What's up, RMers?

[Taylor]

I've been thinking on and off about how to handle scan/analysis of enemies. As I showed off months back, I originally had a system that instead of showing specific numbers or skills, the enemy analysis gave a blurb. This blurb varied depending on the character that last used a scan skill. You could view all obtained blurbs in the main menu.

• While this allowed for a varied system and showing character personality in their observations of the enemies, I would have to write something for every enemy for every party member.
  
• It also - as others pointed out - gave the impression of needing every character to scan enemies, either for completionism or simply out of necessity, and that the character with the best analysis power should just be used alone. This is regardless of the unlock data being shared across save files.
  

I want a simple system, but I also feel like I want something more than "get all info from defeating an enemy", since that would also lock out bosses on initial runs. (Although I may make it that some enemies have hidden data when fighting them anyway?)

• I think it's been suggested before of a system where enemies require a certain number of defeats to unlock stages of data. That's one idea, but it still runs into the same problem and it sounds tedious or unclear how to achieve data stage unlock.
  
• Another method could be copying Persona and that a mission control character can be asked to do the analysis which takes a few turns to do. The problem there is that there doesn't exist a mission control character. However there does exist a character who makes sense to have analytical ability. This makes me biased to making the analysis/scan ability an actual skill, so it works for character narrative.
  
• I got a suggestion earlier to make analysis work through something during enemy attacks, like reaction time events. It could be that during some attacks a character can avoid it with a button press, and this opening is what gives them the ability to give an enemy the once over and obtain bestiary info. However I do understand people don't exactly like QTEs.
  

As an aside, I will probably still have blurb-based enemy data (or I could be lazy and just display STR/INT/DEF/AGI as per usual), but it will be more generic instead of character based, given half of them are optional/obtained whenever the player wants.

EDIT: Addendum; currently the system functions that an Analysis skill is cast, enemy data is updated, and then when it's the player's turn, they can press [Q] when selecting a target to see data. This is in contrast to the Final Fantasy method (select data for a few seconds) or earlier Atlus games (full screen data only after using Analysis, have to use it again to check data again). It does though require being in select single enemy target mode, so it could perhaps be a separate function.

... alternately I could remove in-battle data entirely, though I'm not sure how much of a detriment that will be at this stage.