Think about Dragon dogma 2The interesting and messy combat recently took me back to a different time when a major RPG series tried something completely different with its combat mechanics. In this case, the designers’ goal was the same as Capcom’s with the first Dragon dogma: A single-player RPG that felt like an online multiplayer game to play. But the resulting system couldn’t be more different, and ranks as one of the most fascinating dead ends in the history of game design.
The game is Final fantasy 12 – a swan song for PlayStation 2 when it was released in 2006, now available on current platforms in an excellent remaster, The Zodiac Age. (The Zodiac Age is leaves the PlayStation Plus game catalog on May 21along with several other Final Fantasy titles.) With its wildly flexible Gambit system of party commands, FF12 staged real-time tactical battles that you could effectively program to play themselves. It’s one of the most elegant and satisfying video game combat systems ever devised – but also one of the least influential and most rarely copied.
Final fantasy 12 occupies an odd place in the history of the series. At the beginning of the 2000s it was Final fantasy 10 had launched the series on PlayStation 2 in traditional style – cheap, lush gaming with turn-based combat – and was a big hit. But it was immediately followed by Final fantasy 11a thorny, post-EverQuestfor-World of Warcraft MMORPG that successfully brought Square’s flagship series to the online realm. Even for a series that continually redefines itself, FF11 was a bold change in the way players interacted with these worlds. Here was a Final Fantasy that was a less playable storybook, a more habitable world, where events (and battles) took place in real time.
Image: Square Enix
Square (which merged with Enix in 2003) wanted to capture some of this magic for the offline Final Fantasy games and brought in two of its most talented designers: Final fantasy 9 director Hiroyuki Ito and Yasumi Matsuno, creator of the revered cult favorites Tactics Oger, Final Fantasy TacticsAnd Wanderer story. Ito was the original designer of the series’ famous Active Time Battle system; Matsuno had a gift for writing political intrigue and designing deep, sophisticated game mechanics. Unfortunately, Matsuno wasn’t quite ready for the stress of a production of this scale and had to contend with health issues before the game’s release. Still, together he and Ito were more than up for the challenge of taking Final Fantasy beyond turn-based combat for the first time.
Final fantasy 12 however, it is not an action RPG. In a way, it’s closer to a real-time strategy game – which makes sense, given its kinship with early MMORPGs, where their slow-paced combat emphasizes tactical skill selection. You can pause battles at any time to select skills or items, but they unfold in a continuous, smooth action as the four party members and their enemies position themselves, prepare skills, and release them. FF12The game’s signature visual flourish is the web of neon lines that arc between the characters on the battlefield, showing the intended attacks or spells and their targets – a cool, futuristic touch reminiscent of the ballistic trajectories of nuclear missiles drawn on command screens in Cold War films, such as War games.
This flashy tactical display shows how Ito and Matsuno thought about the action Final fantasy 12 and the player’s place in it. Although players directly control the party leader, they are actually team leaders at a distance, overseeing the brutal logic of the battlefield and issuing orders. The ultimate expression of this point of view is the Gambit system.
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
Gambits are essentially a programming language for the party AI and allow the player to set and prioritize action conditions for each party member. For example, you can command a character to cast Cure on an ally with less than 30% health, to attack the party leader’s target, to cast Firaga on enemies that are weak to fire, to Ignore (or focus on) enemies with more than 3,000 HP. and so forth. For starters, there are only a few basic Gambits available, and each character only has two Gambit slots. But useful Gambit conditions can be purchased from vendors, and the character sheets can be expanded to 12 Gambit slots, all arranged in priority order.
FF12 gently introduces you to this system, but the deeper you get into the game, the more dizzying Gambits’ utility becomes. Almost every tactical eventuality is covered. A good general setup will have your party rampaging through dungeons and overworld enemies without any player intervention; When faced with a boss fight, you can choose to craft custom Gambits for the encounter, or play manually. Overall, Gambits are a great way to deal with the pace of the game’s combat (which is faster than it seems) and chaotic mobs of multiple enemies, but it can be frustrating when you want to intervene with a specific command and all your group members have their own skills lined up.
Why would you want to automate the process of playing a video game? It’s a reasonable question, and the appeal of play FF12 via Gambits is not so easy to put into words. But the satisfaction of building a truly efficient, customizable Gambit setup and watching your party execute it flawlessly is deep and hypnotic. (It’s almost like a sports simulation like Football Manager in the way the player feels.) It also takes away a lot of the stress and busywork of playing a party RPG, while giving the player a tactical outlook at high levels can get into fights and fights. giving them time to think more strategically.
Image: Square Enix
It’s true that Gambits can be used to break the game – perhaps even the concept of gaming itself. A friend, reviewing the original release of FF12 with a tight deadline, used a Gambit setup to automatically adjust the power of its characters at a grinding spot at night so he could then break through the rest of the storyline. It worked, but it was addictive; Once he looked behind the curtain and broke the mechanics of one game in his favor, he could never go back. Since then, he has searched all applicable games for overleveling exploits to make them mechanically easy to completion. He gets through a lot more matches than I do, but he would be the first to admit that the question is how much fun he is having.
Anyway, Final fantasy 12‘s fight turned out to be an outlier. Trends in RPGs went in the opposite direction, favoring action-packed combat with an emphasis on detailed single-character input commands. The Final Fantasy series gradually followed suit, culminating in Final fantasy 16 employing a Devil May Cry designer, Ryota Suzuki, to orchestrate the fast-paced, combo-heavy battles. Instant, tactile feedback became the currency that RPGs trade in, like so many other video game genres. FF12 imagines something different. It casts the player as a tactical mastermind and conceptualizes the action as a perfect machine, an impeccable network of cause and effect. It’s a distinctive and compelling vision that’s all the more worth exploring now because it never caught on.
Final fantasy 12 is available to play on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, Windows PC and Xbox One. The game is also available to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers until May 21.