Final Fantasy and RPG Role Design: Comparing Final Fantasy 9, 12, and 13

[Fyonn]

A thing that is fascinating to me in design terms is that liking FF12 is not a good indicator of liking FF13. A big part of it is structural, obviously. But if we look at just the mechanics, FF13 is so clearly a logical extension of the previous game's mechanics in a way FF rarely ever is. FF12 gives you an incredible amount of customization over your party's AI. In terms of custom RPG AI systems, FF12 is the absolute best implementation ever, full stop. The only ways you could do it better is if there were higher-level abstract options and/or sub-conditions. For examples of what I mean, gambits like "If I know enemy weakness, target weakness with magic" or "If I have at least 50% MP AND If enemy is Oil'd, cast Fire."

Even without those kinds of options, FF12's biggest strength and weakness (depending on what you want in the moment) is that you can custom AI your way out of playing the game very easily. FF has rarely been a franchise with a tight difficulty curve, so strategies as basic as "heal when low on HP, concentrate attacks on weakest enemy" can be successful if you're patient enough. So if that's the system you've built, where do you go from there?

FF13's answer to that question seems to be "if it's so easy to optimize this AI system, why ask the player to do that at all?" It's an answer I like the consequences of a lot, I'm a big FF13 fan. But it's not an answer I think that I would choose. To me, FF13 is a sort of admission. FF13 has a huge pile of spells and abilities from across the franchise, but the designers took all those options and made a game that says "The Final Fantasy franchise has 6 moves." People say you can't give specific orders to your full party in FF13, but I argue you can. It takes a while before everyone has access to every command, but the full command list for FF13 is: Attack, Magic, Heal, Buff, Debuff, Cover. They even had to make a whole new mechanic so that Attack and Magic didn't do exactly the same thing. In fact, the strategies are so obvious with that set of 6 commands that the game restricts you further - the only way it can challenge you is by making you prepare five sets of three simultaneously-issued commands in advance.

Is that an accurate assessment of Final Fantasy as a whole's mechanics? No. If a player is unwilling to lean in, does it accomplish what it set out to do? Absolutely not, you can win almost the entire FF13 campaign racking up 0-star wins by setting Fight/Magic/Heal and never issuing a different command. Does it show any understanding of the nuances of individual actions in prior FFs? Not really, no. Does it speak to a sort of aimlessness I see in my own design ideas, as a reflection of FF being a fundamental building block of my taste in RPG design? Yes, absolutely.

Let's consider Vivi Orniter. Vivi is a Black Mage from FF9. Maybe the best Black Mage ever. How many commands can Vivi know? We've got Attack, Focus, Defend, Row, Item, and 24 Black Magic commands. So Vivi's got twenty-nine commands total. How many options does Vivi have to select between on his turn - twenty-nine, right? No, I don't think so. Here's the list of obvious options Vivi has, in my opinion:

1. Free trivial melee damage. (Attack)
2. Free 25% Magic bonus, stacking. (Focus)
3. Free 50% damage reduction until next command. (Defend)
4. Free stance change 100% incoming/outgoing physical damage VS 50% incoming/outgoing physical damage, stacks with Defend, can be preset to preference. (Row)
5. Deal high single target damage. (Fire, Fira, Firaga, Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizzaga, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga, Bio, Water, Demi, Flare)
6. Deal moderate multi-target damage. (Fire, Fira, Firaga, Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizzaga, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga, Bio, Water)
7. Status effect crowd control (Sleep, Slow, Poison)
8. Enemy removal (Stop, Death, Break)
9. Deal moderate single target damage that bypasses Reflect (Comet)
10. Deal very random multi-target damage that bypasses Reflect (Meteor)
11. Steal HP (Drain)
12. Steal MP (Osmose)
13. Kill the heck out of literally everyone, even your own party (Doomsday)
14. Perform someone else's role, badly (Item)

Thanks almost entirely to options 5 and 6, that is significantly fewer choices than the 29 choices Vivi's command list suggests. And this is without factoring in efficiency. I'm not going to tackle commands on merits of marginal efficiency difference, that would be absurd. But what if we remove the options that are obviously, dramatically inefficient?

