Cataphract O-II
A downloadable game for Windows
made for the cookie cutter jam. even after downscoping multiple times it's still way too big, so it's undertested and the back end is a little light. i'll probably do a second pass for balance, encounter design and polish at some point in the future. but it should be possible to beat it without the game falling to pieces. if you're good
it's combat-focused, and it wouldn't surprise me if it took two hours to beat
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Excited to have another OI entry! Overall I’m excited with the general direction, and your encounter design is interesting, as always.
I see some interesting conversation about some potential ‘flaws’, so I’ll give some of my own (hopefully constructive) criticism:
First, I don’t like the ‘real time’ combat model. It still ends up being turn-based (and I see that it pauses when you are making decisions, which is good and important), with the only effective change being that I have to ‘wait around’ a lot as a player sometimes.
I get that this might be a weakness of the software. You want to have ‘granular’ turn order, where faster combatants go more often than others rather than ‘we go, you go’ activation, and this ‘real time’ version might be the easiest one to get in RPGmaker.
Think of something like Final Fantasy Tactics, where there are speed scores counting up to 100, but no ‘waiting’ - the system just calculates the next turn and goes there.
Also a ‘turn order’ UI where I can see the turn orders of the participants would be amazing! It could also indicate ‘fray’ status…
I get using the tools you know, but it’s kind of a bummer in a hard game where I am replaying combats…
Second, I feel like there are two ‘genres’ in here, broadly, and they feel like they are fighting each other.
The first genre is something like tactical combat ‘discovery’ - here things aren’t totally clear, a bit random, but overall each battle is a puzzle. The ‘unclarity’ is part of the game - a lot of play is learning by doing and putting together strategies, and the output randomness there is ‘juice’ after a fashion.
I think ideally in this type of game, there aren’t ‘attrition’ systems - think something like a SaGa game. You get full HP between battles, and the battles are HARD, maybe expecting you to scrape by nearly losing each time. Also, if you lose, you can usually try again right away - you can generally save anywhere and try again freely.
The second ‘genre’ I’m feeling here is a very ‘attrition-heavy’ game, where you are trying to figure out routes and ‘trades’ to make it though a fixed gauntlet. Think a Magic Tower game, or a well-made Fire Emblem type of game. These games usually don’t have any randomness, and every element is super clear and calculable. ‘attrition’ plays a big role, and the main game is about routing and trying new things - kind of like a good arcade game that can be played at first just to survive, and later for highscore/1cc.
So, you have this hybrid. Things are not clear, but there is attrition-heavy gameplay too. Saves are limited, and the combat system feels ‘slow’ to play.
I really like both of these genres, but there is something a bit ‘grating’ about this particular combination. Specifically the combination of ‘unclarity/discovery’ and ‘heavy attrition’.
I do find the game overall really compelling, and I think it’s short enough that I don’t mind replaying through the friction because the overall design is good. Speeding up the ‘waiting’ so it’s instant would help. And then letting me save anywhere and getting rid of the attrition mechanics, or making everything way more clear and deterministic would make this perfect. Or having a ‘life points’ style attrition system like SaGa games have - if a character is KOed they have to sit out a battle, or use a limited ‘revive’ item, something like that.
Overall I don’t want to seem like I’m dissatisfied with this amazing free experience you’ve given me - I’m not at all :)
I’m actually happier if you make more creative and ‘scuffed’ things, if you doing more polishing or learning other tools would feel bad or reduce your creativity or output.
Thanks as always for sharing!
hey, long time no see! thanks a bunch for playing and sharing your thoughts. i agree with you about the pacing of battle and you're right to peg it as an engine limitation. in the final version i'm hoping to edit the easyrpg player source code to speed up battles, since it's been a recurring critique.
as for the conflicting "genres".. i see the issue you're describing. a nebulous ruleset that you have to feel out through play is inevitably gonna be a messy process and needs to cut players a little slack so you're not asking them to replay every fight for a better score immediately after learning it. but i love attrition and dislike isolated battles, so rather than (say) add healing between fights, i'm inclined to just make battles easier so their threat is cumulative, and rather than having to perfect your approach to every battle, you're looking for smaller avenues of improvement across multiple encounters.. believe it or not i just don't like puzzle battles that much
“believe it or not i just don’t like puzzle battles that much”
Wow, as a ‘full consumer’ of the OI brand, I’m quite shocked! Great idea on just speeding up execution in easyRPG - that may be an easy setting to tweak for the user already. That’s what I’ll try coming back to this.
