Final Fantasy XIV, Rules, and Playful Design

I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV! Yes, I’m one of those! Blame my friends, they got to me at last. I had an interesting thought, the other day. If you haven’t played Final Fantasy XIV, hereafter frequently referred to as FFXIV, then you might not understand that its combat feels very different from the likes of more “standard” MMOs of the years’ past like World of Warcraft. There’s a number of certain somethings in the nuances of its design that piqued my interest, made me question what makes them tick. What’s more, the more I thought about these little nuances the more I found surprising parallels in other games that you might not expect. So, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, I’d like to try and break down what about FFXIV’s combat sets it apart, in my estimation, and what can be learned from how XIV does things.

Now, if I describe aspects of Final Fantasy XIV that come from different expansions that were released years apart, please do not be dissuaded. The entire development history of the game is characterized by slow and highly iterative adaptation to its changing goals and aspirations. Even the game’s own narrative reflects this, but all that’s a story for another day. Suffice to say, even though FFXIV took about a decade to come out, in a drip feed, it is presently very much a complete and cohesive product worth investigating on the whole of its merits, in addition to the individual merits of its expansions.

The Core Mechanics

First, to understand how Final Fantasy XIV becomes ‘playful’, as the title up there indicates, we need to understand, like all newbie players, the baseline that the game expects of you during combat. To start, each player has a combat job, who fills some sort of role. The primary roles are tank, who absorbs most of the damage and the enemies’ ire, the healers, who provide healing support, and the damage dealers, whose specialty is obvious, and are further divided into ranged, melee, and magic damage dealers. Each of these jobs need to maximize their effectiveness to get through the most difficult encounters. Managing their resources correctly, pressing the right buttons and casting the right spells in the right order, is all essential.

There is an optimal way to do this. There is not room for much personal expression through play in the combat of Final Fantasy XIV. I think that’s fine, as this MMO concentrates much of its avenues of personal expression elsewhere. The playfulness of its combat lies elsewhere than in the individual players, as well. But back to the subject, if a player is experienced, their performance will more and more approach this optimal sequence of player actions, that deal the maximum damage, absorb damage most efficiently, or heal most efficiently. This is their ‘rotation’. Players are expected to constantly be tending their rotations in combat for maximum efficiency.

However, the enemies in this game have special attacks that can hit multiple players, and not just the tanks. These are called Area of Effect attacks, or AoEs. These are (almost) always indicated by bright orange volumes on the flat 2D surface of the ground. Some players might humorously say “there are lines on the floor” when ribbing each other’s performance. And indeed, to dodge an AoE, one must step out of the bright orange shape, before it resolves. The orange AoEs are a rather ingenious way of injecting some more engaging movement to the otherwise rather static tradition of “tanking and spanking” enemies as was often said in World of Warcraft. The AoE markers are calculated server-side, meaning their mechanics must be communicated to the greater online sphere before they resolve on an individual player’s client, as AoEs are by definition meant to affect multiple players. If an enemy were to just swing his arm without such a warning in real-time, the differential between client and server could make for a rather inaccurately timed and unpleasant experience. So instead, the developers opted to essentially slow down the process of dodging attacks a lot.

A muscular lizard man with brass knuckles strikes an intimidating pose. A bright orange rectangle appears on the ground in front of him. After a moment, he strikes at the air, sending a shockwave over the highlighted area.

These bright orange “danger” volumes become go-to shorthand in combat.

This, obviously, makes FFXIV a whole lot easier than, say, a real-time game like monster hunter (at least at first, but we’ll get there), and itself not quite an action game. The developers were aware of this too, of course, so instead of relying on players’ reactive abilities, they test players’ predictive abilities. AoE attacks come out slowly. Usually. And they have very clear indicated boundaries. They always resolve a static amount of time after appearing. So what happens if there’s a large AoE, leaving only a small safe zone… but then, another AoE appears, a couple seconds later but before the first resolves, and covers that safe zone? Now you are tracking two timers, splitting your attention.

Remember this is all happening while players continue to triage their rotations. FFXIV is a game that demands multitasking as a core skill. You might have heard this, but the human brain is actually exceptionally bad at engaging in several activities at once. When you ‘multitask’, what you’re really doing is rapidly shifting attention from one activity to the next, and back, ensuring no one activity becomes too neglected, like spinning plates. In the example I provided, you must manage your rotation, but also be aware of the first AoE’s timer, and not be distracted by the fact that a second AoE is overlapping your safe zone. Because as soon as that timer goes off, you must concern yourself with the second, delayed AoE’s timer, and vacate from the initial safe zone. Oh, and don’t forget to keep up with that rotation. Don’t want to fall behind on damage.

So from what at first seems like a rather basic combat design basis, we get some versatility with basically… messing with player cognition to a great degree. Imagine barrages of AoEs, all different sizes and shapes, all slightly offset from each other in space and time. Maybe some AoEs that respond to player movement, and some that depend on player facing direction. Pretty quickly the demands of multitasking become quite frantic. I don’t have to imagine it, I’ve lived it. It doesn’t end there, though. With these basic rules in place, Final Fantasy XIV, instead of only intensifying the existing mechanics, constantly introduces entirely new ones, with their own demands of the player’s time and attention. So how can they keep the constant barrage of new information from overwhelming the player? If the rules are constantly changing, how does the encounter design stay intuitive?

“Intuitive”

To figure that out, we need to decide what’s “intuitive.” using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive. Thanks Oxford, but, hm. Okay, that doesn’t help us much. How do we know what our players will feel to be true “even without conscious reasoning”? Let’s hone in on that last word – instinctive. We can start by using signifiers that relate to general knowledge the average player in our demographic would bring with them into the game. This often translates to relying on real world “common knowledge” as a basis for gameplay mechanics. If there are two towers, one taller than the other, and lightning is about to strike, which tower should you stand under?

An army of adventurers pelt a giant flying centaur with weapon strikes and bolts of magic. The centaur throws two spears into the air, which land on either side of a large platform. One spear is much taller than the other, and this one is struck by lightning.

As you can see, in the chaos, following simple instructions can be challenging.

FFXIV is, once you’ve acclimated to the basis of its combat system, rather consistently good at this. Most of the time, it is possible, perhaps even feasible, to discern most of what an enemy might be capable of based on this sort of “common knowledge” intuition. When an enemy raises their right hand, it is likely unwise to stand on their right flank. A dragon will probably breathe fire in a cone in front of itself. If a boss is charging a massive attack, with tons of energized particle effects to accentuate, and a rock that is roughly the size of play character falls onto the ground, then it is probably advisable to put the rock between yourself and the enemy boss.

