- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's been thirty years since they released a main-series title that isn't real-time based, I think describing being turn-based as something the games are famous for is outright counterfactual.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Is Kain missing teeth there?
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Mm, indeed. The only other long-runner famous for turn-based combat that comes to mind is Pokemon, of the early 90s RPG that survived to the 2020s, and from my experience basically all FF past 7 are ATB to some degree. Maybe also 7, it's been a good few years since I poked it.
This opening scene with the summoner village and mist dragon always stuck with me, as FF4 plot elements go. It's quite the setpiece, established as something the 'baddie empire' would do, but that you wouldn't expect from the game protagonists. They've been decent folk so far, actively bothered by the atrocities their kingdom has begun committing! So for their next orders to amount to 'blow up a village' is quite shocking.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There's also SMT and Dragon Quest, both ongoing and both also dating back to the NES, both staying turn based.
Black lipstick, I think.
Amano's art can be very beautiful, but man some of his costumes just feel like someone reaching into a Jojo's bizarre adventure rummage bin and picking blindly.
Derek58
Rocket Punch is Best Punch
- Location
- Getter Valhalla
7's got ATB as well.
- Location
- Sweden
Twenty years (since original release). FFX is turn-based.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Good point, I forgot about 10.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The method I've worked worked out is to just click Attack the moment the menu comes up; time freezes when you're selecting which enemy to target, and Attack is always the topmost Command, so you only lose a fraction of a second.
Cut for space from the next update:
- Pronouns
- He, him, etc.
Hi Omicron, I've been really enjoying your Let's Plays so far, but I've been particularly looking forward to this one, because it's the first that I've played and thus might have something to contribute. That being said, hopefully this is helpful.
I'm a little confused by this, because unless I'm misunderstanding you or they seriously changed something in the version of the game you're playing (for reference, I played the PS1 Final Fantasy Chronicles version), I don't understand the issue.
See, I'm like you (and @Kadmus and @McFluffles ); I overwhelmingly prefer turn-based rpgs and strategy games because I both hate being rushed making decisions and also like to watch the results of my inputs as an unhurried spectator. Because of this (and one or two other reasons not relevant to the current discussion), I wholeheartedly agree with @McFluffles that the best version of the combat system is Final Fantasy X (specifically the combat; other things like the character advancement and especially the equipment/item systems I'm much less fond of). However I've played IV, VI, VII, and IX, all of which use ATB, and had no problem with any of them. Because in the versions of those games I played, all I had to do was set the system to "Wait" and whenever a characters turn comes up I just immediately enter the Magic menu (or failing that, the Item menu) and the ATB system completely pauses, giving me as much time I wanted. Indeed, more than once I left it in the Magic menu while I went and did something else, with it being exactly where I left it when I got back. Now, was it a bit annoying that I had to quickly duck into the Magic/Item menu whenever a character's turn came up? Yes. Would I have prefered a turn based system like X's? Absolutely. But was it a major issue, even for someone with as much indecisiveness and mediocre reflexes as me? No, not at all.
So I'm a bit confused. Does anyone else feel similarly, or am I missing something?
I'm a little confused by this, because unless I'm misunderstanding you or they seriously changed something in the version of the game you're playing (for reference, I played the PS1 Final Fantasy Chronicles version), I don't understand the issue.
See, I'm like you (and @Kadmus and @McFluffles ); I overwhelmingly prefer turn-based rpgs and strategy games because I both hate being rushed making decisions and also like to watch the results of my inputs as an unhurried spectator. Because of this (and one or two other reasons not relevant to the current discussion), I wholeheartedly agree with @McFluffles that the best version of the combat system is Final Fantasy X (specifically the combat; other things like the character advancement and especially the equipment/item systems I'm much less fond of). However I've played IV, VI, VII, and IX, all of which use ATB, and had no problem with any of them. Because in the versions of those games I played, all I had to do was set the system to "Wait" and whenever a characters turn comes up I just immediately enter the Magic menu (or failing that, the Item menu) and the ATB system completely pauses, giving me as much time I wanted. Indeed, more than once I left it in the Magic menu while I went and did something else, with it being exactly where I left it when I got back. Now, was it a bit annoying that I had to quickly duck into the Magic/Item menu whenever a character's turn came up? Yes. Would I have prefered a turn based system like X's? Absolutely. But was it a major issue, even for someone with as much indecisiveness and mediocre reflexes as me? No, not at all.