Row adds valuable texture to party composition, but in-battle I think it equates to 1 optional turn of homework for ambushes. Options 7 and 8 - are negative Status Effects good in FF9? No. There used to be several paragraphs here in which I broke down exactly why the best Status Effect Vivi can cast is worse than casting Firaga. You don't want to read that, so please just trust me. Comet - Wow, what a spell. On the surface it appears to be option 5 again, but in fact it is a worse version of option 5 that is also a hard counter to the spell that would otherwise be a hard counter to everything Vivi can do. There are better ways to solve Reflect, but Comet feels feels like a tool that Vivi should have. Option 10? Meteor is so dramatically random that it's practically a Status Effect. Like what if Firaga cost more MP in exchange for having a miss rate? 11, Drain - I'd like it if it were cheaper or more powerful. Gets devoured by the abundance of effective healing sources in FF9. 12, Osmose? Solid. Not an option I would leap to because FF9 has several MP sources. If dungeons were longer, there are certain party comps where Vivi would be casting Osmose frequently. 13, Doomsday - lmao, what a move! It shows up too late for me to take it seriously, but a move that demands you build around it like this is always charming to me. It's like the evil twin of party synergy.

So, taking all that into account, here's what I think the meaningful choices you can make when it is Vivi's turn are, as represented by my favorite command they represent:

1. Attack - A valuable bad choice, tests to make sure you understand the game and are awake
2. Defend - Reduce damage until next turn
3. Focus - Stacking Magic damage bonus, risk/reward as you lose it on KO
4. Flare - Single-target damage
5. Bio - Multi-target crowd control
6. Comet - Less effective single-target damage that can't be stopped
7. Osmose - Trade action economy for long-term sustainability
8. Item - Do someone else's job, but poorly and ostensibly at high cost

There are eight things that Vivi can do with his turn. 29 commands, and 21 of them, in my opinion, do not matter. I think, where we get FF13 is an experienced RPG player looking at these eight options, and by means of their own personal biases, removing even more of them. FF13's design thinks that once you take the busy work of managing MP and identifying weaknesses, Vivi has these choices:

1. Flare
2. Bio

And really, if you think that the only thing that Vivi does is cast Flare and Bio, why not reduce that down to just casting Flare? So we arrive at one of FF13's six commands, Magic. Or as FF13 calls it, Ravager.

I can see so clearly how someone could sit down and analyze the Black Mage role and conclude "these choices are so obvious, there's no reason to bother making them." Indeed, FF9 never really put me in a situation where I would consider all of Vivi's tools. I cast Osmose once. But it's interesting to me that instead of examining FF mechanics and going "How can we push players to consider other choices for roles," FF13 goes "How can we make a game out of roles which do the same thing every turn?"

Say we were in charge of an alternate universe FF13, and I walked you through this analysis? I wonder, what other kind of RPG could you even make where characters are boiled down so far that they only have eight commands per character? Well. Discounting out of battle spells, we could make Dragon Quest 1. We could make one third of a Pokemon party. We could make Casette Beasts. We could make LISA The Painful. We could make nearly every single Shin Megami Tensei game, including the Personas, released after the PS2. We could make Darkest Dungeon 1 or 2. We could make Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. Heck, we could even make Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

All we'd have to do is make those choices a little more distinct, a little more universal. Give the options that are outright bad a rework until they serve a clear role. Put a little more pressure on the player. Ask them to survive in a dungeon for a little longer, make standard enemies a little less reasonable on average. I'm not upset about the trajectory of Final Fantasy mechanically, I like Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, and Monster Hunter just as much as I like Final Fantasy. But I do hope that we will some day get a game with the aesthetics and iconography of a Final Fantasy that branches out in this direction instead.

 

[spines]

hmm. i saw this when you were first typing it, and i've wanted to respond but i kind of don't even know where to go because i feel like i just have a different feeling at a fundamental level. first of all, i don't consider it inherently a weakness of rpgs that they're a kind of game that anyone can beat by playing long enough; certainly by ff7 i feel like the intent to present a kind of theme park ride became clearly at the forefront of the series.