That last one is intuitive on a “common knowledge” basis, but it also overlaps with another kind of gameplay intuition, which is pattern recognition. Generally, human brains are very very good at recognizing patterns. When FFXIV introduces a new mechanic, it can be considered to be establishing a paradigm. As that mechanic may appear again, sometimes very frequently! In addition to the “core” mechanics of FFXIV combat discussed earlier, the game deploys additional mechanics with a particular kind of consistency of logic. For example, eventually a player working their way through the main story of FFXIV will find themselves fighting an ancient dragon. This dragon will use an ability called ‘Akh Morn.’ Prior to its activation, this ability is foreshadowed by the standard ‘stack’ mechanic indicator, meaning players must huddle together to split the damage. Akh Morn, however, hits multiple times – so if players scatter after the first hit as they’re used to, they must react to reconvene, if they’re to survive. Later, they will fight a dragon again, and Akh Morn will once again occur, and work the very same way. At this point, it will become clear that Akh Morn is an ability specifically associated with dragons, and players will be prepared for it any time they see one, even before the ability is used. This is also a kind of intuition, based upon a sense for the shape of the gameplay’s design and intentions, in recognition of established patterns. One might even call it gamesense.

FFXIV overlapping its mechanics makes players more predictive than reactive.

That’s all well and good, but this is all kind of fuzzy, isn’t it? Indefinite terms like “common knowledge”, and even pattern recognition will not be consistent across all players – each individual learns at a different pace. So how can you tell what is intuitive? There’s no real definite approach outside of using best judgment, and then playtesting. Playtesting playtesting playtesting. You’ll never really know how players will react to certain gameplay decisions until you see players react to those gameplay decisions. Seeing your players engage with your systems will inform your approach. This can be seen in how enemies and combat mechanics in FFXIV change gradually, but significantly over the course of its story quest – through many iterations across several expansions that came out over the course of a decade.

Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale Are The Same Game

I am especially fond of how FFXIV uses that “common knowledge intuition” to introduce its new combat mechanics. I have a history of playing MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft. I was even a rather hardcore raider – or in other words, a participant in high-end end-game content, the most challenging stuff saved for the most dedicated players. The way WoW designed its encounters was interesting, chaotic, engaging, and often quite complicated. However, I rarely felt the sense of intuitive sensibility I feel playing Final Fantasy XIV. The narrative and aesthetic building blocks of combat in Final Fantasy are all abstractions of actions one can make some sense of in the context of the fiction. WoW, at least when I played it, had some of that, but its more difficult encounters leaned much further into abstraction, with status conditions upon gameplay modifiers upon unique interactions disconnecting, at least for me, the experience of engaging with those systems from the experience of being in the fantasy world.

I have been playing quite a bit of Undertale and Undertale-adjacent content, lately. Such as Toby Fox’s other brilliant game Deltarune, and the charming fan-made Undertale prequel, Undertale Yellow. While dodging bullets shaped like flexing muscles, representing a monster’s outgoing personality, it occurred to me how starkly similar these two games – Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale actually are, at least in terms of their combat systems.

Okay hear me out, I’m not insane, I swear.

Both games are RPGs that represent enemy offensive actions with abstract shapes that denote areas on a 2D plane of danger, and safety. Entering a “danger zone” causes the player damage. The shapes these danger zones take abstractly denote the kind of action the enemy is taking. In Undertale, these danger zones are called bullets, and if they’re shaped like water droplets, they might denote the enemy crying, or causing it to rain. In FFXIV, these danger zones are called AoEs, and if it’s a cone extended from a monster’s front, it might denote the monster breathing fire.

I can see you’re not sold. Alright, consider this; both games feature two prominent methods by which tension, challenge, and surprise is weaved into gameplay. In Undertale you might run into a monster who cries tears down on you from above that you have to avoid. Then, you might run into a monster who sends a fly to slowly follow you, which you must constantly move away from. Neither bullet pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, you may run into both monsters simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both bullet patterns at once. In Final Fantasy XIV, boss mechanics are deployed in a very specific way. Every boss will start by using one of its signature abilities – perhaps a simple barrage of AoE attacks at random locations around the players. Then, they’ll introduce a new mechanic, maybe forcing the players to a certain quadrant of the arena while looking in a certain direction. Neither pattern is especially difficult to dodge. But then, the boss will begin using both moves simultaneously! Suddenly, you must multitask and interweave devoting attention to both patterns at once.

The undertale character Asgore, a large horned furred monster in a warrior king's outfit shoots many bullets of flame out at areas indicated with a "!". He then swings a blue, then an orange trident.

Oh HMMM sure looks *exactly* like AoE markers and color-coded attacks with special rules, HMMM!

That is not where the similarities end, though. The other prominent method by which both games influence their interest curves is through the introduction of new rules, as previously mentioned. Think about it; The first time Undertale deploys the “blue heart” mechanic, the player is shocked, possibly confused, as their schmup-style 2D grid of bullet dodging suddenly becomes a 2D platformer complete with gravity and jumping controls. It completely upends the paradigm of how one must think of the spatial relationships of all entities in play. I really think the “blue heart” moment is undersold in how instantly it establishes Undertale’s playful nature, and the breadth of unique variety it is willing to explore. Meanwhile, in FFXIV, the first I remember of an equivalent “blue heart” moment is when I was introduced to the “ice floor” mechanic in the story content leading up to FFXIV’s first expansion. The ice floor forces the player to move a set, (large) minimum distance, if moving at all, most often coinciding with other, damaging mechanics that need to be dodged. This, and other mechanics like, “forced march”, which, as the name implies, forces your character to march in a straight line, changes the paradigm of how you relate your character’s spatial relationship to all other entities in play.

A decaying giant robot puppet spins like she is dancing, in an opera hall. A much smaller android in a black dress dexterously bounds over and around a stream of energy orbs unleashed from the puppet, then strikes her with a sword.

But perhaps I give Undertale too much credit. I am not, after all, extremely familiar with the shoot ’em ups and bullet hells which inspired it. In fact, it feels as though bullet hell-like mechanics have been infiltrating other genres for a while now, much like RPG mechanics started to do some years ago. I’m always in favor of that sort of diffusion, as it leads to a lot of cool new ideas that couldn’t exist otherwise. It reminds me of Returnal, or its inspirations like Nier and Nier: Automota. I do, however, think there is a certain something to how FFXIV and Undertale/Deltarune play with their rules, that *does* set them apart from other similar games. I just can’t shake the feeling that these two seemingly disparate experiences have a strong link between them.

Rules

A rather flamboyant character with shoulder-length hair and an official-looking uniform. He is "roulx kaard" from the game Deltarune. He is lying down, propped up on one elbow, rocking his foot and a finger-gun gesture back and forth in rhythm. His hair is sparkling.

Image unrelated.

