Concept
The concept and design philosophy behind Patchwork Battle is "Build your party". Now, when I say "build your party" I don't mean chose from a predetermined list of 6 characters and go on your marry way. Instead, I quite literally mean build your party (more on this later).
Once you have your party built you then use them to enter the arena and fight wave after wave of baddies. The battle system is your typical Turn Based RPG battle system, utilizing an ATB (Active Time Battle, see here:
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/B...ve_Time_Battle) battle system. After each wave of baddies is defeated you can either continue on to the next wave or go back to your lab to upgrade and/or build more mimics.
Build Your Party
So remember when I said "Build your party"? Yeah, let's talk about that because it's a vital part to Patchwork Battle and is, in my opinion, probably the coolest part to boot.
You are in charge of assembling your party of mimics to defeat the endless wave of baddie mimics coming after you. This is done by collecting mimic body parts, hearts, souls, and memories and putting them together to create your mimic. Essentially, instead of crafting your weapons and armor you are crafting your party member. It should be noted that there is no equipment in the game. Everything is tied to the body parts, hearts, souls, memories, and upgrade crystals of the mimic.
Build-A-Mimic
So now that you have a brief introduction, let's get into a little more detail on this. Mimics require a head, a body, 2 arms, 2 legs, and a heart. Each and every body part has some stats attached to it (HP, STR, DEX, etc). The stats for your mimic are determined based on the sum of it's parts (plus any synergy points).
The heart of the mimic determines the mimics base class. There's a lot more to it than that, however. Each body part also has a Class attached to it. The 8 starting classes are: Mage, Sorcerer, Priest, Druid, Warrior, Knight, Rogue, and Archer. Each part also has a class value assigned to it (hearts are assigned a value of 3, body and head are assigned a value of 2, while arms and legs are assigned a value of 1). The higher the class value of a class the stronger that classes skills and bonuses will be.
So looking back at the previous paragraph you may have realized that you can mix and match classes. You're not stuck with having just a Warrior. You can have a Mimic with the heart, head, body, and legs of a Warrior but the arms of a Mage. So you now have a Battlemage, of sorts.
That was a great segue to the next nuance of the "Build-A-Mimic" shop, which is the ability to unlock an additional 8 mimic classes through building mimics. By combining certain classes together within your mimic you may unlock a new class (Example: Warrior + Mage = Battlemage). When you've unlocked a new class you will be informed and you will have to dismantle your mimic, losing all of the parts you used to build it*, in order to collect it's heart. Classes are sublcassed (ie: Battlemage can use parts from Warrior and Mage and get full bonuses from both).
My mimic is souless!
Actually, no he's not... unless you want him to be, that is. Okay, so that was a pretty bad segue. I apologize for that.
As you advance through the waves of baddie mimics you will, without a doubt, find some souls. These souls can be put into your mimics to give them a personality. The personality of your mimic will provide it with bonuses in certain situations. For example, a mimic with a "Courageous Soul" will get a +DEF bonus when put in the front line.
Souls are reusable, meaning you can have the same soul in multiple mimics. If you remove the soul from a mimic it's not lost. In simpler terms - once you find a soul it's forever usable. This is huge because it's opened up the door for a neat nuance to the battle system.
Mimics on your same team who share the same soul will be "Soul Linked". Soul Linked mimics provide bonuses to each other, depending on the soul. For example, two mimics with the "Courageous Soul" may share damage with each other, meaning when one mimic gets attacked it takes some of the damage and the other mimics take some of the damage (i.e: 2 linked mimics will take 50% damage each, 3 will take 33% each, etc).
Amnesia?
Mimics don't have Amnesia, silly! They don't have any memories because you haven't given them any memories, yet. You are in control of them, remember. What they have, or lack, is all up to you.
I have not fleshed out the memory system completely yet but I will say this - Mimics can be given memories which will determine which skills they have available to them. Memories can be unlocked by defeating baddies and/or leveling up current skills.
* I'm not sold on the idea of losing parts yet. Just something I'm tinkering with!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram