Fyonn
did their best!
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:
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:
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.
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:
- Free trivial melee damage. (Attack)
- Free 25% Magic bonus, stacking. (Focus)
- Free 50% damage reduction until next command. (Defend)
- Free stance change 100% incoming/outgoing physical damage VS 50% incoming/outgoing physical damage, stacks with Defend, can be preset to preference. (Row)
- Deal high single target damage. (Fire, Fira, Firaga, Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizzaga, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga, Bio, Water, Demi, Flare)
- Deal moderate multi-target damage. (Fire, Fira, Firaga, Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizzaga, Thunder, Thundara, Thundaga, Bio, Water)
- Status effect crowd control (Sleep, Slow, Poison)
- Enemy removal (Stop, Death, Break)
- Deal moderate single target damage that bypasses Reflect (Comet)
- Deal very random multi-target damage that bypasses Reflect (Meteor)
- Steal HP (Drain)
- Steal MP (Osmose)
- Kill the heck out of literally everyone, even your own party (Doomsday)
- Perform someone else's role, badly (Item)
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:
- Attack - A valuable bad choice, tests to make sure you understand the game and are awake
- Defend - Reduce damage until next turn
- Focus - Stacking Magic damage bonus, risk/reward as you lose it on KO
- Flare - Single-target damage
- Bio - Multi-target crowd control
- Comet - Less effective single-target damage that can't be stopped
- Osmose - Trade action economy for long-term sustainability
- Item - Do someone else's job, but poorly and ostensibly at high cost
- Flare
- Bio
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.