Battles
I had random encounters in this game. The battle system is tactical style. Even though the battles can be pretty short because of the easy difficulty, it still doesn’t seem like it’d fit having random encounters. At least running was 100%. The random encounters did sort of turn me off to exploring it until I got the encounter-none ability. I’m not a big fan of random encounters though. I prefer being able to avoid and fight whatever enemies I want. Not everyone liked it, especially because they wanted to develop their characters, but I did like what I did in Paradise Blue. You have a limited amount of encounters in a map, and once you beat it, they’re gone forever.
Character Roles
For the battle system itself, I had various characters with their own roles, and you can pick 3 of the 5 in battle. Sabrina would do 2x damage against water enemies with her attack, and has healing/attack magic, while Lisa would have buffs, long range attack, and do 2x damage against land animals, and so on. I liked the general idea. You can fight a battle in different ways depending on which party you used to fight it. However, there ended up being one party that would end up being too strong, and there weren’t too many abilities to play around with. For someone like Angela, if you’re not using the limit break ability, she would stick to an elemental spell spam. In the end game, you can have Sabrina, Lisa, and Angela. Courage with Sabrina to raise everyones limit growth, Magic buff with Lisa to double magic power, then limit break with Angela and then cast a spell with her. That should just about handle most battles, if not just have Sabrina/Angela continue casting. No need for any of the characters to even move as the spells were all enemy effect. I liked how each of the characters had their own use at least, James was a great boss killer because of his 2x damage to humans and multi-attack limit. William less so but attacked long range at least and was an anti-aerial attacker.
Enemy AI
The enemy AI I feel brought it down a lot. I didn’t code anything special for the enemies so they just run around until they’re in range of a character and then attack. Few problems here: The player doesn’t know how far the enemy will go (as enemy phase is done based on time rather than enemies taking their turns), no indication on how hard the enemy hits, who will get targeted, and things like that. The game is easy enough that you likely wouldn’t lose a battle, although you just need one character to die to get a game over. Part of the fun of the battle system, other than your characters development, and experimentation, is the enemies AI. In here, the enemy phase was just a blur, they all just attack and you hope that your character remains alive so you can patch up the damage (if any) and continue on. I myself didn’t know how much defense I should have when fighting certain enemies.
I did try to make some sort of variations for how the battles were fought, and even though they didn’t all work, at least they provided some much needed variety for the battles. The one I personally liked most was the fight with Lou Zar (This game has a lot of bad puns). Instead of doing damage to the enemy (although with Angela’s Lumina, that is an alternative way to win the fight), you have to push the enemies to one side while they try to push you to the other side. An attack will then push them one step back, while enemy attacks will push you back. It is amusing when an enemy kills themselves and goes in the light area during their movement phase. I tried personally to make each boss battle fight a little bit differently, which I thought was a good idea. Some don’t have much in the way of customization, some (like the mentioned battle) have a lot more. One other problem is that there’s a list of who the enemy targets, and it’s always the same. If the enemy encounters someone in range, it’ll first check if it’s Sabrina. Then Lisa. Then Angela. Then James, and finally William. It is a good idea to keep everyone armored just in case the enemy finds someone else first, but mainly you just have to focus on keeping Sabrina well armored. Until ironically the final boss when it’s best to have Sabrina unequipped but everyone else equipped. That final boss bases the damage on Sabrinas defense, which is bad if you have her defense very high. It wasn’t a good way to balance it as I thought it would be.
The boss battles and the ideas behind them:
-The first boss has you against 2 animals and Eva Lanche. She occasionally casts Mute when she attacks, so your character is prevented from using skills the next turn. Otherwise it’s a normal battle. This one is probably the most balanced boss so it’s actually possible to die from this boss if you’re not careful. Angela should probably be the only one at the moment with all enemy attacks so you’ll likely be moving around and attacking with Lisa (Animal slayer) and James (Human slayer) and have Sabrina around for healing.
