The limiting space was what I had in mind while thinking of my battle system so that no more than 3 members can stay in a single screen. This battle engine is what I ultimately came up with back in the day when I was working on yeong rpg, which planned to have 14-15 members.

For ARPG, which hugely favors one party member RPG game, I can only think of few ways of implying multiparty system:

1) Press button to change to different party member (prolly 4 max)
2) Party members move based on an AI, and only the "selected" party members can be moved manually
3) LoZ: four swords

Well, just in case, this is 16x16 monochrome sprites I worked on long time ago. Feel free to use them if needed. http://yeong.57o9.org/pics.html

Greyscale is not necessary. Look at Verdante Forest. It was wonderful piece of game without greyscale.

because people disrespect the bridge?

=.=

So I just read the storyline and I read about me not knowing what I'm doing. can it be fixed so that I'm intentionally evil?

I think those are to make final decisions.

Oh ok.

This is how it works. (Let's base it on 12 members in party)

In battle, you can group members to up to 3 "cycles". So you can have 4/4/4 or 2/6/4 or 9/3 etc.

In each turn, 1 member from each cycle (could be called leader) can perform action or switch to other member in the same cycle.

Some of the spells can affect the entire cycle, all "leaders" of cycle, individual, etc. All physical attacks will attack the "leader" of the cycle.

Since it's called a "cycle," the order of members in cycle is important.

Let's say you have a cycle with guy A→B→C→D.

As A, you can't just switch to C, but rather take a turn to change to B and then C. You can only switch once per turn per cycle, requiring total of two turns to switch from A to C.

Also, in addition to this, each member could have a special attribute that enhance the cycle leaders a bit when they're in the leader position. Let's say that the leader s of cycles are A, E, and G. A's special attribute is MP+10 and E's special attribute is STR+2 and G's special attribute is INT+3. All the cycle leaders (and only the cycle leaders) will share these attributes.

EDIT: Oh. I forgot about the EXP sharing. The less cycle the battle was fought with, the more EXP will party receive. The members who weren't partcipating in the cycles won't get EXP. The current cycle leaders will receive 1.2x EXP while the other members in cycle receives a normal amount of EXP.