Summary
In the vast majority of games with a party or companions of some sort, it’s standard fare to give you quite a large amount of control over those characters. If you can’t outright play as them, you can at least issue them detailed commands, choose their class and equipment, and plenty more. Freedom to build the party of your own liking.
But some games want to stretch the defined. A party must work together of course, but who’s to say you should be able to control everything you do? Some characters will rely on their own expertise rather than your own, and others will work off the pre-defined strategies you offer them and refuse to deviate.
Probably not the first entry you expected, huh? The Monster Hunter games are famed for their high difficulty, requiring mastery of your chosen weapon and the moveset of any given monster if you want to succeed. Multiplayer cooperation has always been at the heart of the experience, but it relied on real players, not NPCs.
That changed with the Sunbreak expansion for Monster Hunter Rise. Suddenly,all those supposedly great hunters could join you on the hunt, all with their own unique playstyles. Though just like real players, you couldn’t tell then what to do. You would have to check out their weapons and tendencies beforehand to make sure they were a fit for the upcoming hunt.
Skyrim is a lot of things. An expansive open-world, a setting filled with inventive fantasy ideas, a modder’s paradise. It has captivated the world for over a decade, and that’s not slowing down. But one thing that Skyrim does not excel at is the AI of its characters. This is fine when characters target you in combat. Not so much when you have to rely on them to help you.
Skyrim lets you recruit countless companions across the country, but you can’t tell them what to do. You want them to use the weapons you gave them? You better hope they want to. Oh, you just wanted them to hold? Well actually it’s their weapon now. They have no survival instinct whatsoever, running headfirst into danger. It would be admirable if they weren’t your pack mule.
The Suikoden games have always been a wonderful blend of turn-based combat and real-time strategy elements, and that is owed in large part to the sheer number of characters you recruit. While most might expect a party to cap out at four members,the Suikoden games frequently surpass this. In the case of Suikoden 3, you have a party of 6 at a time, set in pairs.
This leads to a unique scenario where you only directly control one character in a pair based on the command you issue, with the other acting to their best judgement. This can lead to some poor decisions on the AI-controlled party member, but that’s half the battle. You need to construct pairs you think can actually fend for themselves when not in use.
For over a decade, Bioware has been defined by the Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. While both are RPGs, they are polar opposite in every other regard. Where Dragon Age gave you granular control over your companions, from the automated actions they took to outright direct contol, Mass Effect was much more lax.
With action combat taking the forefront, you had little control over companions. You could set their gear and unlocked abilities, but this was mostly it. As the games went on, even this level of control dwindled. The largest input you ever had on them was where they took cover in combat. Beyond that, you’re hoping they are smart enough to hold their own.
From Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker studio, The Last Story was an interpretation of a modern Final Fantasy title with more real-time tactical elements for a combat system unlike most other games out there. In it, you played as the protagonist Zael, and Zael alone. You literally issued commands, but everything else relied on your companions actually enacting them.
This led to a system where you actually acted like a general, leading your party of six as a leader. Zael was more than just commands though, with stealth elements to his own gameplay as well as a crossbow that could be aimed freely. In this sense, combat was a fine balance between relying on your own skills, and your ability to guide your party members to use their talents to the best of their abilities.
In Unicorn Overlord, you play as the exiled Prince Alain as you work to restore yourself to the throne. It’s not a tale that’s in anyway unfamiliar, though the way in which it handles its tactical turn-based combat is far from standard. You must still recruit your party members across the world, outfit them, and build a formidable unit. But you don’t control them.
In fact, you don’t directly control any of them. Instead, Unicorn Overlord uses a Gambut system where you set up actions and reactions in advance for each squad. This will then determine how they act when they come across certain actions or enemies. Maybe if there is a mage present, a unit may focus on taking them out first before their own weaknesses can be targeted. You can’t react yourself in the midst of combat, so you have to hope the gambits you’ve set up are enough.
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Dragon’s Dogma eschews the traditional idea of a party-based RPG, opting instead for real-time action combat. Further still, not a single member of this party is pre-determined. From the pawn you create in the beginning of the game to the two additional pawns you hire along the way, all of them are unique. And none of them can be controlled.
Pawns learn from their masters, bringing those talents into combat and exploration. If you have a mage, they will heal you when you are weak. Unless they have a braver inclination, in which case they may spam attack spells instead. Never will you have a party that all acts the same, but that is what makes this ragtag bunch so enticing.
With modern Persona games, it’s a given that you can control your party members. They are the star of the show in many regards, of course you can. Even Persona 3 Reload gives you full control over the party, letting you tweak every aspect of them. Except this is new. In the original Persona 3, only the protagonist was controlled.
It may seem a far cry from how the game’s are percieved now, but in Persona 3, your companions acted according to their own feelings. Yes you still equipped them with gear, but the actions they took in combat were entirely their own, with no exceptions. It made the game a challenge by all means, but also affirmed that these were characters in their own right who deserved to make their own actions. Even if they weren’t always the smartest.
