Next question then:
When KoR was announced to be almost entirely free from wiimote controls, I leapt to the conclusion that even I could make a better tales game for the Wii. There were obvious limitations, especially as I didn't have access to disk based media (for the Wii, anyway). Infact, I was limited to a one button flash game. I got the concept down and while I will admit that my story and characters weren't exactly great, I soon found out I didn't have a lot to top anyway. The only thing I couldn't figure out was how to do 3D.
Flash forward a few years and it's obviously going nowhere, mostly due to my inability to sprite an entire character, but I'd like to know what your opinions are on the current concept.
The first thing is that it revolves around this input grid:
Holding the cursor in the central zone will keep your character idle while holding forwards or backwards (relative to your character) will cause a walk or backstep, respectively. Far forward would cause a run and far backward would cause the character to turn, at which point what was far backward would become far forward, causing the character to run. Up and Down do nothing special but far down causes a crouch and far up causes a jump.
In the original concept, an auto block would occur when backstepping and pressing A at that instant wold cause guardian but that was simply due to button limitations.
Note: "A" can be read as its other console equivalent or as the DS/3DS Dpad if desired.
Combining this with the A button leads to attacks. Up, down, forward, backward and center are all part of the basic 3 hit combo, with up taking things into the air. Once in the air, all segments have the same downward combo ending hit (so up, up is only a two hit combo). Far down A and far forward A are single hit attacks, far backward and far up have none.
From here, all of these moves but far down A can be chained into any non-magic base arte which is performed by going through the central segment and one of the directional ones while holding the A button (up to four can be assigned). Those can then be chained into either fusion artes or base arte extensions, though not all characters will have access to both.
Fusion artes are performed by going through two adjacent directional segments and are determined by the base artes in those slots.
Extensions are performed by going through a directional segment and the far segment that shares that direction. Again, they are defined by the base arte.
From here you can only chain into your hi-ougi, the activation of which will be for each character.
Now onto magic. First tier spells are performed by holding the A button and dragging through the center, into a directional segment and into the far segment. After this, there is a pause of 2.5 seconds for the next input before the spell is cast in which the user cannot move.
By dragging from top to bottom/bottom to top or leftmost to rightmost/rightmost to leftmost during this period, the spell can be extended into two different second tier spells assigned to that base spell via the arte menu. Once this is done, there will be a wait of 1.5 for the next input before the spell is cast (original pause is canceled).
To extend to level 3 (also menu assigned), you must perform the input you didn't use for level two. There will then be a pause of only 0.75 seconds before the spell is cast.
Finally, level four can be reached via a full circle input in the far directional zone. These spells will insta-cast once the input is complete.
As you can see, level four spells can take almost no time to cast if you're fast with the input or they can take up to 4.75 seconds (or even fail mid way) if you aren't. Level four is practically a hi-ougi for mages so no real hi-ougi would be learnt.
Overlimits are activated via a full circle input in the directional area.
All zones can be passed through in any order during input but no other zones may be if the move is to work.
Extensions and fusions cannot be used until learnt, as is normally the case.