LogFAQs > #972168864

Revelation34 posted...

Those lines are fine. They should just be allowed to be skippable.

They're skippable in that you can scroll through them by mashing A, but that still just ends up adding 5+ seconds to every single turn just dealing with useless, tedious repetition of information that could be displayed much more efficiently, which adds up and is more annoying than anything. Plenty of turn-based RPG's communicate all the information needed to follow more complex battle systems than Pokemon's without needing to spell it all out in text every turn. Heck, Pokemon already does have animations and icons for things like status effects, you just have to sit through those and then still have text boxes tell you what they meant. It's mildly useful the first couple times, but after even one battle of being burned, paralyzed, or confused, the vast majority of players are going to have figured it out.

As a philosophy, text in turn-based battles should mostly only be used to communicate information that can't be more easily communicated another way (or to retain a log of what's happened, which can fill in at the same time as other informative actions are happening on-screen). A lot of using text goes back to the original inspirations of D&D and the like, where the DM does actually have to tell you what happens after each attack because there's no other way to deliver that information. Even once we did get into the realm of video RPG's, graphics were pretty limited and adding more animations was expensive (both monetarily and in terms of how much it taxed the systems). We're well past that point, though, and using animations and HUD elements to communicate information more efficiently can make things a lot less tedious.