Fascinated about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s curiously scrappy fight not too long ago took me again to a different time when a serious role-playing sport collection tried one thing very completely different with its fight mechanics. On this case, the designers’ objective was the identical as Capcom’s with the primary Dragon’s Dogma: a single-player RPG that felt like a massively multiplayer on-line sport to play. However the ensuing system couldn’t have been extra completely different, and stands as probably the most fascinating useless ends in sport design historical past.
The sport is Remaining Fantasy 12 — a swan tune for PlayStation 2 when it was launched in 2006, now obtainable on present platforms in a wonderful remaster, The Zodiac Age. (The Zodiac Age is leaving PlayStation Plus’ Game Catalog on May 21, together with a number of different Remaining Fantasy titles.) With its massively versatile Gambit system of celebration instructions, FF12 staged real-time tactical fight you could possibly successfully program to play itself. It’s probably the most elegant and satisfying online game fight programs ever devised — but in addition one of many least influential and most seldom copied.
Remaining Fantasy 12 occupies a wierd place within the collection’ historical past. At the beginning of the 2000s, Remaining Fantasy 10 had launched the collection on PlayStation 2 in conventional fashion — tacky, opulent gaming with turn-based battles — and was an enormous hit. However it was instantly adopted by Remaining Fantasy 11, a thorny, post-EverQuest, pre-World of Warcraft MMORPG that efficiently took Sq.’s flagship collection into the web realm. Even for a collection that continually redefines itself, FF11 was a daring change in how gamers associated to those worlds. Right here was a Remaining Fantasy that was much less playable storybook, extra inhabitable world, the place occasions (and battles) occurred in actual time.
![Final Fantasy 12’s Amalia casts a powerful spell](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Pj71DztreTNs9Njs3LQIcRxTKA0=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25404789/07_Ashe_Quickening.jpg)
Picture: Sq. Enix
Sq. (which merged with Enix in 2003) needed to seize a few of this magic for the offline Remaining Fantasy video games, and employed two of its most gifted designers to do it: Remaining Fantasy 9 director Hiroyuki Ito and Yasumi Matsuno, creator of the revered cult favorites Techniques Ogre, Remaining Fantasy Techniques, and Vagrant Story. Ito was the unique designer of the collection’ well-known Lively Time Battle system; Matsuno had a present for writing political intrigue and designing deep, refined sport mechanics. Sadly, Matsuno wasn’t fairly prepared for the stress of a manufacturing of this scale, and bowed out with well being points earlier than the sport’s launch. Nonetheless, he and Ito collectively had been greater than up for the problem of taking mainline Remaining Fantasy past turn-based battles for the primary time.
Remaining Fantasy 12 is not any action-RPG, nonetheless. In a method, it’s nearer to a real-time technique sport — which is sensible, contemplating its kinship to early MMORPGs, with their slow-paced fight emphasizing tactical talent choice. You may pause battles at any second to pick expertise or gadgets, however they unfold in a steady, easy crawl of motion, because the 4 celebration members and their foes place themselves, prepared expertise, and unleash them. FF12’s signature visible flourish is the online of neon traces that arc between characters on the battlefield, displaying supposed assaults or spells and their targets — a cool, futuristic contact harking back to the ballistic trajectories of nuclear missiles drawn on command screens in Chilly Battle films like Battle Video games.
This ostentatious tactical show reveals how Ito and Matsuno thought in regards to the motion in Remaining Fantasy 12 and the participant’s place in it. Though gamers management the celebration chief instantly, actually they’re squad leaders at one take away, surveying the remorseless logic of the battlefield and issuing instructions. The final word expression of this viewpoint is the Gambit system.
![The Gambit tutorial screen in Final Fantasy 12, showing the commands “Ally: any, first aid” and “Foe: nearest visible, attack”](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/2KZENHtXbfp0NPw_gYRfwN5-Yhk=/0x0:1280x720/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:1280x720):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25404776/Final_Fantasy_12_gambits.jpg)
Picture: Sq. Enix by way of Polygon
Basically a programming language for the celebration’s AI, Gambits enable the participant to set and prioritize situations for motion for each celebration member. For instance, you’ll be able to instruct a personality to forged Treatment on any ally with well being under 30%, to assault the celebration chief’s goal, to forged Firaga on foes weak to fireplace, to disregard (or focus on) foes with greater than 3,000 HP, and so forth. To start with, just a few easy Gambits can be found, and every character has solely two Gambit slots. However helpful Gambit situations will be purchased from distributors, and characters’ sheets can develop to 12 Gambit slots, all ranked in precedence order.
FF12 eases you into this technique gently, however the deeper you get into the sport, the extra dizzying the utility of Gambits turns into. Nearly each tactical eventuality is roofed. An excellent generalized setup will see your celebration churn by way of dungeon and overworld foes with no participant intervention in any respect; when confronted with a boss battle, you’ll be able to select to design customized Gambits for the encounter, or to play extra manually. On the whole, Gambits are a good way to deal with the tempo of battle within the sport (which is quicker than it appears) and with chaotic mobs of a number of enemies, however it may be irritating if you need to intervene with a selected command and discover all of your celebration members have their very own expertise lined up.
Why would you need to automate the method of enjoying a online game, although? It’s an affordable query, and the attraction of enjoying FF12 by way of Gambits isn’t that simple to articulate. However the satisfaction of setting up a very environment friendly, adaptable Gambit setup and watching your celebration execute it flawlessly is deep and hypnotic. (It’s nearly akin to a sports activities sim like Soccer Supervisor in the way it makes the participant really feel.) It additionally removes a lot of the stress and busywork from enjoying a celebration RPG, whereas permitting the participant to take a high-level tactical view of battle and affording them time to assume extra strategically.
![A battle screenshot from Final Fantasy 12](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/QWrKt15ln66U0kTOthqv24DghCQ=/0x0:3840x2160/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3840x2160):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25404767/FF12_battle.jpg)
Picture: Sq. Enix
It’s true that Gambits can be utilized to interrupt the sport — even, arguably, to interrupt the idea of gaming itself. A pal, reviewing the unique launch of FF12 on a good deadline, used a Gambit setup to automatically power-level his characters in a single day at a grinding spot so he might then smash by way of the remainder of the storyline. It labored, nevertheless it was habit-forming; as soon as he had seen backstage and damaged the mechanism of 1 sport to his benefit, he might by no means return. Ever since, he has sought out overleveling exploits in each relevant sport to render them mechanically simple to play to completion. He will get by way of much more video games than I do, however he can be the primary to confess that it’s debatable how a lot enjoyable he’s having.
In any occasion, Remaining Fantasy 12’s fight proved to be an outlier. Tendencies in RPGs headed in the wrong way, favoring action-flavored fight specializing in granular enter instructions for a single character. The Remaining Fantasy collection steadily adopted go well with — culminating in Remaining Fantasy 16 using a Satan Might Cry designer, Ryota Suzuki, to orchestrate its fast-paced, combo-heavy fight. Fast, tactile suggestions turned the foreign money RPGs commerce in, like so many different online game genres. FF12 envisions one thing completely different. It casts the participant as a tactical mastermind and conceptualizes the motion as an ideal machine, an immaculate community of trigger and impact. It’s a particular and persuasive imaginative and prescient that’s all of the extra value in search of out now as a result of it by no means caught on.
Remaining Fantasy 12 is offered to play on Nintendo Change, PlayStation 4 and 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox One. It is usually obtainable for PlayStation Plus Further and Premium subscribers till Might 21.