Fair enough. I just don't particularly need the financial support, so buying a game you don't want to support me isn't the best use of your resources, that's all.
MRY soo-o.. lets get this straight, in this game combat (and pretty much every other player decision) will be a somewhat informed gamble using available resources without any player skill factor for somewhat uncertain returns?
I think this is a reasonably accurate, but incomplete description. It also depends what "player skill factor" means. If you mean "twitch reactions," then, yes. Except for someone with an extreme manual impairment, who conceivably might miss a key moment to flee from a fight, there's no "player skill" in that regard. But I view the exercise of judgment as a player skill, too, and that matters -- including in combat. Target selection is a non-trivial matter. Some units will do better against other units; there are ways to protect low HP characters (for instance, by tying up the enemy by engaging with someone else); certain enemies are better to kill first (e.g., "leader" enemies who give a bonus to others, wizards whose death destroys any shades they've summoned, etc.). I think calling this an "informed gamble" somewhat understates things -- it sounds more like King of Dragon Pass, where the combat really does have a roulette wheel feel to it.
More generally, because the game is not explicit about what the risks and rewards are, player judgment -- to some extent metaknowledge but to some extent common sense -- can give you an edge. And figuring out the right sequence of risks to take is important, too.
Though it is an inapt analogy, there was an article I read once about grinding in Dragon Warrior 1 that makes me want to analogize to very early jRPG combat. A big part of the judgment you're make is how hard to push -- when you want to go all in, when you want to hedge, etc. In early jRPGs, the consideration was basically: It costs X gold to rest in an inn, and takes me Y minutes to walk from the combat grinding area to the inn; the more fights I do in the combat grinding area, the greater return I get on on X and Y; is it worth risking another fight, or should I go back and rest? In FG, there's no grinding (this is why it's a bad analogy), but there are opportunity costs to avoiding risks. If you leave a cave to rest out of every fight, you will consume many more days in clearing the cave, which in turn leaves you fewer days to pursue other possible rewards. Conversely, if you try to push through a cave in one shot, you could lose an important follower, or the god could die (costing you a week to resurrect), etc. Whether to enter the cave in the first place is itself a cost-benefit analysis. Even though it's close by (and thus you're saving days by spelunking now rather than later), you might not be strong enough to chance it. Do you load up on a bunch of churls first? A stop in a village will take some time, and though the churls are free, they eat food, and if you don't feed them, they become unhappy, in which case they won't be much help in the cave. So you might need to spend gold to buy them some food (fortunately food is cheap in villages) or you might want to hunt en route to the cave (costing you a day).
Zoomed in very closely, each of these decisions is an "informed gamble" (for instance, hunting is a gamble because the amount of food you get is random [though it is affected by factors like the terrain you're hunting in, your gear, your stats, your fetch (familiar), whether you have a woodsman in the warband, etc.], so sometimes it will prove costlier than just buying food), but when you zoom out a little, there are so many such decisions going on at once, that the game is not really a bunch of blind bets, it's a game with gameplay. Very stylized gameplay, to be sure. But more meaningful gameplay in some respects than many RPGs because in many RPGs, every choice is a winning choice, just some win a little more slowly than others. In FG, some choices prove bad, others prove good, and the skill is not just in risk management on the front end, but knowing how to lean into the successful choices when they happen and mitigate the bad choices when they happen.
But the other thing I guess I would say is that while gameplay is about mechanics, the experience of playing a game is not entirely mechanical. Thus, while a strictly minmaxing player would see FG as nothing but a series of informed gambles, ultimately the game is not built around minmaxing. Many choices are meant to have a certain inherent fun (or revulsion), and some of the reward is meant to be narrative, not numerical. Like, blowing the Lur right in the face of a senile old jarl, letting a witch eat a baby, letting your berserk win the hand of the headman's daughter, headbanging with a troll who a wandering skald taught to sing, having your eagle rip out a viking's eyes -- ultimately, if those kinds of opportunities (within a context of calculated risk) add to your pleasure, you might like Fallen Gods. But if they don't, you probably won't, because there are other games that have better mechanics. The same is true of the failures. If being ripped apart from unsuccessfully wrestling a bear, provoking a mob (and a draug!) to attack you by trying to save a slave girl from sacrifice at a funeral, causing a crisis of faith at a shrine by being such a loser god, etc. don't amuse you at all, then the experience of gambling and losing in the game probably won't be much fun -- it would be like missing shots in X-Com but without the tactical combat in which the misses occur.
Zombra Yes, Ogre Battle 1 was an inspiration. Indeed, long before Dan Miller created the amazing aesthetic to the combat, the idea was to directly imitate the Ogre Battle 1 look.
