I've been making a lot of changes in our battle code in the last few weeks and thinking about how to take it to the next level. I've decided to start producing more draft images to discuss the changes I intend to make before I actually make them. Discussion of these drafts helps us to provide the best presentation to the player possible and it also helps me (or whoever happens to be writing the code) to have a clear goal before I actually start implementing the new design.
In Part II we came to a pretty firm agreement on the general layout and there have only been minor changes from these drafts. In this thread I would like to focus on the additional aspects of the design that we have never discussed. This includes: the victory screen, the defeat screen, and how we display dialogues that occur in battle. Currently I'm working on the battle finish code, which takes effect whenever one party or the other emerges victoriously from the battle. First I want to start off with the defeat screen since it is relatively simple. Here is the first draft I have produced.

Points of Interest
(1): The entire standard battle GUI is hidden, including the bottom menu, character names/stats, indicator graphics/text, and the stamina bar/icons.
(2): We'll continue to use the blood red scene lighting that we have in past releases. This draft can't fully emulate how cool that effect looks, but the transparent red overlay is there to indicate it will not be changed.
(3): The battle outcome notification message and GUI have been moved to the top center in this draft.
(4): The battle defeat message has been changed. It has traditionally been: "The heroes have been defeated..."
(5): The defeat options have been made much more brief than they were before. They used to be "Retry battle...Load from last save point...Return to main menu...Exit the game". Instead now a single word represents each of these four possibilities.
(6): Below the defeat options is a "tooltip" window which displays a detailed description about the selected option. In the draft, the "Retry" option is selected, although I forgot to add the cursor image in this draft. Note that it also lists the number of retries remaining in this case.
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Notes/Thoughts
(A): I'm thinking of moving the defeat GUI to the middle right, overlapping the enemy sprites. That's where I intend to draw the GUI for the victory screen. But if I move it there, it will overlap some/all of the remaining enemy sprites which I'm not sure would be good.

(B): Not sure which defeat message I like best: "But the heroes were defeated..." versus "The heroes have been defeated...". Which do you prefer?
(C): I like the tooltip idea. It makes the layout nice and slim with the concise commands, but doesn't leave the player scratching their head about what the commands do either.