-The second boss is 2 birds and Robin M. Blind. Robin M. Blind is completely invulnerable until you get rid of the 2 birds. After a turn or 2, one bird will be brought back, in which case you must destroy it again before you can hurt Robin M. Blind. Sabrina is good for healing and perhaps if you have it, the all enemy Storm spell, Angela can use storm spell, James is good for taking out Robin when the defenses are down and William is a good anti-bird attacker.
-The third boss is 3 knights (Sir Loin and his guards). The rules for battle are changed, so spells aren’t going to do damage. You need to attack the ball and have the ball pass by the enemy or touch the enemy for them to take damage. So Sabrina (for healing again), James and William are best for this task since Angelas spells won’t work anyway. As we see, we can tell that Sabrina ends up a bit too useful simply because she can heal. You have items that have but they won’t full cure your team and you can only use one per character.
-The fourth boss is a Helicopter and 2 birds. This battle has a forced team of Sabrina, James and William, and I think that was a bug. If you cast Fire on the Helicopter, it does high damage but you get counter-attacked (all ally damage). If you cast Storm, then it’s completely ineffective. So I use Sabrina for casting Ice, Healing, and attacking, while James and William do damage. William is good here because of his 2x damage to all the enemies, but James should have the multi-attack command which will also help when doing damage against the helicopter.
-The fifth boss I’ll list is an optional boss, her name is Anne Teak. She was actually a story boss in the original version but I replaced her. She has 2 birds and will pick an element to defend against. So perhaps one turn, fire will not work. Other than that, it’s a standard battle except she has a lot of HP, which nets a lot of EXP. That’s the other thing I forgot to mention, you can get enough EXP from simply fighting boss battles that you don’t even need to fight a normal battle. I’ve played the game that way, running away from every encounter except the boss ones and still managed to be at a fine level for the end game.
-The sixth boss is in the same area, her name is Constance Noring. Her role in battle is similar to that outside of battle, making the characters fall asleep. The enemies around her (a squid and a shark) will attack you and that will wake you up when you’re hit, but if you slay them you can actually go a while before naturally being awakened. I got annoyed at that. Sabrina, Lisa and Angela should be fine for this, Sabrina for Fire and for 2x water enemy damage, Lisa for magic and power buffs, and Angela for Star limit (reducing enemy HPs by 25-50%) and more Fire.
-The seventh boss is the Lou Zar boss which I mentioned previously. You have to hit him and his 2 crows to one side, while they try to hit you to the other side. You can make good use of the Shield spell here as it prevents you from being moved by an attack. My favorite battle.
-The eighth boss is Stan Dintall and 2 Golems in the crater. The leprechaun (which he denies) is really easy, and it’s the Golems who have high HP and very high attack power, it managed to one hit kill me. Sabrina/Lisa/Angela strategy again, except I have them move as far away as I can.
-The ninth boss is 3 Islanders. I think I put on some elemental weaknesses/resistances to some, but I just Lumina them to death. Nothing special about the battle.
-The tenth boss is Jim Pansey. He comes with 2 animals but they’re nothing but distractions really. Whenever Jim moves, everyone takes damage. So basically you need to have high enough defense and make sure you heal it, or trap Jim so he doesn’t move. Then once he can’t move, you can just attack free of worries.
-The last boss is Leviathan. 3 Forms of course. The first form is Leviathan and 2 sharks. You can avoid the sharks by not going near the water and just casting Fire spells. Sabrinas attack works well here too. The second form I made a bad decision. They take away your items. You have 3 people to attack the Leviathan. You should make it as it just spams one spell. Then for the last form, it has a lot of HP (Every later version of Island Sky has this HP amount lowered). At first, it was 99,999 HP, which makes Angelas Star limit absolutely necessary to remove it. It just stays in the same spot and spams one spell over and over, and you have 5 characters for this battle so everyone just spams their own stuff.