Sometimes I Want To Play With My Friends, Not Against Them

I've been playing Phantom Dust again lately, and I wonder why they didn't include a co-op mode in the game. You can fight your friends, but you can't team up against them. Maybe they save that for online play, which has never really been my bag. Since it's possible for a single player to combine skills in an arsenal that will complement each other, it'd could be crazy fun to make complementing arsenals for you and a friend. I understand sometimes the game wants to assign you a specific character as a partner for a mission, but I don't see why your friend couldn't play as that character. My best guess is that in some cases, it's critical a character behave in a certain way, and if your friend was controlling the character, rather than the computer, it might not work that way.

Example. There's a mission where Tsubataki asks you to help her seek out and fight the Gyne Sisters. Part of your mission is to win the battle, the trickier part is to keep Tsubataki alive. Tricky because she's kind of suicidal, and likes attacks that drain her health. So I'm scrambling to find a useful attack, watching her health plummet and she keeps using the Fire of Gehenna. If I was playing with a friend, they'd presumably not be so reckless, though I can never tell with Alex.

The situation where I miss it the most is flight combat games. This is not surprising, given I've complained about the idiot wingmen those games tend to saddle the player with. Secret Weapons Over Normandy would have been a better game if I could actually count on one of the fellows flying with me to carry out my commands. The computer's clearly not up to it, so having a friend I can tell to cover me when I go dive-bombing, and trust to actually do that, would be a welcome change. This would apply for Heroes of the Pacific as well. Even Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge would be more fun. It's a little different from the other two, since you can't issue commands to your wingmen, but also don't necessarily need them. Again though, with the variety of aircraft available, you could mix and match strengths. If it's a boss level, one you the players picks a heavy firepower plane, the other picks something light and quick to keep the fighters off their partner.

If there were concerns that it would make the games too easy, I'd point out a) that's what higher difficulty levels are for, and b) there's always the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 strategy of doubling the number of cannon fodder enemies.