1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video game program for displaying multiple characters, including a player character and enemy character, on screen and controlling battles between the characters, a computer-readable data storage medium storing the video game program, a video game processing method, and a video game processing apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
Role playing games are one genre of video game played using a computer. In a typical role playing game, the player takes the role of a particular character in the game and experiences simulated adventures through the character that the player controls (referred to below as the “player character”) as the story unfolds. In many such games, the player character and opposing character (referred to below as the “enemy character”) are placed in set zones created in a virtual space. As the player character advances into a zone, the player character fights with an enemy character trying to thwart the player character's attempts to achieve the goal of the story, and the story advances when the player character defeats the enemy character.
The player character is typically controlled using buttons on a keypad or a joystick. The player character moves and performs specific actions in response to keypad operations. Numerous battle scenes and other events are distributed throughout the story. The game advances as a result of selected operations performed at each event.
A drawback to such conventional video games is that battle scenes are often presented from the same fixed perspective. The scenes thus lack realism, display content becomes boring, and interest is gradually lost the more the game is played.
There is therefore a need for video games that can flexibly switch to images from a particular perspective determined according to the character status and game progress.