A few weeks ago, after playing Devil May Cry 4, I realised where I wanted to go with the combat system. I was looking for a system in which both player skill and knowledge, together with the player character's own growth in skills and statistics would lead to the battle system I was looking for. I had already established that every battle had to be its own instance a very long time ago. While I'm obviously sticking in a 2D world (since 3D worlds are out of any single-person development team), I realised that DMC had hit that spot that I wanted - and I now had some vision of what I wanted.
I wanted timing to be part of the equation, variety of attacks, real time tactics, relatively unique enemy behaviour, a difficulty increase not just by number of enemies - but numbers of certain kinds of enemies. To get this kind of system working well, limits of peculiar kinds have to be set - which Fantasy of War is highly suited for. The game has need for growth, but not that same kind needed in an RPG - but one needed for something like DMC. This also revealed that my experience block system was perfect for Fantasy of War, not Sword Fantasy.
The concept of experience blocks was originally so that it could be easily reallocated between statistics - but I now find that having them reallocatable between skills as well as statistics - could be a real interesting system of tradeoffs. Having them freely move about in an RPG was grossly impractical and unfair, but having them move about - when there is a limit to how many of these blocks you can have around - and more skills and statistics than you could possibly buy, with plenty of unique and different battles - leads to what I believe is a very flexible system that's loads of fun.
That being said, there is a very good possibility of me suspending Sword Fantasy to pursue this new battle system. And so begins the Fantasy of War.