Restart Battle Element (during battle)

Hello,

I had an idea for a skill ability I would like to use but not exactly sure how possible it is or difficult it may be to implement (if possible). To give an example of how this may work, I will use the idea I had for it in a game I am currently working on.

In my game there will be a bard class. Given a bard would be musicially driven (so to speak), a powerful skill he could achieve would be a song to reset time (think Majora's Mask). What I would like to do, is when the skill is used (battle only) the Bard would play a tune that resets the battle. [The idea could be use in other scenarios of characters who have "time warping" abilities.] Say you are in a tough battle and are having problems, dont like the way things are going and need a last ditch effort to re-try your hands. Use the bards high level skill tune to immediately restart the battle. Essentially, it would be like ending the current battle without it being a win/loss and forcing the player (or in my case party) immediately back into the same battle sequence from the start in one fell swoop.

While we are at it, this would obviously be the sort of ability you would want to limit its use; maybe only once per battle sequence, once every XX amount of time, or if it is used XX amount within a given time it causes adverse affects. If the previous is do-able, this would be a latter concept to think about.

I was thinking just now of aborting the battle and starting it again. The problem though is there'll need to be a way for the event to know which encounter you've just aborted. It might be possible with variables and conditional branches, but if your game has more than half a dozen of different enemy troops, this process will be way too time consuming.

What I'll suggest is instead have this skill fade out the screen (not sure if this is possible during battle since I've never tried, but worth a try), and then to simply have it activate a common event. In that event you could put in commands to simply restore everyone's health (allies and enemies alike) and revive all KOed allies and enemies and then fade the screen back in. If the screen fade doesn't work, you could put some kind of snazzy battle animation. Whichever way you decide to do it, I think having this skill activate a common event will be the basis that will be required.

Not ending the battle can also make the whole idea of skill cooldown easy as well. Yanfly has a script that lets you add cooldowns for certain skills.

I did something similar with a skill in the "Time" class of one of my games.  It was kind of a pain in the butt.  I had an event tracking the current HP, MP, etc. of each character at the start of the battle, so that when the Time mage used this skill (to "turn back time" to the beginning of the battle), I'd know what to set everyone's HP/MP to.  This required a fairly high amount of eventing due to the way that the Change HP/MP commands are set up.

Additionally, if you have States that characters would start a battle with, or enemies that appear halfway, item usage, etc., it gets even more complicated.  I limited the spells scope to the party (so that it wouldn't effect enemies, which makes it a little different than your idea) to limit the scope of creating this spell, and I had all States wear off at the end of battle (which I felt allowed me to make the States much more impactful in a single battle) so I didn't need to worry about tracking States.  I didn't even bother worrying about item usage during the battle!

The "cooldown" is easy: add a state to the character that Seals the skill, and have it remove itself at the end of battle and/or after a certain number of turns pass.

Long story short: you'll probably want to limit the scope of what you're doing, or be prepared to spend a long time storing an incredibly large amount of information about character status if you want to truly "restart" the battle.

Alternatively you could check out Hime's "Reverse Time" script, but note that it restores some things (damage, states applied through skills, etc.) but not others (MP paid for skill costs, states applied through events, etc.).