So I'm a bit confused. Does anyone else feel similarly, or am I missing something?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Keep in mind I'm not writing this Let's Play having already finished the game; you're getting my reactions after about only an hour of hands-on experience with the ATB system. I expect (I hope!) that by the time I'm finished with FFIV it will no longer be stressful.
That said, the major reason why the ATB system is causing me so much trouble at the moment (but hopefully not for long) is one I'll go into with my next update, when we meet two more characters that I didn't get to in this chapter, and when we do hopefully things will make more sense.
- Location
- Alabama
Hahaha. Yeah, I now remember playing a version of this game. Say hello to big dad angry you made her cry.
Also, bright side. Not all FFs have that, look at X.(The game I'm playing atm.)
Granted, it's rep as the easiest FF is well deserved. Other than Tidus completely failing at his role in the party as lizard killer.
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It does, yes.
So I just discovered, in fact, that there is a pause function. I think it's natively bound to the spacebar on PC. I've played through Pixel remasters 1 through 4 and somehow only found out about this now.
- Pronouns
- He, him, etc.
OK, that's fair. I'll hold any further thoughts until your next update.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
First boss: The Mist Dragon is, as first bosses often are in RPGs, a tutorial. This one is specifically on the ATB system, and the idea that proper timing can help you out during battle. As it's a tutorial, the idea and execution is simple: Boss has a counter stance, don't attack it in the counter stance. This is a boss concept that is revisited in future games, and the Mist Dragon isn't my absolute favorite, but it's a pretty good first try at it.
It's also not the worst one, that one is...pretty infamous and singlehandedly knocks one of the most popular FF games out of the running for Best Opening.
It's also not the worst one, that one is...pretty infamous and singlehandedly knocks one of the most popular FF games out of the running for Best Opening.
Now, the question is, what the heck was @Omicron looking for that spoiled the plot going to complete Lunacy?
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Yeah I really hated FF4's version of the ATB system and it was definitely a contributor to my feelings on the game being Mixed - albeit I kind of acclimated to to it by the end as the margin for error becomes less of a problem. Also, there's a fringe benefit to the system that you probably ran into back in the invisible initiative order games - you can actually be certain of your order of operations among the party. If you have two characters with full ATB and a downed third, you can just have one use a Phoenix Down and the other use a Hi-Potion and it'll actually fucking work without the boss cockslapping the character and killing them instantly.
Thankfully at some point in the future, I don't know when but at least by 7, they fix the ATB system by allowing you to queue up actions by selecting them before the ATB gauge fills up.
do you feel like a hero yet, cecilLet's find our grateful villagers.
…
It was a bomb ring.
As in, it was a ring that summoned the enemy type called Bomb, known for its ability to explosively self-destruct and set everything on fire.
Jesus christ.
…I just killed everybody in this place, didn't I?
Cecil and Kain: "You thought your dad hit you? Geez, get ready for this."The two terrifying knights who just admitted to killing her mother close in on the little girl, demanding that she come with them, pushing her back, until all this results in the most devastating battle screen in all Final Fantasy so far:
Christ.
Entering combat with an 8-year-old moments after killing everyone she ever knew and loved before her Stand punches you so hard you atomise makes for a strong start to FF4's story-gameplay moments.What an absolute gut-punch.
I mean, what am I supposed to do here? Attack the little girl with all the power of the dark side? Try to stab her with a spear, but, like, non-lethally? What am I supposed to do? Well, the ATB gauge is counting up! Little girl's turn is coming up! Time to decide! Do I just decide to wait and see what she does with her action? Do I just attack and hope that this is treated as my characters 'peacefully' knocking her out? Do I-
DING DING DING
Too late! The bell is ringing!
And it's time for Final Fantasy to remind us that this is anime, and you don't fucking stand around lollygagging while a child with brightly colored hair descended from a dead village of super-wizards is angry at you!
That is fucking Titan right there.
Yeah, this is an instant kill on both characters.
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Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
What the hell, forum. I didn't get a new threadmark notification since the post before stepping into the WoD in FF3 until now. Oh well, I'll limit my word vomit to FF4.
*Sakaguchi, that is.
I know many people dislike the system, but I always liked this flexibility. Lot's of pseudo combos to be done, and allowing you to sacrifice spamming speed in favor of tactics, at least as much as the game design was capable of allowing you to. And as you notice later with the Mist Dragon, an expansion in battle mechanics. With that and more, all in all the ATB system is good in my book. There are PLENTY of jrpg games in the SNES era with far more atrocious systems; ATB ain't even close to the worst.
That's it. That's the entire joke I got from that. Don't worry, I know where is the exit.
