Press Turn and Encouraging a Gameplay Loop

System design isn't something done in a vacuum, the way a system functions usually involves building around what will encourage the game to be played in a way that fits what the developer wants, or at least that's the hope. The Shin Megami Tensei series and its Press Turn combat system are a reasonable illustration of this point. The contrast between how the series combat and progression was designed before and after them can help elucidate how the way the interlocking systems work helps to teach how the player ought to use them.

That's a lot of gobbledygook if you've never played Shin Megami Tensei though, so I'll break it down a bit. Shin Megami Tensei is a metaseries of Japanese RPGs that, depending on how you're measuring, started on the Famicom/NES. The franchise changed its title from Megami Tensei to Shin Megami Tensei on the Super Famicom/Super NES and started to see official English releases on the PS1. History lesson out of the way let's get down to mechanics. These earlier games were first person dungeon crawlers, often unfair or just unreasonably difficult. Thematically they all dealt with apocalypes and demons and gods of every conceivable religion invading Japan. The core differentiating gameplay mechanic was that you could recruit enemies to your side and fuse them with each other to make new ones that did different things. The early games seek to encourage players to play properly in a pretty blunt fashion. Demons in the party do not gain experience, so in order for a player to keep their party usable their hand will eventually be forced and they'll have to fuse demons. It's a pretty simple way to keep things moving but it creates a lot of pressure on the player. It's essentially all stick no carrot, make this decision or you'll be utterly incapable of further progress. SMT games gained a reputation of being hard, demoralizing to lose in. The spin-off games even experimented with much stranger methods of progression. Unfortunately these often led to methods of play that weren't really great for designer or player. For an example, Persona 2 allowed the player to purchase new Personas but the actual selection process makes it deeply unclear how useful new ones will be and as such the game is almost balanced around only expecting the player to have new ones when the plot gives them new ones.

That's the problem that needs solving though, if we look at Persona 2's systems we see a game that has systems that encourage the player to keep using their old personas. The player knows what group spells their old personas have, casting group spells is both mechanically economical and arbitrarily boosts stats of the old personas allowing them to continue to be useful long after the rest of the game's mechanics say they ought to be replaced. The mechanical mismatch essentially encourages the player to largely ignore this entire system. It doesn't even really get better at "high-level" play, unless the player just wants to use all the personas there just isn't much reason to delve into this system. Things needed to change about how these systems were approached. As a sidebar though Persona 2 is incredible and will be the subject of an essay about its tragic deprived middle child status soon.

Where were we though, ah that's it, the mechanical underpinnings of the Shin Megami Tensei games were on shaky ground. Older games were harsh and mechanically rigid, new attempts to replace them being tested in spin-off games were coming up with poor results (you are lucky I did not try to explain how on earth "Shin Megami Tensei if..." handles this) The series kind of took a short hiatus in the early PS2 era before coming back with Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. This game featured a pretty fundamental rethink of how demons and combat worked. It's pretty clear the new systems were designed to compliment each other and a version of these systems has found its way to nearly every future game. First, demons could now level up, they could gain new skills and when they were fused they could pass them to what demon resulted from that fusion. The rules around this were still intensely opaque but the player could count on skills they had become reliant on continuing to follow them from demon to demon. That said, demons being able to level up introduced the old problem, how to encourag the player to fuse them away. Nocturne did this by integrating the incentive into the way combat functions at its core.

Press Turn combat probably deserves its own section here, so I'll give the rundown. In most turn based RPG combat, everything on the battlefield has a specific reaction to every element. These are usually multipliers on base damage, if you're weak to an attack you might take 2x damage, resist 0.5x, nullify it 0x, absorb it -1x. Press Turn combat takes that and adds further incentives though. If you are hit by an attack you're weak to your opponent actually gets another turn, they can keep attacking, heal, buff, getting struck in your weak point could cause a domino effect where the opponent gets significantly more turns and wipes your party. There are limits to how many turns can be gained this way, but gaining more than one can be devastating to the opposing party. These games are thus built to reward parties that can maximize the number of press turns they gain and minimize the number they lose.

If you think about it you can already probably guess how the game is going to use this to incentivize fusing demons, getting into this other part of the mechanics. It isn't typically until very late game that you can have a party that is capable of dealing with most any situation. You'll always be having to choose what elements you are less likely to be hit with, what attacks you can maximize your number of turns with. The demon party can fluctuate based on what dungeon the player is in. This gives the player both carrot and stick to fuse demons. If they aren't fusing they'll reach a point where their current skills just aren't cutting it, or the inbuilt weaknesses and strengths of their party are just incompatible with the current set of enemies. When they do fuse though they can keep what abilities are important to them, producing more useful skill loadouts in the results, while increasing the overall power of their party and acquiring new demons whose weaknesses may be better suited for the current area.

This kind of design ideally exists in most games, but certainly not all of them. There are always reasons to consider when to decouple systems that you don't intend to be core to every player's experience and I could almost write a companion piece about where it breaks down. That companion piece would probably be about Final Fantasy VIII so maybe I will follow that up. While Shin Megami Tensei's current building blocks showcase where this idea can create a virtuous cycle, each of the core gameplay systems looping together to encourage proper use of both, sometimes it can be useful to examine when the actual start of the loop gets lost. Where it becomes unclear to a new player how the game is actually meant to be approached and what it can do to a game's reputation when the band-aid fixes they use to make progress hurt how the game is played.