These “paradigm shifting” moments are essentially the introduction of supplementary rules to the basis upon each respective game is built. Games are made of rules, so when you add rules, you change the game. Both Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV do this with some regularity, to the point that adapting to the addition of new rules is a prominent part of both games’ core skillset and identity. A combination of pattern recognition, rote memorization, and intuitive anticipation replaces the twitch-reactive mindset you might find in an action game. This settles both games into a certain mood, where anything can happen, because any new rule can simply be dropped in the player’s lap.

By utilizing intuitive design, presumably through extensive testing, FFXIV dodges the obvious pitfall of such an approach in most cases. That being, if a player settles into the loop of a comfortable and reliable ruleset, a sudden disruption can feel jarring and unfair – a new rule kind of implies that the player hasn’t been prepared for it, yeah? So that’s why it’s so essential to this sort of playful design that things always be intuitive. FFXIV has several vectors to achieve this – not just in its flashing indicators, AoE warning shapes, monster designs, and monster animations, but also through the text displayed on enemy UI when they use a special attack. “Forced March” sort of implies what it does, and those words are visible to you before you have to react. All these things form the language by which FFXIV communicates information and teaches you each new rule without teaching it to you. Undertale’s language for communicating new rules is through shapes. When the player’s heart turns green, the game becomes a bit of a rhythm-adjacent directional timing game. This is indicated by all the enemy bullets becoming arrows, and moving in regular intervals with the music.

A floormap with large, complicated orange "AoE" markers layered overtop. The entire map rotates counterclockwise, and two quadrants of the map are highlighted in red.

As you can see, once this stuff starts to stack up, it can really get quite taxing. Gif from here.

In both cases, if players are ever confused, they are never confused for long, and even may discern the nuances of a new rule before it’s engaged! Understanding game rules becomes a skill in itself, and experienced players are encouraged to discern the shape of the design through intuition. I find something so fascinating and appealing about this because it goes in the opposite direction of the typical wisdom that the hand of the designer needs to be invisible. The players play along as the designer plays – it creates a sort of Calvinball mentality, where the game can be anything you imagine, and every encounter can feel fresh. So many other RPGs I’ve played get so wrapped up in what the design of their encounters must be that they feel stifling.

I think this is what makes me distinguish Undertale and Final Fantasy XIV so closely in my mind, even compared to similar games in the MMO or Shoot ‘Em Ups genres. It’s the playfulness, the bending and manipulating of the very fabric of the game by bending, reimagining, or supplementing the very building blocks, the rules. This allows the designers so much freedom in what they can convey simply through combat mechanics, and if you’ve read anything of mine or spoken to me for five minutes, you may know that I love when gameplay and narrative synergize or better yet supplement one another. Undertale uses shapes to communicate gameplay obstacles, but also the shape of the opposing monsters’ emotions. The blue heart mechanic only appears while fighting the skeleton brothers, two fights that happen worlds apart but are connected by this, emphasizing their relationship to each other. When a character repeats the use of a forbidden power in Final Fantasy you hadn’t seen for a very long time, you understand their desperation. And so on.

A closeup of an elderly elf man. He looks contentedly into a blazing light that grows to encompass him and then the entire image.

All that aside, you’ll still find me looking like this standing in a basic-ass AoE

What Was I Talking About?

Anyway, I think I’m finally satisfied with what was causing an itch at the back of my brain while playing Undertale Yellow. It’s that the exact same parts of that brain, the same reflexes, pattern recognition skills, and adaptability I had trained in Final Fantasy were carrying over. And I think I’ve been able to suss out what about the two games feels so familiar to me. Playfulness in design, the willinging to recontextualize and reorient the ruleset has been employed often in games, but rarely is it such a central pillar as it is in Undertale and FFXIV. Wario Ware and Mario Party are games about playing smaller, bite sized game experiences, and I’ve heard FFXIV players joke that they’re essentially the same as their favorite MMO. I can remember a number of arena battles in Ratchet and Clank that randomly swap out your weapon, or give the enemies some absurd advantage, rotating rules in and out over time. I think I’ve found a lot to take away from this exercise, and it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the very different approaches there are to making combat in games both fun and engaging. Not everything has to be about fast and snappy reactions. There are a myriad of reasons a person might enjoy a game and a thousand avenues to accentuate that. So experiment with your design and your rules, and see what speaks to you.

Ifrit the fiery god from final fantasy XIV is shown in closeup, a horned burning lizard-like beast with skeletal claws and stony scales.

So – let us be about it, hero.

Playing Final Fantasy I, II, and III For The First Time

I try to play a lot of games. I find exposing oneself to a wide variety of ideas and precedent helps one form a better understanding of the craft. I especially am fond of tracing the development of certain ideas and precedents over long stretches of time. In a moment of hubris that could be perhaps, generously, described as “insane”, some friends and I decided to undergo the herculean task of playing through the entirety of the Final Fantasy canon. The Roman numeral numbered ones, anyway. There are scant few games with such a distinct and traceable lineage. This is but the first leg of a long journey. Perhaps by the end you dear reader, and I, will have learned… something.

A man in red and black armor wielding a black sword with a red crack in it in one hand. His other hand is spiky and demonic with an orange glow over black armor.

He stands before an ashy gray castle in the background. A fiery phoenix and wolflike beast growl at each other from the corners of the screen.

Promotional image of the game Final Fantasy XVI

…We’ll get there.

As this is a retrospective, expect at least some spoilers for these games.

Final Fantasy I – Setting a Precedent

This is not going to be a narrative retrospective, at least not primarily, but story is an important part of this franchise’s identity, so I will touch on it briefly where I have something to comment about. Final Fantasy I‘s initial setup is about as simple as it gets. Four Warriors of Light set out on a quest to save a princess from an evil knight, then quickly discover they are heroes foretold in legend, destined to defeat Four Fiends, collect four magic crystals, and restore the balance of light and dark in the world. Still, even from humble beginnings, someone somewhere wanted to make this tale stand out a bit, with inspirations likely from Japanese mythology, manga, and anime, all of which tend to deal with rather esoteric concepts. The evil knight from the beginning of the game, Garland, reveals that he has enacted a complex time loop by sending the Four Fiends back in time. The result of this is that Garland becomes the immortal demon Chaos. Once defeated, all of our heroes’ adventures are undone, along with the evil of Chaos, though the memory of those adventures remains etched in the Warrior’s hearts. There are elements of Final Fantasy‘s heart here already. The esoterica, the high-minded fantasy concepts, the slight twinge of melancholy at the end of a long journey, all feelings that pervade the Final Fantasy games and their derivatives that I have played.

A man in full platemail, helmet decorated with bull-like horns and glowing yellow eyes. He wields a giant greatsword, and has a woman in a dress slung over his shoulder. A castle looms very small in the background. An image of the evil knight Garland.