I actually like hard+attrition fine, now that I’ve had more time to think on it. I think the combination of the battles having a lot of ‘quiet’ moves (to borrow from chess lingo) combined with the ATB waiting, it blew other qualities a bit out of proportion for me. Honestly, if this was the same but made in 2K I might have not even noticed the ‘friction’. I think I just really hate ATB - if it would just ‘jump’ inbetween inactive time, it would be fine.
You do attrition really well, so it makes sense that you love it. I loved the ship-based OI game, for instance - I still remember the feeling of replaying battles to preserve resources in that one.
I plan to check out your ‘sketches’ too! And thanks for signal boosting Razuth - I don’t know if I’d have found their work otherwise.
Glad you are still out there doing your thing :)
Haven't finished this one yet, but it gets my vote for sickest "tutorial" out of the jam. I like that no one actually says shit, it's just battle text at best, it feels like some cold-open in-media-res action movie intro or something. There's a lot number of mechanics here and some of which aren't made explicit (e.g. rest mechanics or some attacks only doing damage when out of the fray) which has been addressed elsewhere, but I'm looking forward to digging into this one further as well as the previous OI games. I got as far as Scissorhawk in this one on my first attempt. Heavy hitter.
A new Cataphract OI? In 2026? Hell yeah.
I've started poking at it, and I really like the expansion to the combat system - the fray system feels more fleshed out and dynamic this time around, and it was already one of my favorite JRPG combat systems. I also really like the rest system - it feels pretty intuitive and adds some nice risk-reward to combat.
I'm currently "stuck" on the fight with the Controller and six Conscripts - I can get through it but I'm taking WAY too much damage because that fight is absolutely brutal as an introduction to a new enemy. My gut feeling is that it should probably have fewer enemies as backup, but that's probably because I haven't figured out the trick to handling it. I'll get there, though - I'm starting to piece together how to disrupt the Controller, and just need to put that into practice.
...
My one major complaint is that the combat feels way more random than it did in Cataphract OI. I had problems with the fight that introduces the little I Only Disarm imp because both Engage and Circle Formation kept missing repeatedly, so I assumed that it was immune and that I had to use the Boar Spear to kill it. I'm really not a fan of that in a game that's so focused on learning through observation.
I'm also not a bit fan of so many attacks dealing chip damage to Free or Safe characters. In my opinion it makes the combat system feel muddier - it's one thing when you have something like Boar Spear where that's it's thing, but apparently Warji's Ogre Bat can also hit disengaged enemies despite not saying that anywhere? On the receiving end, it feels a little bad to take unavoidable damage in a game where healing is so limited.
Granted, both of those things feel more like engine limitations that you didn't have time to polish out than intentional design decisions (inb4 you tell me that they were intentional design decisions :p), so those being my two big complaints is probably a good thing.
All in all, I'm glad to see that you're still making stuff! Now, back to figuring out that Controller fight...
thanks for your thoughts! my opinion is that a little bit if chip damage promotes a little bit of pressure while you're figuring things out, even if you can suss out a stable defensive strategy, you can't sustain it forever. that's the principle anyway. i'm not convinced it's 100% necessary, but it'd feel wrong if it was straight zeroes. the thing that bothers me is the inconsistency. partly that's the system (i don't think i can math it out so ranged attacks deal 1 while you're in the fray), part of it's the rushed development cycle (ogre bat originally served boar spear's function before i arrived at the concept of reach weapons and revised all the damage formulas late in development, and i cant promise all the changes in the spreadsheet made it into the game), part of it is for tutorial purposes (i'd like all blocked melee attacks to deal 1, but the falchion dealing 0 to the axe guy in the first battle helps communicate that you need to be doing something besides just attacking). i'll be working on untangling this stuff in the next round of revisions..
re: randomization, that's a needle i'm still figuring out how to thread. i like randomization in general and it feels right to me that some enemies should resist it to various degrees. but any time you have a percentage chance in the middle range (i use a lot of 70s and 30s in this) you create a communication problem, and now it takes a lot of experimentation that players generally aren't that motivated to do in order to assess the effectiveness of your status ailments, etc. sometimes i like living with that ambiguity, and i don't like predictability of moves that always or never work. but when you have this many different enemies it's kind of a drag to have to restart the learning process with each one.. my ideal would be to collapse the range of fray resistances to a couple of heuristics (ranged enemies resist a little, flying enemies resist a lot). there's also the possibility of making fray/disarm ALWAYS work if not resisted, and expressing 'fray resistance' purely through enemy reactions - but the sequencing of actions in rm2k3's turn order might end up undoing that, situationally. so i might have to play around a bit to see what feels right.
so yeah, they kind of were both intentional lol! but that just means you're even more right to raise them. thanks for helping me see the realities of these decisions more clearly, it's valuable perspective. you're on your own with the controller but i'm rooting for you. good luck!