i think in the case of ff9, and that's a game i have plenty of gripes with mechanically, the player abilities aren't really the whole story; the game tries to play a lot with enemy compositions and reactions, so that you don't just make a party of Attack-ers. and i don't think it entirely works well, as i've said many times, although it certainly does hinder the strength of some setups; sometimes the reactions just don't actually have a real effect, or are overly annoying, and inevitably there are lots of battles where it becomes basically a waste of time to attack or cast spells and half your party or more are standing around passing turns till the one person who has a good answer to the enemy gets to hit enough times. and i think more than that the game speed and the difficulty it has conveying some of these mechanics before you just get hit with whatever is rather frustrating. and of course ito's more recent dungeon encounters plays with a lot of the same ideas but reverses them with full customization of party members' abilities and almost complete transparency about the damage mechanics. i really liked that game, but i also did not find the combat and presentation fundamentally compelling enough to play the "final fantasy battle system" progression linearly through the whole dungeon crawl. which, fortunately, you extremely don't have to, lol

but i think that the way that dungeon encounters is so "obviously" mechanistic puts people off is in itself an interesting statement about what people see in rpgs. and not just in the way that it becomes very noticeable that enemies have just a little bit more than an even multiple of your current fixed weapon power, and random weapons average somewhat higher than fixed damage to complement that fact, but that most attacks in the game look the same the whole time as well. do we really need three elements that basically all do the same thing aside from one of them being sometimes stronger than the others? is blizzaga "more interesting" than blizzard?

yes! because it looks cooler! i would absolutely say that i think aesthetic, "flavor", or even entirely illusionary choices (the kind of thing that has no effect on narrative progression or mechanics) aren't meaningless. of course, i think if there's a game that epitomizes that, it's legend of mana, a role-playing game which features all kinds of choices, constantly, but relatively rarely in the context of a prompt or something with apparent "consequences", because the consequences aren't the point. the choices are. it's not presented to the player with the kind of high difficulty that might make it a puzzle to solve or optimize, but a medium for exploration and self-expression

that's not to say i don't like 13, a game which does try to incentivize mastering the battle system and rpg elements. ultimately, yeah, it's a game that kind of turns the traditional ATB concepts into a car engine chugging along as you drive somewhere, although i think it's striking that even then it's a very different concept of skill than the actual action games they were purportedly chasing at the time (and i think it's clear there was a lot of truth to that given the trajectory of the next few games after 13-2). it's got these time-sensitive elements, but not down to the frame data of parrying or whatever, and feeling out the "vibe" of the battle and when to strike, defend, push ahead into danger, and try to open that critical moment are great feelings that i love. i've played other rpgs i feel have those elements (largely from the same era and the following decade), and i think it's something unique to games that don't demand an "exact" result

i think 12 is...somewhere between all that. it's easy to acquire a lot of strange and often not particularly useful abilities, but that sound weird or compelling enough you want to at least see them, and while it's easy to use obvious gambit matches to play the game as a human satisfied grinding out the game with basic concepts forever would, you can also set up weird, experimental, convoluted, or even meaningless routines. because it's funny or interesting. in that sense it's a very freeing game, but it's also such a large game that i don't think it's very easy to find the will and interest to truly explore that freedom. in that way i think it's a very different game from 13, and even though i do think they share some major aspects they feel like very different answers to the kinds of implied questions that might be used to try and connect them mechanically, "how do we turn these ideas more into an real-time game that doesn't involve so many menus?" or "are these decisions actually interesting to players?"

i don't know. i admit i haven't played a lot of the other games you're talking about, and i'm often less interested in games presented as mechanically complex or difficult because i kind of have the impression they're more focused on stuff like resource management and turn-by-turn decision-making that doesn't excite me in a vacuum, at least not before i'm invested in what else the game does and feels like to interact with. (although i'd say on that note that in my view a lot of the SMT games focus a lot more heavily on the preparation side of battle and what moves you have, with the right decision almost every turn being pretty obvious based on that)

 

[YangusKhan]

All we'd have to do is make those choices a little more distinct, a little more universal. Give the options that are outright bad a rework until they serve a clear role. Put a little more pressure on the player. Ask them to survive in a dungeon for a little longer, make standard enemies a little less reasonable on average. I'm not upset about the trajectory of Final Fantasy mechanically, I like Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, and Monster Hunter just as much as I like Final Fantasy. But I do hope that we will some day get a game with the aesthetics and iconography of a Final Fantasy that branches out in this direction instead.