Yeah man, this guy…

At the outset, the player chooses a lineup of four heroes from a roster of possible character classes with different abilities. Notably, you can loadout your team any way you like. Use four white mages, aka healers if you so like. Use four glass cannon black mages. This level of customization sets a nice precedent going forward for what the gameplay of Final Fantasy is, I think. The game followed the release of Dragon Quest about a year earlier, and follows similar conventions of its contemporaries. Turn-based combat with simple rules, spells, attacks, and the ability to run from battle.

Often I judge my enjoyment of turn-based gameplay by how much leeway I am given for strategic thinking. There’s… not a whole lot of that in Final Fantasy I. Boss and enemy designs tend to be straightforward. One throws fire at you. One throws ice at you. Sometimes enemies are stronger than you, though, and figuring out how to maximize your heroes’ damage while keeping them alive can be a bit of an entertaining problem.

A skeletal mage labeled 'Lich' fights against a mage in a blue robe with a face shrouded in shadow, all on a plain black background. The menus surrounding the fight are labeled 'Lich' 'Fight' 'Magic' 'Drink' 'Item' 'Run' 'BkM 'Fhtr' 'Thef' 'RedM'

The game’s visuals are simplistic, but refreshingly uncluttered.

My friends and I did arrive at a rather interesting strategy. It’s pretty apparent that it wasn’t the primary method of play, that it was a strategy unique to us, so that’s pretty cool. We had a part of one strong physical attacker, the warrior, one potent offensive mage, the black mage, one healing support, the white mage, and one jack-of-all-trades red mage. Our go-to method is thus: The white mage casts a strength-enhancing spell on our warrior, and the red mage casts a speed-enhancing speed spell on our warrior. Our black mage continues to blast offensive spells away, not needed enhancements to do decent damage, especially against several enemies at once. Meanwhile, our warriors becomes a lawnmower, shredding through bosses and other monsters like dry grass.

So while our decision making process never really changed, we did make some interesting decisions that allowed us to clear the game, so that’s good. On the other hand, the presence of a certain mechanic I dread really accentuates the repetitiveness – that being random encounter system. In the overworld, the player character moves across terrain divided into tiles on a grid. Each time they pass a tile, there is a chance they will be forced into a monster encounter. I think I’ve decided by now I pretty much detest random encounters, for a number of reasons. They introduce a level of abstraction that is irritating to me, bringing me out of the fantasy of the world. Where are all these monsters coming from? Where are they hiding? Why are they not dangerous until they are on top of me? Worse than that it bring an unjustified level of agency away from the player. The use of random encounters in early RPGs almost certainly was partially a tech consideration. The NES can only render so many items on screen, and a consistent supply of enemies to fight was needed. Still, from a purely ludic standpoint it’s annoying as hell. Crossing a continent in this game could take two minutes, or two hours, depending on your real-world luck stat. Mine is very very low.

I always find myself comparing old RPGs with random encounters to one of my favorite RPG – Chrono Trigger which, contrary to many of its contemporaries, had no random encounters. Enemies were consistently visible in the overworld. Sure, there were surprise encounters, and required encounters. Enemies often leap out of bushes to ambush the heroes. The added context and predictability of these encounters make them far more tolerable, especially when backtracking through areas, as is often required in RPGs. When one can mentally prepare for exactly how long a task it’s going to take, it’s a lot more pleasant than getting surprised with a lot of meaningless activity that does little but waste time. Any advantages you could gain by having random encounters can be achieved with more bespoke, designed encounters, with none of the frustration. But, this is Final Fantasy I of 16, so I’d better get used to them. Just wanted to throw out the random encounters rant early on here.

There’s one more thing I’ve got to say about this first game. Final Fantasy I sprang forth about a year after the release of watershed title Dragon Quest, itself inspired by similar role-playing-type games like Ultima. Ultima, in turn was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, itself inspired by other tabletop war games and major fantasy works like The Lord of The Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, which includes The Lord of The Rings, represents a sort of fictive mythologized history of the real world – a legend for the modern age. My point is, Final Fantasy represents a lineage of people exploring the nature of the world as they understand it through imagination. There’s something poetic, I think, about how the heroes of the story embark on a journey that brings them across the world, and to the edge of history, only to rid the world of evil, at the cost of forever leaving those fantastical events behind, as nothing more than a fantasy. They don’t get to stay in that world, but the memory of it stays forever with them. Final Fantasy I is a humble game, with systems, gameplay, and storytelling that are primitive by today’s standards, but it’s also impossible to divorce it from all this context of its creation. There’s a lot of beauty, in this humble little adventure.

A message saying; 'The Warrior who broke the 2000 year Time-Loop is truly a LIGHT WARRIOR.... That warrior was YOU!' is imposed over a backdrop of peaceful waters and forests of pine trees under a blue sky.

Final Fantasy II – Experiments Are Educational, But Not Always Fun

The early Final Fantasy series was notoriously mislabeled in the west under its English releases, with Final Fantasy IV being erroneously christened Final Fantasy II to English speakers because the actual second and third entries to the franchise were simply not released outside of Japan. You know, I believe in the dissemination and availability of media across cultural boundaries. Translations and localization with easy availability are not only good, but necessary for a thriving and robust culture. That said… I think I could see how The Powers That Be found that, in the project of bringing Final Fantasy to the western market… I understand why they decided, “eh, think we can skip this one” (this is a joke). I mean… It’s bad, guys. I did not thoroughly enjoy my time playing Final Fantasy II.

The story of this game is alarmingly Star Wars. I know that’s an easy criticism to levy at a lot of fantasy media, but it’s really true in this case, I think. Everything from a rebellion lead by a princess fighting an evil empire, to a secretive emperor with a flying super weapon that razes civilizations, accompanied by a right-hand man dressed in black who is a secret lost family member that eventually turns good again at the last minute. The biggest major departure is the journey’s terminus taking place in a bright technicolor version of hell, which was a pretty delightful surprise, though somewhat harsh on my eyeballs.

A portrait of a man in an armored hat next to a text box reading "Guy: Guy speak beaver."

Below the text, four people stand near a beaver in the snow.

Okay, never mind this story is Kino.

Once upon a time, the coolest, hypest, most exciting RPG on the horizon was the as yet unreleased Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We were dazzled with its cutting edge graphics in one-thousand-and-eighty-whole-p, 1080p! We were told about many of its new, innovative, never-before-seen gameplay systems that would upend what we thought an RPG could be! For example, the traditional RPG character level system? Out the window! Replaced, with this shiny novel skill system where your hero would improve specifically at the tasks they performed the most. How fresh! How new! Except, of course, this system predates Skyrim by more than two decades. It exists, in near identical fashion, in Final Fantasy II, which also forgoes its predecessor’s level system in favor of an adaptive skill system. Suffice to say, it leads to many of the same problems that plagued Skyrim in its day, though in some cases to a far greater degree.

Against a black background, four cerulean blue knights on horseback fight against a four heroic warriors. The menu at the bottom of the screen reads hp and mp, as well as the heroes' names in Japanese.