This ain't your (five years older) cousin's FF no more.
Oh yeah baby. This is the beginning of Square's brand of shock-'n-awe story openings.
With this and what others already said about Kain's supposed background, I'm not going to go in deep here, but there are theories about these not being just references, but the story of FF4 being what happened some time after FF2. Not necessarily an idea I buy into, but something fun to keep in mind.
*cackles in script knowledge*
FF4 is full of these little narrative touches thanks to one new team member having a dramaturgy background, and I've seen the game being described as something like "when Story Daddy* found a nice locale so that Theater Boy could get his geek on".
*Sakaguchi, that is.
"And the crowds go wild!"
Her introduction in the DS version ends up with a very nifty CGI of Cecil in his (very intimidating armor) looking down from the battlements, and Rosa behind him looking with sadness. If that short exchange didn't grok you there was something between them, that CGI sure would.
In Megamind's voice: Foreshadowing!
Yeah, I never got the idea that it was supposed to teach me anything. I started getting how the ATB system worked once I got fisticuffs against goblins and went "oh, lil bar fillies up, and then I choosey attackey! Goodie, goodie."
She also wields bows. Like, that crap ain't fo healin, my gal. Sure, a magic staff isn't going to heal your boo boos either, but at least it's more useful for patching a hole than an arrow!
Which helps telling you that Cecil ain't just any sergeant. He gets the good stuff.
I can't remember if FF4 allows you to switch which character you were going to use next in a battle, but definitely other games did. So my guess has always been that the intention behind allowing time to pass while in the top menu was that if the now ready Character A had commands that you prefer to be engaged after the commands of Character B, you could wait until B was ready, use their commands, then immediately use A's.
I know many people dislike the system, but I always liked this flexibility. Lot's of pseudo combos to be done, and allowing you to sacrifice spamming speed in favor of tactics, at least as much as the game design was capable of allowing you to. And as you notice later with the Mist Dragon, an expansion in battle mechanics. With that and more, all in all the ATB system is good in my book. There are PLENTY of jrpg games in the SNES era with far more atrocious systems; ATB ain't even close to the worst.
"Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Fantasy."
That's it. That's the entire joke I got from that. Don't worry, I know where is the exit.
It couldn't be known! D:
I can see in my mind those early NES FF veterans, innocently switching on their shinny new Super Famicoms a sunny Sunday morning of 1991, and getting to this.
This ain't your (five years older) cousin's FF no more.
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ATB is literally the devil. Somehow, they've managed to combine the worst elements of turn-based and real time battle systems with zero benefits from either. That's impressively malicious.
As someone with similar stress issues reharding the system, I can tell you that it does get better once you become more familiar with character moveset and find the right rythm to it. It becomes almost as good as regular turn-based system.
I feel it's less, like, objective mechanical failure and more psychological perception, or possibly just brainbugs plaguing some people like me and Omicron. There is just something about hesitating a second on the menu and seeing the enemy seize initiative and do a move before you could even though your gauge was full that that drives a spike of anxiety right through my brain in a way that neither fully real time nor fully turn-based systems do, even though it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Part of the thing is that the early ATB entries at the least are fast combat. I don't mean that in terms of ATB gauge speeds, I mean in terms of the turn concept.
Like, consider the Mist Dragon- per Omicron's own post;
Just like preceding final fantasies, boss type enemies quite often are able to kill one or more characters in two or less attacks as far as I recall, assuming you don't overlevel. Which means the boss getting an 'extra' attack on you because you hesitated can genuinely put you significantly on the backfoot.
Like, put another way, something like Super Mario 64 and Megaman Battle Network are both real time games, but super mario 64 does not generally have the boss pumping out roughly 50~% of your life per, say, every 4 seconds or less in damage, as high end bosses in battle network quite often do.
Or to use more recent examples from my experience, Curse of the Dead Gods and One Step From Eden are both real time roguelike type games, but the former has a relatively relaxed pace where you mostly have to deal with one thing at a time, while the latter has individual boss patterns and even just regular enemy patterns that literally require multiple dodges per second to not take massive, rapidly lethal damage. While finding time to aim and attack back with your dizzying deck of cards.
Active Time Battle in Final Fantasy is technically somewhere between turn based and real time, but then the tempo of combat is so fast that it's often actually a more demanding tempo than many fully real time games that simply do not require you react that fast or that often to survive.
