What you see in JRPGs usually is the same sort of thing in each and every battle system. You've got standard attacks with whatever weapons. You've likely got special combos or something along the line of special moves. You've got magic abilities that can range among many other elements. But you may also see some attacks that make you wonder, what were the game designers thinking? I find myself thinking the same thing sometimes when I play games.
You look at some special attacks, like the Purify Weird Souls from Valkyrie Profile. These all seem to be some sort of hidden power or something like that. Just check out Arngrim or Lucian and see what kinds of finishing combos these guys do. And then all of Legend of Legaia's characters use fancy-named martial arts combos, but these all don't seem to have any special effects. What about the types of attacks Will/Freedan/Shadow does in Illusion of Gaia, or the special attacks that Ark can do in Terranigma? They're pretty neat. Same with the special techniques characters in the Tales series can do. And even at their weirdest, the majority of special finishing techniques used in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters are very much charming each time they are used.
Not everything is set for awesome special attacks, as a majority of them tend to mix in weird ones with good awesome ones. Mario & Luigi games love to have zaniness in their special bros moves, which it gets a pass because Mario & Luigi games are already meant to be fun in a lot of ways anyways. I can't really say the same for the first Wild Arms though. How does Rudy get different kinds of armaments anyways? His default gun actually is supposed to be his regular shotgun*. To tell the truth though, I want to focus on how zany Square is with its non-Final Fantasy RPGs and the weird attacks they have.
Enter an on-foot battle in Xenogears and input your button combos to do your deathblows. So far, nothing's too important, especially very early on in this game. You've just got standard martial arts combos, sword combos, whip combos, wait, is Elly actually screaming at an enemy for damage? The hell? And then you unlock the elemental deathblows, and wonder how the hell these characters can get such superpowers. Bart growing angel wings and flapping them? Crikey. They at least deduced that Emeralda was a completely unique character that can shapeshift with her nanomachine body, so all her crazy deathblows actually make sense. But I really can't say the same about everything else. Maybe it's the whole deal with the Limiters?
So onto Chrono Cross. Watching the techniques in this game basically inspired me to create this post, and given this game's crazy as hell cast, it was sure telling. Just look: Luccia using her chemicals to totally mutilate her enemies? What about Macha's technique of turning her enemy into a shirt and folding it? Mel does even more, turning her opponent into a drawing and drawing on it, or the stupid temper tantrum attack that somehow causes an earthquake. Turnip's secret technique has him flattening an enemy with a Matryoshka version of himself. I guess it does make sense that nonsensical characters have nonsensical special abilites, but Square sure loves to take it far when they did this in Chrono Cross. Heck, in Chrono Trigger, Frog's best technique is Frog Squash. Which if you recall, summons a HUGE frog to stomp on the enemies. Yeah.
Am I against these weird attacks? Should this really be taken seriously? I really wouldn't know. All I can say is, if you're gonna have weird and wacky special abilities for characters in a JRPG, then they shouldn't be characters that are taken too seriously. For the games I mentioned, they are mostly fine give or take. I honestly still prefer the anime-esque attacks of any other game no matter what.
*Well when you think about it, that only really applies in the remake, where he actually has this as his default weapon. In Alter Code F, he also gets special JRPG style moves with his gun, but this is better RPG-wise than having multiple different armaments. Oh, and his default weapon in the original Wild Arms is none other than a small sword. At least Jack makes some sense with his special moves, I guess.
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