Have you read or watched Berserk? Is so, what genre of game would fit best for it?
I’ve done both of course. It’s one of my favorite manga series. I think that it would fit best as a 3d beat em up game, somewhere between the souls games and say devil may cry. In terms of game structure you could very easily adapt a lot of manga chapters to fit.
Following from the souls games I think that combat should be about finding the right time between enemy attacks to land massive heavy weighty hits. I played through Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 for the first time each using the zweihander type weapon. First the dragon bone smasher, the zweihander, then the greatsword. I think that missed hits should probably be cancelable into roll dodges, and blocks should either be done two handed, letting some damage through, or no blocking at all, just dodge everything. The hard part will probably be capturing the agility of Guts in combination with massive heavy sword wielding, which is why I propose the roll cancel on whiffed attacks (inspired by monster hunter).
In line with Dark Souls, having faster lighter attacks as contextual actions after rolls would be a cool touch too. Following from DMC, having a bunch of command inputs, like forward + slash, back + slash would be helpful. If there are two attack inputs, one should be for horizontal slashes, the other for vertical slashes, the latter being more powerful, and probably slamming enemies to the ground (because I loved that about the zweihander). I think using a stamina system would make a lot of sense (it’s what prevents you from repeatedly slamming enemies to the ground over and over in an infinite) even though that’s clearly more of a souls influence. I think that if command inputs are used, that lock-on should be toggled based on the R1 button, meaning that the attack buttons would be among the face buttons instead of triggers. Some ranged attacks can hang out on the triggers still though.
The game could follow directly the story and battles as they are in the manga, or during the golden age arc and later during the black swordsman arc, open you up for a mission-type structure or open world structure respectively. I think that leveling up and so on should be left out of the game ideally, with new abilities and weapons presented at the appropriate point in the story arc. Maybe a light resource management aspect with throwing knives, arrows, and cannonballs. If there is an open structure then people tend to respond poorly to side quests or optional missions unless there’s a reward at the end of it I feel. Maybe a healing item could be introduced in the open world half of the game and side missions unlock dispensaries. Side missions could maybe also unlock warp points or shortcuts through the world. In the golden age campaign, you could have it so there are many paths to victory and different missions push the enemy back across the map or something, closing off some missions so it’s essentially branched progression forwards, pick your favorite percentage of missions to advance
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 