Original post by BringBackFuturama
I think Chrono Cross did an excellent job with character development, considering there's 44 characters.

I agree that Chrono Cross made its unique characters interesting, (by providing each of them with some backstory explored via the use of sidequests), but unfortunately many of the characters weren't differentiated enough gameplay wise to make them fun: only a small subset of the characters made sense to pick at any given time.

Combining character development WITH gameplay diversity would be prime.

For promoting character diversity:

1. In the final fantasy games (trend here) I really like the limit breaks that are unique to specific characters. Perhaps, have something like limit breaks but have character-dependent ways on how they work:

Thronk: Fills his limit meter when he takes damage, pulls off a powerful attack whose strength depends on stopping a moving bar at a certain spot (sort of like with Titus's limit break in FF-X or the power meter in golf games)

Gill: Fills his meter when he sees lots of stealable items, limit break consists of trying to steal multiple items from an enemy, sucess depends on hitting button combinations like in a fighter game or DDRR.

Valient: Fills his meter when enemies take damage, pulls off an attack like Thronk does but his attack depends on the outcome of a 1d20 dice roll.


So it would basically be:
Fill methods / limit outcomes / How it's calculated.

Create some way to really make these special to each different character and you might have something.

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Personally, I really liked the limit breaks for Tifa and Cait Sith in FFVII. Slot machines and dice have a unique element of risk to them thats really interesting in battle.

Tifa attack was calculated from X number of reels depending on if it was normal, critical, or miss (not sure... don't have the game anymore)

Cait did 100 x (his level/20)d6 dice damage. which was pretty neat.