Oh featureless black void in which all fights take place, we’re really in it now…

Your heroes’ efficacy with a sword, with a shield, even with their ability to sustain damage is all determined by individual numeric values that only increase when engaged in their associated property. For your Warriors of Light to have a decent health pool, they have to be smacked in the face, repeatedly, and at length. Because you are able to target allies with offensive commands in battle, the best way to train hp is to have your heroes smack each other. The adaptive skill system introduces all kinds of bizarre and irritating behaviors like this. Whenever you get a new spell, you are not enthralled by the exciting new possibilities, but debilitated by the crushing knowledge that you’ll have to spend hours mindlessly blasting weaker monsters to get this new spell to even reach the point of being partially usable.

You will consistently feel pigeon-holed by the choices in character building presented in this game. Make no mistake, Final Fantasy II offers a bevy of options when building your heroes for battle. There are lots of different swords with different properties, from swords, to axes, to polearms. You can even dual wield! You can carry a shield. You can practice black magic and white magic as you please! You can customize your spell loadout. And yet. It takes so much time, and so much effort, to get any of those aforementioned options up to a level of usefulness with the adaptive skill system, that if you don’t choose your course for each hero early on, and stick with it, you’ll find your jacks-of-all-trades to be rather useless in combat by the end. In this way, Final Fantasy II rather lacks the adaptability in hero roster customization that even Final Fantasy I had.

This is not to say that such a level of adaptability is necessary to even complete this slog of a game. And I don’t use that word lightly. A lot of RPGs are very long, and very repetitive, but engaging with II‘s content is so consistently irritating, with more random encounters than ever before, that I eventually found myself engaging in… the Teleport spam. You see, Teleport is one of those spells – the kind that remove enemies entirely from battle. Usually, the tradeoff for that in most RPGs is that enemies will not drop loot, or provide experience points to level up. However, my hero’s skill at successfully casting Teleport did improve every time they used it, making this spell an infinite feedback loop of instantly killing everything, and becoming more likely to instantly kill everything. Including bosses! Including the last boss, save for his… very very super last, final form. Even then, we moved on to employing some other similarly cheesy strategy to dispatch him. ‘Cheesy’ in the case meaning, that it does not feel as though the strategy meaningfully engages with the mechanics of the game. The win against the boss at the end rang kind of hollow for me.

So Final Fantasy II was extremely experimental. It tried a totally new way to conceptualize character building. Even its Star Wars-ass story feels like a test bed for what these games could be capable of narratively. I mean certainly a lot of things happen in this game. It’s turn of event after turn of event, even if they all feel very familiar. Gameplay seems to have become even more simplified since the first game, but that may also be a byproduct of experimentation, with new spells and skills and whatnot. Experimentation isn’t a bad thing though, even if it seems to have thoroughly ruined this particular outing. Based on what I know of Final Fantasy now, it’s almost certain that the developers learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t while making this game, and that’ll serve them well in future titles.

Final Fantasy III – Why This Game And Not Any Other?

Final Fantasy III starts introducing more of those bizarre, esoteric concepts that require some serious thinking to really keep straight it your head. There’s no time travel, as far as I can tell, but there are larger than life mythological wizards, with special gifts of immortality, or dream walking, etc. There is global time stoppage, though. There’s a giant floating continent that the heroes were born on, not knowing it was a small part of the larger world. To the game’s credit, I also experienced that same emotional journey – and I’m sure that was the intent, a surprise reveal for players of the smaller Final Fantasy games that came before. Surprise! The game’s world is actually way larger than you thought. Pretty cool. The Warriors of (The) Light are still mostly hollow player-inserts, the quest is still to collect a bunch of magic rocks, and most characters present are not terribly deep or engrossing. The villain is once again preoccupied with immortality, and entangles themselves with dark forces beyond them for their hubris. The series is establishing its pattern of repeating narrative motifs – which is not necessarily a bad thing!

Final Fantasy III introduces the Jobs system. The seeds of this system will germ and survive long into Final Fantasy‘s future, up to present day. It is, in essence, the ability to swap your Warrior of Light’s class and associated abilities or on the fly, or under certain circumstances. In III, this circumstance is any time outside of battle. Your choice of jobs to pick from expands as you progress through the game, with more powerful ones coming later. This is pretty exciting, and does enhance the possibilities of team building from the first game. You don’t have to commit to a team right away. There are a couple problems with this first run at the system, though. For some reason, swapping jobs makes the swapped hero weakened for several battles. I say ‘for some reason’, but it’s likely to make committing to specific jobs per hero attractive, so heroes build more of a gameplay identity, rather than faceless fighters who can do all things at all times. I suspect this, because future such jobs systems will be designed toward that end, but usually in a more clever and less frictional way.

A grid view of the same drawing of a girl five times, with the girl in a different outfit for each drawing, and then again in those respective outfits seen from behind.

All that said though, yeah, the jobs system is cool.

Boss and enemy design of Final Fantasy III is once again fairly simplistic, but there was a moment that came late in the game. I think what I saw in Final Fantasy III was a spark, a flicker, a momentary glimmer in the night that reminds me of the reason that I actively seek out games with turn-based combat. I’m not talking about why I play JRPGS, a vague collection of aesthetic and ludic conventions that form a genre. I’m talking about why I enjoy the play of commanding a team and managing resources in a turn-oriented fashion the way Final Fantasy does it, divorced from all aesthetic and narrative trappings. Within the optional dungeon of Eureka, I saw the essence of what makes turn-based RPGs worth the effort.

The bosses of Eureka are tough. They threaten the Warriors of The Light with devastating attacks and powerful spells. Instant death for individual heroes is a very real possibility. To defeat these bosses, my own team of heroes – us nerds playing the game, had to put our heads together and reason out a strategy. A lot of games require this kind of creative thinking – where your initial approach is brick-walled by an impassible obstacle, and a different approach is required to progress. However, given the strictly governed rules of a turn-based game, the player’s ability to think laterally and solve abstract problems is something unique to this kind of play. It’s the same sort of thing that’s made activities like Chess and Go among the most enduring of all designed games. In hundreds of hours across three games of mowing down group of monsters, after group of monsters, boss after boss, villain after villain, mostly just by spamming our most powerful moves over and over again or… gods save me… spamming the Teleport spell, Final Fantasy III, in it’s final hours, at last forced us to think. It wasn’t just that we could think creatively to solve a problem, but that the game responded to this, and rewarded this. When creative application of game mechanics leads to interesting and rewarding, designed scenarios, that, to me, is strategic liberty, the very reason turn-based games are compelling to me.

Four purple wasps on a black background fight against four heroic warriors. The warriors names, as well as the options for combat are listed in Japanese on blue menus.