Like, consider the Mist Dragon- per Omicron's own post;
The game's baby tutorial boss that is definitely not particularly hard still kills Cecil and Kain in 7-8 counter hits. Given both characters can trigger it when they attack, mistiming a round of attacks can be 25% of the way to a defeat.
Just like preceding final fantasies, boss type enemies quite often are able to kill one or more characters in two or less attacks as far as I recall, assuming you don't overlevel. Which means the boss getting an 'extra' attack on you because you hesitated can genuinely put you significantly on the backfoot.
Like, put another way, something like Super Mario 64 and Megaman Battle Network are both real time games, but super mario 64 does not generally have the boss pumping out roughly 50~% of your life per, say, every 4 seconds or less in damage, as high end bosses in battle network quite often do.
Or to use more recent examples from my experience, Curse of the Dead Gods and One Step From Eden are both real time roguelike type games, but the former has a relatively relaxed pace where you mostly have to deal with one thing at a time, while the latter has individual boss patterns and even just regular enemy patterns that literally require multiple dodges per second to not take massive, rapidly lethal damage. While finding time to aim and attack back with your dizzying deck of cards.
Active Time Battle in Final Fantasy is technically somewhere between turn based and real time, but then the tempo of combat is so fast that it's often actually a more demanding tempo than many fully real time games that simply do not require you react that fast or that often to survive.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
You realize that everything after this is a spoiler, right? Why are you intentionally spoiling things? The comment would have worked fine even stopping at this line, without including details from games further ahead in the series.
I'll need to disagree here, as I think the best iteration of the ATB system still is FFX-2. It's the only one where the game mechanics actually use the ATB to add mechanical complexity to the game, instead of simply using it to add stress for no purpose. It's not as good as the turn-based approach of FFX, but it's better than FF7R, and thus also the rest of the ATB games, in how it makes use of the ATB as a mechanic.
It's because the Final Fantasy developers, Sakaguchi especially but hardly just him, wanted their games to be cinematic. This obsessions with making the games more and more cinematic as they progress is one of the things that have been the driving force behind the many ways in which the series has been decaying just as as much as it is what pushed some of the best development, such as the increase in complexity of story and characterization. Ultimately, some people think that movies are classy art and videogames aren't, so if you can make your videogame just close enough to a movie, then maybe it can be more like art - a disdainful approach that naturally pushes development in directions that run counter to taking full advantage of the medium in an effort to try and ape a different medium.
The ATB was just the first and most persistent aspect of this, because the only way to make a properly cinematic game was, of course, to make it have real time battles, thus wanting to move the series toward being action games, but they at least understand that the large amount of options is one of the things that drive the series popularity, so they still try to preserve that. Note how the best final fantasy of the last two decades is apparently FFXIV (watched a few let's play, and I can see the appeal), where you don't have a team to input commands for. The game can focus squarely on being only an action game instead of having to make compromises with being a team game, and it benefits from it. Similarly, it being an MMO allows them to have the cinematic graphic they want without having to shrink and shrink the game to the point that, instead of having a game where you explore an entire planet with multiple world maps, you're reduced to barely having a full city to explore.
So... yeah, the ATB is a bad idea overall compared to a proper turn system like FFX has, although I do think that, when we're talking of these first incarnation of it compared to the NES turns, it's not too big of a pain; it's annoying, but it can be dealt with in various ways. Although it's nice of the PR version to include the ATB bar; the SNES version didn't have it visible, which made the whole situation way more confusing than it needed to be. But then, a visible bar runs counter to the whole "making this cinematic" driving mentality; I'm honestly surprised they ever added it.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
I played the NES version of this and it took a little getting used to but the main trick is to memorize what every character's strengths are and then just blitz through the menus. My physical attacker guys, they're going to "attack", my spell guys are going to cast, etc. Play around with special moves on weak monsters until you get a sense of what they're good for and then work out what situations might call for them ahead of time.
Because there was no "ATB" meter, I had no idea exactly how the initiative order thing worked but I worked out they could hit me in the menu sometimes pretty quickly.
Because there was no "ATB" meter, I had no idea exactly how the initiative order thing worked but I worked out they could hit me in the menu sometimes pretty quickly.
Well, now that you got to Rydia, here is the first difference. Dark, or darkness worked a bit differently in the DS version. Using basically makes Cecil enter a darkness state. After that, every physical attack he uses does double damage and is dark elemental in exchange for each attack eating a bit at your health. The Darkness state wears off after a bit.
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All this ATB hate is kind of blowing my mind, honestly. VI was my first Final Fantasy, so that's just kind of always how it was for me. How's the water, right?