The Grand Battle Video Game (and Soundtrack) Discussion

Here is my somewhat ridiculously ambitious vision.

The overall model is an adventure game. Move from room to room and encounter people/interact with things. There is a separate battle system, which could be either actiony or RPG-style or whatever, I kind of like actiony but the point is that you've got exploration and you've got battles.
The ambitious part: Any character can die in a given round. (Besides yours, that's a Game Over.) Essentially, there are multiple paths through each round, and depending on which path you go for, you'll see different cutscenes and fight a different character at the end.

Now, at first glance, this sounds somewhat ridiculous - namely, the part where you potentially have 56 routes for every round. Or more, as special routes could be opened up if certain characters are still alive.

But this can be simplified a bit. For instance, we could have six characters who have mostly the same path for fighting Character X in Round One, and a seventh who gets a special case. So we'd be looking at more or less one to three routes per character per round - still an ambitious task, but far more manageable. There would probably be optional scenes on some of those paths if certain characters are still alive; seeing some of these in earlier rounds might be necessary to open paths on later rounds.

The big thing here, of course, is that there would be a lot of dialogue with all those paths. But it would give the game a ton of replay value. I'd say that all scenes and battles (including fights against NPCs) would be replayable from a main menu; basically the game would be daring you to unlock them all over the course of countless replays.

That's my ridiculously ambitious idea, anyhow. It would take SO MUCH WRITING and also SO MUCH BUGTESTING to make sure there weren't any scenes that triggered on the wrong path or something. But it would also be very, very fun if it worked out.