You kill an awful lot of wildlife in RPGs, I’m realizing…

It’s so important for a game to recognize its own worth. Why play this game, and not any other? I play action games to feel a sense of dexterity in my hands and tension in my heart that isn’t possible or quite the same in other formats. I play rhythm games because my sense of music aligns with my sense of play, and the two complement each other. I play platform games because the ease of traversal they entail appeals to a sense of exploration and adventure. I think often games will replicate certain mechanics or conventions based on precedent, without stopping to recognize why those things are precedent in the first place. This is the kind of thing I was hoping to see, playing Final Fantasy as a retrospective – these important core principles to the turn-based RPG and JRPG traditions develop before my eyes in real-time.

It occurred to me that the strategic liberty I so value in turn-based RPGs is much like the solving of a very elaborate and very particular kind of puzzle. It isn’t just that we had to think creatively with the tools we were given, but that the tools we were given operated in tandem to produce new possibilities. For example, the Warrior of Light Refia was our dragoon hero, or spearman. She was also our greatest damage dealer. We were fighting a boss whose physical attacks devastated the heroes. We could counter this with the Protect spell, but that Protect spell could only target one hero per turn, and only two of our heroes were capable of casting it. Moreover, each of our four heroes served an essential role in the party. Refia brought the damage, the dark knight Ingus was the only one who could take a hit, the red mage Luneth was our go-to spell caster, including caster of Protect, and the white mage Arc was needed for healing duty. Losing even one would debilitate us for the rest of the fight.

While our mages were busy casting Protect on people and not healing, one or more of our heroes might straight up die, so raising a full defense was just too slow a prospect. It occurred to us, after some experimentation, that Refia’s Jump ability – in which she jumps off screen and becomes immune to damage for one turn, then crashes back down to deal bonus damage – was maxing out the damage count at ‘9999’. Five of those jumps alone would bring the enemy down. So instead of insuring every hero could survive incoming damage, one of my friend’s suggested, let’s ensure Refia can, so she can constantly jump to safety, while busting the enemy down over the course of ten turns. Instead of Protecting the party, our mages would Protect themselves, while Refia used the guard action to survive. Then, we would buff her with Haste to ensure she’d always Jump before the enemy could act. If ever she was caught with some damage as she landed, we would repeat the process of setup, then sent her on her way to continue the attack. After a couple of tries, it worked! The enemy was defeated, and all of us players cheered.

The sense of satisfaction that washed over us was fantastic. Our friend expressed that they felt like a genius – a familiar sensation for anyone who’s played a particularly challenging RPG. It’s just a shame that this sort of thing had to take several dozens of hours of gameplay to get to. That’s a bit unfair, though, there was some strategizing that took place in the earlier levels of Final Fantasy III. However, it never reached near this level of depth. Knowledge of the game’s rules or how its various mechanics interacted was never really necessary. It was more a continuous process of experimentation – seeing what the various hero jobs did, though a feeling of utilizing them to some greater end was disappointingly infrequent.

That said, the presence of this strategic liberty, even at the eleventh hour, kind of redeemed Final Fantasy III a bit in my eyes. Like Final Fantasy I, I think it’s very commendable for its time, and it’s scratching at the surface of some of the things that I think makes this kind of game great, which is a good sign! I’m optimistic going into Final Fantasy IV, another game I’ve never played! Final Fantasy will be entering a transitional period, I predict, as it undergoes a transformation from its simple NES days to the robust cutting edge graphical and storytelling experiences of the SNES and PS1 eras, and beyond, that the series is famous for.

A man in blue dragon-like armor with glowing yellow eyes repeatedly pumps his fist in the air on a grassy background.

With the memory of their struggle buried deep in their hearts…

Final Fantasy 7 Remake: Active Time Battle Finally Comes Home

There was a lot that impressed me about the Final Fantasy VII Remake, released 2020. For me, it set the standard for the full revitalization of an old game. Or rather, it would be if it weren’t only part one, a game that covers a fraction of the story of the original. Repackaging the story of one game into several full-sized, full-priced games, re-imagining the combat systems completely, expanding and rewriting the story. These are all controversial decisions, though they are assuaged somewhat by the existence of Ever Crisis, another full remake of Final Fantasy VII that is a more traditional, more faithful remake using updated assets. Indeed, there are so many interesting questions surrounding this game one could discuss. For now, let’s talk about the changes to Remake‘s combat systems, what experience they’re trying to accomplish, and why they are the way they are.

A girl in a plush animal-shaped hood and a stoic man with a staff team up to beat the ever-loving-stuffing out of an ostrich-like carnivorous bird. — ATB: The gentleman’s method of abstracting physical altercations with wildlife

One feature of Remake‘s combat that I find most interesting is the presence of the ATB bar. For those unfamiliar, Final Fantasy has employed at various points since its fourth installment the Active Time Battle system, or ATB for short. For the folks who may have been riled by Square Enix’s recent efforts to bring Final Fantasy more into the realm of action games, and deployment of increasingly arcane systems combining action with turn-based combat, rest assured that this is not a new trend. They have been trying to do this since the 90s. In its traditional use, the ATB bar is a timer that counts down to when a player character can act in battle. The faster that character’s speed stat, the more often they can act. When action is not possible, characters stand idle. So essentially, it’s a traditional turn-based combat, but with the wrinkle of an active timer.

At the heart of the ATB system’s ambitions, successes, and failures, I think is this tension a lot of combat-oriented games experience between their action elements and strategic elements. There advantages in verisimilitude, theoretically, as a real-time element brings with it less abstraction, but also a loss of many of the advantages that turn-based represents.

Turn-based games are inherently strategic in their foundation. The benefit of having combat play out over an indefinite amount of time is giving the player the space to make informed and meaningful decisions to gain an advantage over the opposition, which is where the challenge in turn-based combat comes from. Enemies need to be powerful enough to require critical thinking and problem solving in order to be engaging. Problem solving and critical thinking requires time to think. On the other hand, action combat is often all about twitch reaction, muscle memory, and being present in the moment as developments unfold around you. This is why you often finding me describing real-time game systems as ‘action’ ones. Now, action games can and often do have strategic depth as well, but the strategy of a game like soccer exists on a different state of mind than a game like chess.

There is an inherent friction between these ideas that can crop up in any system that aims to combine the two experiences. If action is meant to be all about the pressure of events happening in real-time, when do you get the time to develop your strategy? If that space for critical thought and puzzle-solving is needed for a turn-based game to have its strategic depth, how do you provide that space without disrupting the flow and rhythm of an action game?