My main issue with the chip damage is that it currently feels inconsistent - some attacks deal 0 damage while others deal 2-3, without much of an indication other than memorizing "oh, this skeleton has a broadsword", which just feels a bit janky. It also interacts a bit weirdly with the healing system in my opinion - if my main way of healing is by leaving party members out of fights, I feel like fights with only one enemy should let me do that without taking mandatory damage. Maybe blocked attacks could be 1 damage with clear indicator that they were blocked, and then being Safe reduces that to 0 to give you more of a reason to Buckler over just Disengaging?
As for randomization... yeah, thinking about it more my issue is less with randomization and more that the feedback I got didn't make me realize that I was just very unlucky (I swear, I missed like four Circle Formations/Engages on the same enemy in a row). Another possible suggestion would be to represent resistance to the fray/disarming by making those enemies immune to AoE abilities - in other words, Circle Formation or similar attacks would pull every melee enemy into the fray, but you'd have to use Engage on each ranged or flying enemy individually.
Thanks for the encouragement - hopefully I'll have time to get back to it this week!
Just finished this one and had a blast! It's a tight resource optimization puzzle, and it can only be solved by learning the mechanics and understanding what a "good" result for each fight looks like. The resting mechanic rewards you for balancing risk and reward, routing the fights in an optimal order, and understanding which characters are needed for which fights. That last one requires more thought than in many RPGs since this very much isn't a rock-paper-scissors battle system, so there are genuine trade-offs with every decision that are more than "use character X to beat Y". Every mechanic has a purpose, and the best way through each battle isn't always the most obvious one. The end result is that you really need to understand the game to do well; a fight that "seemed okay" might not be good enough in the long run. New mechanics are introduced over time so that you're constantly introduced to something new before the old mechanics start to get anywhere near being repetitive (despite each fight being relatively long in itself).
While there's enough leeway that you don't need good RNG, you absolutely can run out of resources if you let mistakes stack up over time. It's worth taking the time to redo fights that went poorly and fix any mistakes.
I already shared some my thoughts with you but I wanted to leave a comment as well. I think this is my favourite combat-focused entry. The battle system is immediately overwhelming but quickly becomes intuitive, despite the lack of explicit tutorialization. You're provided with only 5 healing items but a whole host of clever tricks to delay their use as much as possible. Puzzling out how to get away with taking as little damage as possible, or leave a character out of a fight to let them rest, was constantly challenging and rewarding, and the encounters keep evolving and introducing new snags. The cutscenes and surprise attacks through the tower were fun and expressive. After all of it, my fight against the final boss came down to the wire, and I won just before dying with no healing items remaining. Really beautiful game.
Wow!!! The Fray is a great combat mechanic just like the first time around, but this time every single encounter introduces new types of enemies and attacks that interact with the system in unique ways... incredible!
The resting mechanic took me a while to notice, but I'm a big fan of how the resource economy here works. Even if the measly 5 healing items you get is super stingy.
The silent storytelling is awesome too, introducing the characters one by one really lets you get attached to each of them, and the atmosphere of escaping the castle under assault is impeccable. I love the part where the last party member gets introduced and she just casually styles on a swarm of enemies for 5 minutes lmao.
It's a bit buggy/unpolished currently, but I think this beats the first game by a mile, and I loved that one (crazy that it's been four years...). My only real complaint is that I wish the combat system was faster.
Shoutouts to the elf from RPG sketch 3.
(Also the time this took me to beat was more like 6 hours than 2 ahahahahaha. I got stuck on the final boss for a while.)
i'm really touched that you would play this one to the end in its current state. i was having my doubts at the last minute, but it's super heartening to hear that the vision came through and that it was technically possible to finish. i'll try and polish it up good so it doesn't take the next challenger 6 hours lmfao. thank you
i read what you wrote about overscoping and it being two hours long and i thought damn, really?? the space is so small! and then in roughly 10 minutes of playing I was immediately like "oh"
i am very much looking forward to playing more