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I have never been all that hot on Final Fantasy. A few games in the series have managed to amuse me, on one level or another. In general, I am bored by what Square has continually tried to accomplish with this series. I feel often that they have gone in the wrong directions, for the wrong reasons, and have as a result -- given how much political influence they have within the design community, and how misdirected and conservative their design philosophy has been -- been largely responsible for the lack of substantial evolution in the Japanese console RPG genre which they helped to popularize. They just set a bad popular precedent, for the rest of the industry to follow. And follow, you know the industry will. Biohazard was another problem; Mikami is now on his way toward fixing it. Now, though, I think Square might be on its way to joining Capcom in this trend toward repairing a whole genre.
You have got to understand, first, how stupid and arbitrary the modern Japanese console RPG is. There is no reason for it to exist in its current form, besides inertia. Just about every distinguishing facet of the genre -- experience, money, levels, battle encounters (random or not), constant equipment upgrades, an overworld with towns and dungeons scattered around it -- is a placeholder for some grander concept, instituted mostly because of the insurmountable hardware and design limitations of the day, that has never subsequently been realized in a broad sense even after the hardware was available to do more than approximate these ideas. Now we are hard pressed to be rid of the placeholders, because so many people have come to latch onto them for their own sake as a meaningless abstraction. It is a case of idolatry, really; mistaking the importance of the object itself for the concept it represents. As such, the genre has failed to mature in a substantial way for about fifteen years. If anything, design has devolved into a mockery; generally the only notable distinguishing element of any given RPG lies in what new gimmick has been superimposed upon the existing RPG template. Whether Materia or Mana Eggs or Limit Breaks, these all miss the point by adding an extra level of meaningless abstraction for the sole reason of distinguishing one game system from the next. It's all about system. Rules about nothing.
To be fair, Square has made a few halfhearted stabs at fixing the traditional problems. Final Fantasy VIII tries to envision a traditional RPG without the money and equipment standbys. FFX tries to ditch an overworld, and character levelling and experience, and it tries to avoid meaningless battles as well as it can. These are noble enough attempts, although Square again has tended to miss the boat by adding in other, even more-arbitrary systems (such as the sphere grid or the junctioning system) to make up for the concepts they have eliminated.
Final Fantasy XII might just be the answer. It is by a different development team from any of the previous games. From what I have seen of it, I somehow doubt it was originally conceived as a main-series Final Fantasy game. It's just too... different. And yet, there it is. It is the next Final Fantasy, so it will be one of the most influential games around, upon its release. Everyone will try to copy its ideas, and incorporate them into his or her own project. In this case, I think that might be an ideal situation.
Perhaps the most important change in FFXII lies in its approach to battles. There are no battle transitions. The battle system which exists does so for the sake of utility and clarity in the face of chaos, rather than for the sake of being a clever battle system. Most importantly, from what I have seen, the battles are not arbitrary. You do not fight to gain experience or gold (although those mechanics might well still be present -- I will deal with that eventuality in a moment). You do not fight because the computer has chosen to throw a battle at you. You fight because, say, your castle is being invaded and there happen to be a number of specific soldiers running through the halls. You fight in order to survive against a specific threat, which is a part of your environment. It all has contextual meaning and reason. Further, you fight in something of a realistic manner: you spot an enemy, and engage him in battle -- or he spots you -- and a tether-of-intent connects you and your opponent. You both know that you're going to have to fight. Or, perhaps, you can physically run away and try to avoid the battle -- even once your opponent has you in his sights. Once the battle has begun, you switch from party member to party member, kind of pausing the action, BioWare-style, to assign them various tasks. The tasks will all then play through in real-time. You retain full control over the character you have selected, and can run all over the playfield if you wish. The closest thing to a systematic conceit lies in a slight Active Time-like wait period before a given character can conduct a new action, keeping everyone from acting all at once and allowing the player some semblence of control over the situation. When the opponent is defeated, the player just keeps running along to wherever he was going, leaving the body or bodies behind.
It kind of comes off as a cross between Final Fantasy and Baldur's Gate -- only more dynamic.
Now, the game might well fall prey to other traps of the genre. People expect their characters to evolve over time -- which well they should, although the process of human growth does not translate too well to a progression of numerical levels that leads a character, in the end, to be physically strong enough to kill God because of all the time the player has spent stabbing bees in the grasslands, yet somehow without the emotional evolution which would tend to occur simultaneously with such a personal set of changes. I guess that's okay. I would personally do away with overt experience and level growth, and work in a more subtle and invisible way of tracking a player's actions and allowing them to hone the character over time. Yet, I guess one thing at a time is good enough. The change in philosophy over the whole meaning of in-game battles seems profound enough for the moment, for a game which will be so influential as this. Maybe in the next game we can work toward completing the picture.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
is an old man, by RPG standards.
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