In the ATB system’s early uses, the main advantage I can see is its ability to offer variable turn frequency through the speed state. It’s an interest dimension to scale character power, not one that is super frequently employed in turn-based games. Usually enemies and players only get one turn each, in even ratio to one another. Allowing that ratio to change can create some very interesting scenarios. There are disadvantages though. Personally, I love taking my time to formulate the perfect strategy and course of action in any given situation in a turn-based game. It’s a big part of the draw for me. The ATB system, which allows enemies to continue acting in spite of the player, demands that one keep taking actions or quickly become overwhelmed. Older Final Fantasy games would often have a mode to address this, but the wait mode of of old Final Fantasy is effective the same as regular old turn-based, kind of defeating the purpose. I believe Final Fantasy VII Remake has an optional mode akin to this, though I would argue Remake’s combat is a fuller realization of ATB’s design goals regardless. The argument that the wait mode represents a lack of confidence in the ATB systems early on is stronger I think, when one examines Final Fantasy X, a game in which the speed stat still exists in the form of agility, but represents the frequency of turns for an actor within a non-real-time system. Static turns are simply queued up in an ordered list, with faster characters getting more turns. The real time element here, was unnecessary, and therefor not included.

A girl in a plush animal-shaped hood teams up with a stoic man wielding a staff to pummel a leopard-like monster. Time stops after a moment while a UI element is navigated, after which both characters unleash powerful flashy moves. — In *FFVIIR*, real-time actions fuel strategic resources, which fuel combat advantages

What are those design goals then? Well going by the nomenclature it seems the Active Time Battle systems was meant to make turn-based combat more actively engage the player with its time-sensitive elements. Final Fantasy, like Dragon Quest before it, utilize turn-based combat akin to the tabletop games that inspired them. Turn-based combat was developed as a way to create an abstract representation of combat for the safe environment of a game. There aren’t a lot of practical ways to really play out hitting each other with swords while gathered around a table, without this layer of abstraction. Nowadays, I think there’s a lot of appreciation for the unique experiences possible only through a sophisticated turn-based system. I get the sense that even in the 90s, all the way up to now, some at Square Enix felt as though the turn-based system imposes limitations on what the combat can be, and imposes a barrier between the player and being immersed in the game’s world.

I think that last point is debatable, but what isn’t, so it seems to me, is that the ATB system wants the player to feel more pressured, with a more present sense of danger and action playing out in real-time. The problem for me, is that the simplicity of the ATB system feels like somewhat of a half measure. It’s a little at odds with the strategic systems of Final Fantasy combat, but also doesn’t fully create a sense of urgency or action for me. It’s kind of just a turn-based combat systems where you jump through a few extra hoops. The first real exception to this for me… is… not Final Fantasy VII Remake, which would come a lot later. Chrono Trigger is a vary notable instance of a game taking the ATB system and pushing it in an interesting direction.

A red-haired swordsman is accosted by a pair of blue goblins. One kicks him. The swordsman then spins his blade around in a cyclone, hitting and dispatching both goblins at once. — Wait for the opportune time to use the right move, and this real-time element makes a lot of sense

The key for what makes the ATB system work for me in Chrono Trigger is the importance of player and enemy positioning. Some of the Final Fantasy games had shades of this, but it was very digital and binary. IE: If you’ve ambushed enemies you have an advantage, if they’ve ambushed you, they have the advantage. In Chrono Trigger though, the relative position of enemies is analogue, constantly changing, and an ever-present strategic element. This element is often just a small, simple detail. For example, when several enemies are close together, you may be able to hit all of them at once with a single special attack, but not if they’re spread apart. If an enemy is too close to the player character when attacked, they may immediately respond with a counterattack. That sort of thing.

This simple extra dimension was like a missing link for me. Real-time is only one element of what makes action games engaging. In a traditional turn-based game. Things such as multi-hit attacks and counters are often very static and abstract. A multi-hit attack might always hit three enemies, or always hit enemies adjacent to one another, though they never move. In Chrono Trigger, and games influence by it, enemy positions are organic and ever-shifting, a natural and intuitive extension of the world. This ingredient alone makes the ATB bar make sense, as the dynamics of battle change in real-time along with the turn order. As I’ve often said elsewhere, relative position and spacing management on the part of the player is also an essential element. Chrono Trigger had a great commitment to holistic nature of its world. There are no random encounters. There are no battle transitions – the combat takes place in the same physical space it is initiated in. And, of course, battles occur in real-time. The game works to minimize abstraction in the broad strokes to make the game as seamless and cohesive as possible. Chrono Trigger brings these elements together in the context of a turn-based game, and was the last real evolution of the ATB system, in my opinion… until…

A red-haired young swordsman teams up with a blonde young woman with a crossbow to fight a large red robot in a festival courtyard. The swordsman strikes, but is immediately countered by the robot, who unleashes a spring-loaded boxing glove fist from a compartment in his chest. — Disadvantaged Positioning

A red-haired young swordsman teams up with a blonde young woman with a crossbow to fight a large red robot in a festival courtyard. After a moment, the robot wanders a little ways away from its opponents. The swordsman runs up to strike, then jumps back to his starting position, and the game's UI reads "Too far away to counterattack." at the top of the display. — Disadvantaged Positioning

Well okay, there are a couple of other Square Enix games I want to talk about that finally lead us to where we are today with Final Fantasy VII Remake, but first I’ll finally talk about Remake. Remake‘s primary conceit in its combat is that you can run your player characters around a 3D space and directly command them to attack in real-time, taking after the likes of a Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry. While not as robust a system as those, Remake‘s action makes for an effective stopgap of realism to reinforce what is being represented by the more abstract strategic decision making that takes place between – the action forms an important bedrock of context. Kingdom Hearts is another series that initially attempted to marry turn-based combat’s strategic elements to an action system, but ultimately fell head-first into the symbolic dream-ocean of full-on action game by its first sequel. The wrinkle for Remake, though, is the player’s ability to pause the action at any time to assess the situation and execute specific commands for the party members, commands which are invariably a lot more powerful than the standard real-time attacks.

A lot of games have tried this ‘stop and go’ sort of combat. Most prominently I think of old CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, or Dragon Age for a more recent example. These games take direct inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons or are indeed, even licensed games tied to the property. Weirdly though they’d often not employ turn-based combat at all, unlike the actual tabletop game they’re based on, almost as if turn-based is this inherent limitation to be overcome. I wonder if the developers at Square Enix ever played these games, or were inspired by their indifference to turn-based combat, haha. Suffice to say I think turn-based combat has almost always been underappreciated for its merits in many spheres of video game development. What made combat for a game like Dragon Age a little dull for me, was in how the real-time segments and paused segments, the player characters’ capabilities are exactly the same. So ultimately, I just felt like I was disrupting whenever I needed to pause the game to line up a spell, and since all characters are only indirectly controlled through commands, I never felt fully engaged during real-time either.