Until we see any indication of this cropping up in a main-line FF game, I think it's pretty much relegated to FF "spinoff" games or "spiritual sequels." Things like... Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default. 4 Heroes of Light. Hell, some of the FF gacha games get pretty deep into the weeds while still only allowing each character a handful of abilities.

 

[Fyonn]

I just want to say I really appreciate how often ya'll weigh in on my RPG ramblings.

hmm. i saw this when you were first typing it, and i've wanted to respond but i kind of don't even know where to go because i feel like i just have a different feeling at a fundamental level. first of all, i don't consider it inherently a weakness of rpgs that they're a kind of game that anyone can beat by playing long enough; certainly by ff7 i feel like the intent to present a kind of theme park ride became clearly at the forefront of the series.

i think in the case of ff9, and that's a game i have plenty of gripes with mechanically, the player abilities aren't really the whole story; the game tries to play a lot with enemy compositions and reactions, so that you don't just make a party of Attack-ers. and i don't think it entirely works well, as i've said many times, although it certainly does hinder the strength of some setups; sometimes the reactions just don't actually have a real effect, or are overly annoying, and inevitably there are lots of battles where it becomes basically a waste of time to attack or cast spells and half your party or more are standing around passing turns till the one person who has a good answer to the enemy gets to hit enough times. and i think more than that the game speed and the difficulty it has conveying some of these mechanics before you just get hit with whatever is rather frustrating. and of course ito's more recent dungeon encounters plays with a lot of the same ideas but reverses them with full customization of party members' abilities and almost complete transparency about the damage mechanics. i really liked that game, but i also did not find the combat and presentation fundamentally compelling enough to play the "final fantasy battle system" progression linearly through the whole dungeon crawl. which, fortunately, you extremely don't have to, lol

but i think that the way that dungeon encounters is so "obviously" mechanistic puts people off is in itself an interesting statement about what people see in rpgs. and not just in the way that it becomes very noticeable that enemies have just a little bit more than an even multiple of your current fixed weapon power, and random weapons average somewhat higher than fixed damage to complement that fact, but that most attacks in the game look the same the whole time as well. do we really need three elements that basically all do the same thing aside from one of them being sometimes stronger than the others? is blizzaga "more interesting" than blizzard?

yes! because it looks cooler! i would absolutely say that i think aesthetic, "flavor", or even entirely illusionary choices (the kind of thing that has no effect on narrative progression or mechanics) aren't meaningless. of course, i think if there's a game that epitomizes that, it's legend of mana, a role-playing game which features all kinds of choices, constantly, but relatively rarely in the context of a prompt or something with apparent "consequences", because the consequences aren't the point. the choices are. it's not presented to the player with the kind of high difficulty that might make it a puzzle to solve or optimize, but a medium for exploration and self-expression

that's not to say i don't like 13, a game which does try to incentivize mastering the battle system and rpg elements. ultimately, yeah, it's a game that kind of turns the traditional ATB concepts into a car engine chugging along as you drive somewhere, although i think it's striking that even then it's a very different concept of skill than the actual action games they were purportedly chasing at the time (and i think it's clear there was a lot of truth to that given the trajectory of the next few games after 13-2). it's got these time-sensitive elements, but not down to the frame data of parrying or whatever, and feeling out the "vibe" of the battle and when to strike, defend, push ahead into danger, and try to open that critical moment are great feelings that i love. i've played other rpgs i feel have those elements (largely from the same era and the following decade), and i think it's something unique to games that don't demand an "exact" result

i think 12 is...somewhere between all that. it's easy to acquire a lot of strange and often not particularly useful abilities, but that sound weird or compelling enough you want to at least see them, and while it's easy to use obvious gambit matches to play the game as a human satisfied grinding out the game with basic concepts forever would, you can also set up weird, experimental, convoluted, or even meaningless routines. because it's funny or interesting. in that sense it's a very freeing game, but it's also such a large game that i don't think it's very easy to find the will and interest to truly explore that freedom. in that way i think it's a very different game from 13, and even though i do think they share some major aspects they feel like very different answers to the kinds of implied questions that might be used to try and connect them mechanically, "how do we turn these ideas more into an real-time game that doesn't involve so many menus?" or "are these decisions actually interesting to players?"

