemental, but I can't think of anything else that would be.  Most Espers would be non-elemental in this case.

The idea is that the espers wouldn't necessarily be a single element. Since we have multiple abilities to fill, we fill out different moves with different elemtents. Most espers have at least thematic association with one or more elements. For example, Tritoch and Maduin could have an attack from each of fire/ice/bolt. Siren, even though it teaches fire, has strong thematic association with water. Bahamut, tho NE, could obviously use a wind elemental attack. and the mix-and-match style keeps us from having to create a full set of spells for each esper, just have them pull from a pool of spells. This would be especially helpful with the significant number of holy-themed espers.

On the other hand, if we limit the possible Esper choices to Ramuh, Ifrit, Shiva, Kirin (see below), Bismark, Alexandr, Bahamut and Terrato (which is my initial idea for which Espers to use), and let her Fuse with any at any time, every option has a clearly defined purpose.  The good thing about that particular selection is that it has eight options (like many existing skills), it gives her options immediately while still leaving room for progression, and hits 6/8 elements.

I have a hard time justifying this lore-wise. Why would she fuse to some but not others? the only real difference I can see as to her options would be what esper she has equipped. It also makes her esper almost like a gear extention, making that choice potentially important going into a major fight, adding a layer of strategy pre-battle, tho potentially a hindrance for random encounters.

I also feel like one option should be a healing/buffing Esper, since many of the Espers are devoted to that.  I think that this would be great to give her more versatility, and to represent the Esper selection better.  But I'm not sure how much of a hassle it would be to handle the targeting with that, so if that's too much of a pain I'd choose to go with Palidor (Wind) or Shoat (Poison) instead.

yes, healing/buffing setups totally make sense. They would just use basically the same categories as the "attacks". I didn't mean to disclude them, i just kinda lumped it all together.

I was thinking that perhaps the overflow's effect could be cutting her HP by half.  That way we could at least be sure that it won't kill her.  If the overflow attack is powerful enough to be cool, I think that it wouldn't be looked down upon by most people.

I figured the drawback could be different per spell... maybe some inflict blindness, or slow, or some hp damage. it adds variance and i think falls into her afflicted character well. Like, the more she pulls power from the esper, the more it costs her. It's almost a metaphor for what magitek has done to the empire (i totally just came up with that now). But the major idea is that it would be overall a good thing to pull that attack, just with some hindrance attached.


With all that in mind: do you still think we should go menu-based? Are any of your concerns appeased? I'm not exactly opposed to making a menu, but it will be more work (like that's ever stopped me). I really want to make sure we do right by the character.

Any other opinions? I'm still open to other ideas, I just want to get whatever we decide rolling.