A girl in a hood shaped like a plush animal summons mystic runes around her to launch magic attacks at a soldier. Her partner, a stoic man with a staff, dashes up alongside the soldier at the same time she does, to do a combination attack. — Satisfying action, satisfying strategy, but most importantly the two modes **support one another**

This is where Final Fantasy VII Remake really accels, I think. It’s built on the solid foundation of an action game, with a full suite of direct control for the player, from blocking to dodging to parrying. And you’ll need those options, as the enemies take full advantage of their freedom of movement while the game is un-paused. Engaging with this action system builds up your ATB gauge, no longer a mere function of time, it is a function of engagement with the core systems. At certain thresholds of ATB, you can command a party member to unleash a powerful attack, and are given the ability to pause the action to carefully consider how and where to employ these ATB abilities. This pausing never disrupted the flow of the game for me, because they’re always big moments I was building to – rewards for effectively playing the game. The barrier between what can be done during real-time, and what cannot be, also very effectively delineates the two modes, so I never felt as if one is intruding on the other. I have to pause the game to heal a party member, or to unleash a skull-cracking dive kick. These actions are not something I can just do on the fly. They require strategy and consideration, so their presence within a pause sub-mode of the game feels natural. The ability to pause is a godsend too, as the player characters each have very intricate combat mechanics unique to them that, when used in tandem with careful consideration, can have some devastatingly powerful results.

Cloud, Tifa, and Barret from Final Fantasy 7, beat the stuffing out of a soldier in a sci-fi wearhouse. The action pauses mid-fight, in dramatic slow-mo fashion, then the beatdown resumes. — It’s also all very pretty to look at.

Another key to this is the stagger system, which is also an ongoing iterative system featured in many Square Enix games. It creates a long-term goal in any given combat encounter that the player can build up to. By using the right moves at the right times, enemies can be staggered, opening them up for massive damage. A balance of micro-goals and long-term goals is essential to a compelling combat system. From not getting hit, to setting up an enormous combo. It’s these interlaced interest curves, build ups and releases, that keeps combat from getting stale.

This makes for a sophisticated system of setups and payoffs, where every party member is instrumental in stringing together combination maneuvers. Cloud can easily set up a stagger on an enemy with his powerful counter attacks in real time and big sword strikes from the command menu. Meanwhile, Tifa can empower her abilities by stringing together a series of strikes. At the same time, Barret, who can take a lot of punishment, is safe to set up some buffs like haste to increase the party’s speed. Once the target is staggered, Tifa can unleash her built up power to fully exploit in the enemy’s weakness, and Cloud can finish them off once they’re low on health. The fantasy that Remake really delivers on for me is twofold; One, it creates this delightful scenario of being able to pause and survey a complex battlefield, almost like stepping into a freeze-frame of an action movie, owed to how well the real-time segments of the game operate in isolation to create impressive spectacle and compelling scenarios. I can survey these wild combat engagements with a strategic, discerning eye without fear of reprisal. Secondly, the way all of the character’s complex mechanics mesh together creates for me the sense that they are a real, team, working together to accomplish incredible things they could not do alone.

Cloud, Barret, and Tifa team up against soldiers in a futuristic warehouse. Barret, a man with a gun for an arm, casts a spell empowering Tifa, a woman who then punches a soldier dozens of times in a second, before the action pauses again, then resumes as Tifa knocks him over with a dropkick. — Buff up, wear down the target, knock em down. Just as planned!

This schema didn’t appear fully formed in Remake from thin air or divine inspiration, though. Many might not realize Final Fantasy has been trying to achieve this awakening of the ATB system’s dream for years. I can think of three major stepping stones of this journey: Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns, and Final Fantasy XV. All three of these games have bits and pieces of the puzzle that would make up the combat system of VII Remake, each containing the germ of an idea that you can see grow into what we have today.

XIII established party-wide strategic command overlaid upon action that exists in a different mode from that strategy. There’s been a lot of criticism over the lack of player engagement for this in-between mode, but the basis of VII Remake started as far back as this game. It became an example how combing two modes of play without disrupting pacing could work, although the quality of the pacing of XIII‘s combat is debatable. The later sequel Lightning Returns did away party dynamics, but intimately explored the stagger system, and how indirectly controlling player characters in real-time could work.

XV was an interesting beast. The result of an overlong development time, branched off from a very different design concept that leaned more on action gameplay. XV shows signs of its troubled development, but I think none is more prominent than the combat system. It isn’t bad, per say, but it feels very underdeveloped. A lot of the ideas that shine in VII Remake exist here in a sort of primordial form. Optional wait modes exist alongside a limit-action systems that puts emphasis of enemies positioning, and party-wide combination attacks. Everything is just a little off. A lot of those micro-goals I mentioned don’t feel as though they are totally in-sync, and long-term goals within combat aren’t totally clear. Nothing quite meshes like it feels as though it should, but all the ideas are there. Whether you actually like these games or not, the long and short of this is that Final Fantasies XIII, XIII: Lightning Returns, and XV walked so VII Remake could run.

The old lessons from Chrono Trigger live at the heart of Final Fantasy VII Remake as well, with the relative positions of enemies and party members in 3D space determining how actions resolve. A big sword swing might hit a dozen enemies at once if you’re careful about positioning! This is taken further than Chrono Trigger even, with the ability to finely control exactly where each party member is standing, and a third dimension to play around with. It’s an intricate dance of set ups, payoffs, and strategic positioning wrapped in a solid-as-stone action game bedrock crafted by old hands when it comes to hack-and-slash ARPG gameplay.

A girl in a plush animal-shaped hood, wielding a giant ninja star, runs up to a group of giant ratlike monsters. The action pauses for a moment, then resumes as she places a magic rune on the ground, which sucks in all the rat monsters, dispatching them all at once. — Real-time danger is the risk one can weight against the reward of advantageous positioning

So Final Fantasy VII Remake does not have turn-based combat, and that is an understandably big loss for some people. What it is not, however, is a turn-based combat system trying to masquerade as a hybrid of action and strategy. Rather, it is the realization of that decades long dream to create an engaging hybridization of strategy and action RPGs. It is at last, finally, the ATB system come home. It is the design goals set way back then finally pushed to their apex, at least so far. Fully realized, the ATB can shine in accomplishing what it’s struggled to do for years. I’m also pretty impressed, and thankful, that a second completely differently imagined remake of Final Fantasy VII is due in the form of Ever Crisis, which seems to retain the old combat system, as a companion piece to Remake. Remake‘s redone combat aims to capture its predecessor’s strengths in a heightened form. It’s a brilliant system to build off of in that regard, and has become one of the biggest reasons I remain very excited for the future installments of Final Fantasy VII Remake.

A blonde young man with a huge sword, an unarmed, long-haired woman, and a large man with a gun for an arm team up to battle soldiers in a futuristic warehouse. Time slows to a crawl as a menu of options is manipulated in a game UI. When time resumes, the party teams up to unleash devastating attacks on the soldiers.

Attack while its tail is up! It’s gonna counterattack with its laser…