i don't know. i admit i haven't played a lot of the other games you're talking about, and i'm often less interested in games presented as mechanically complex or difficult because i kind of have the impression they're more focused on stuff like resource management and turn-by-turn decision-making that doesn't excite me in a vacuum, at least not before i'm invested in what else the game does and feels like to interact with. (although i'd say on that note that in my view a lot of the SMT games focus a lot more heavily on the preparation side of battle and what moves you have, with the right decision almost every turn being pretty obvious based on that)

I also think it's fine for RPGs to let you win if you play it long enough. After all, RPGs that do demand you play in Serious Mode 24/7 can be exhausting. It took a long time for me to come to terms with Earthbound when I revisited last year (or the year before?) because it absolutely wants you to always be doing that math. I get too overwhelmed to even approach games like Darkest Dungeon because abilities in that game approach balance by being multifaceted and interacting with other abilities and enemies in sometimes unexpected ways. Having precision-tuned RPGs gets stressful quickly. When it comes to this kind of tuning, I think my ideal is probably Dragon Quest - Dragon Quest will let you win without too much resistance. If you try something in Dragon Quest and can't cut it, you get to keep all the EXP you earned, and are better positioned the next time you try. If you're making the most of your abilities, you can squeeze a little bit more out of your party and skirt by where other players might not. That experience is very rewarding, but Dragon Quest gives you plenty of tools to opt out of that experience seamlessly.

But, I didn't mean to express that any of these games or design concepts is better than the others. I guess in my struggle to make my thoughts cohesive, I constructed a conclusion when I didn't really have one. I remember thinking at the time "wait, what am I trying to express here? Posts are supposed to say something. Uh, this? I guess?" Where I said "But I do hope that we will some day get a game with the aesthetics and iconography of a Final Fantasy that branches out in this direction instead," what I think I really meant was, "I would like to make something like this."

Every FF example here is from a game I liked enough to finish. I have no real insight into what actually motivated the combat design of FF13. I can identify why I think I might have made those choices, because I've often made those kinds of choices in my *checks folder* 49 half-formed-at-best concepts. Inevitably I end up missing something I can't quite identify. So this is just kind of aimless thoughts I've had about RPG design and the consequences of it, in large part because I want to find my own design voice. What do I want to say with my design, and how can I say it? What have other people said with their designs, how did they say it? Did they mean for their design to say that, or is the statement an unexpected consequence? I don't think FF9's game design team meant to say "Poison is bad and you shouldn't cast it," so trying to find the intent is an interesting question for me. I'm sitting at my desk with a set of screwdrivers, taking a watch apart to learn how to make a watch without anyone to teach me the ropes.

I think it's obvious I find games that have very limited options per-character fascinating and elegant. On the other hand, there are definitely reasons to have tiered damage spells and cure spells like most Final Fantasy games do. You can maintain a character's balance throughout a game by increasing the power and cost of abilities significantly as HP and MP increase. For one, I bet it means dungeons don't have to get bigger for resource pressure to stay roughly the same. By linking magic to equipment, FF9 can use tiered spells to produce leaps in Vivi's effectiveness the same way almost all RPGs use weapons to produce leaps in effectiveness for melee characters. I assume that must have made the nightmarish job of balancing FF9 across all 30+ hours of its run time much easier, right? I'm looking at things like that in detail because I want to know what it costs me when I make XYZ choice about a design. Will I ever finish one of my projects? Who can say? Either way, the act of putting the effort in and thinking about them is inherently rewarding for me, but sometimes I just need an outlet to put the webwork of my thoughts out there.

 

[spines]

yeah, definitely the side of people who actually make these things is something i don't want to totally overlook. i tend to recoil at the idea there has to be "a point" to everything, and i think that where square was at in the 90s is a big part of why they were able to do a lot of things that, looking back...maybe don't make a lot of sense, and are certainly not likely to be matched in relative influence and breadth of talent on display. whereas like, a person or a few people making a game maybe don't want to put a lot of effort into implementing and testing stuff players generally won't use if at all. i've played around with design tools a little and certainly thought about ideas for games i'd try to make, but certainly not put the same kind of effort into it you have, and i recognize that the kinds of things i'd like to do, which aren't so visibly mathy...still inevitably involves incorporating those concepts, and even stuff like guilty gear strive has made me realize that trying to streamline the player away from "seeing all the numbers" has all kinds of pitfalls and janky outcomes in their own right