How to Fix Final Fantasy

2011-12-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

First, I’d like to say that this post was inspired by a certain Joystiq article by the same name. It’s written hastily and without proofreading. The original article’s main problem is that it was basically pointless. Rather than actually talking about ways to fix Final Fantasy, it just satirized all the choices FFXIII-2 is making, which, sure, I can get behind that. But on the other hand, I’d like to actually look at FF games, and treat them as the amazing gems that they (almost universally) are. So, I wrote this in a hurry, mostly going off of the top of my head: it's not comprehensive, nor is it really intended to be, it's a bit repetitive, there's probably a few typos and grammatical errors, and it's way longer than I actually intended. It's just my stab at seeing what's wrong with the modern FF games. Discussion is encouraged--I'd love to hear more thoughts on the way the series has gone. Flaming is also entirely legitimate but I'll ignore it.

Also, TL;DR version at the bottom.

A lot of people complain about the decreasing relevancy of Final Fantasy compared to more popular western games, which are primarily things like FPSes and Mass Effect. Of course, they ignore that Final Fantasy still does pretty good sales—we’re gonna ignore that too, since what we’re talking about here isn’t marketing, just the content of their games. Actually, no, screw it, let’s get marketing out of the way first.

The reason FPSes games sell so well and JRPGs don’t is primarily because FPSes appeal to a different crowd than what JRPGs ever even got. COD and Battlefield 3 aren’t causing less copies of FF13 to sell by drawing away consumers. They’re tapping into an entirely different crowd, most of whom don’t like things like Final Fantasy. I’m going to be a bit qualitative rather than quantitative here because I can’t really speak for every single purchaser of CoD or Halo, but most people I met who were heavily into FPSes were sort of what you’d call “bros.” No, not Mario Bros. These are the guys that join frats and bullied the developers of CoD when they were both kids on the schoolground. They don’t care about stories. They care about pwning bitches. You don’t get called fag every minute when you’re playing FF13 online—in the hypothetical world where this essay takes place, you can play FF13 online—or when playing any given MMO, usually (though I suppose there’s a reason there’s no inter-faction communication in WoW.) That’s because bros don’t play those games. You can’t pwn enough bitches in them.

Now that we’re out of the realm of things that may or may not be entirely my own goddamn opinion, the reason FPSes are so popular and JRPGs are not is for two very simple reasons. First, multiplayer, which is the driving force behind what made the Wii so successful, also happens to be the driving force behind CoD. It sells six million units for the same reason that you might start smoking pot if everyone in your apartment is smoking pot. It’s called peer pressure. It’s not even something that’s inherently negative—people are going over to a friend’s house and trying the game. Since it’s easy to jump into, they like it, and buy it, since they can also play with their friends when they’re not at their friend’s house. In contrast, something that you absolutely cannot drop into and out of is any goddamn RPG, since they’re usually at least twenty hours long, and something that pretty much never has multiplayer is RPGs. Now, I’ve had some great success with multiplayer Secret of Mana and Tales of the Abyss, but when my friends went home they didn’t run out and buy the game immediately, considering that they couldn’t get anything out of it on their own or from their own home that they couldn’t get from my copy of the game. That is to say, if these games had multiplayer, probably Diablo 2 style, where you COULD drop in and out with any players worldwide, maybe they’d be selling more copies. That’s one marketing thing.

The other main reason is presentation. Skyrim sold 7 million copies (as near as I can tell—source http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2011/11/skyrim-sales) and the reason for that success compared to FFXIII’s meager 3 million isn’t entirely due to design differences. Most of the difference is just the way the game looks. Also advertising, but, advertising when your aesthetics don’t match up with your target base is sort of a bad strategy, anyway. There’s a reason you don’t see ads for bud light during the super bowl that heavily reinforce that they support gay pride. Westerners don’t like anime bullshit, because they didn’t grow up getting used to its tropes. People who played FF since they were kids probably do like it, but for the most part they’re gonna get the next FF regardless of what it looks like. So how about you make it look like something with more global appeal than anime characters? Don’t get me wrong, FFXIII is an absolutely astoundingly beautiful game, but the art style isn’t exactly what people are looking for. WoW also shows that we can have cartoony art styles that are appealing to a mass audience. In fact, the way everything looks in WoW is one of the main reasons I like it so much.

What if you used an art style more in line with FFXI, then? With a little tweaking, like, making the beastmen races not look retarded, and avoiding cutesy bullshit like Taru and Mithra, that game has a really good art style that’s more in line with what you see in Elder Scrolls. It also manages to be pretty breathtaking at times, even in that style.

Anyway, that’s all I’m gonna talk about marketing. A little more might sneak in there.

So, let’s go through pretty much every FF game and talk about what makes them so great. I didn’t get more than a quarter of the way through II and only about halfway through VIII, so my opinions there are kind of limited, but I’ll still touch on what I like in them.

Final Fantasy, as in, the first game, is a pretty good game considering it came out way back in 1987 and has not aged very well. Quick and dirty, what makes FFI good is party customization as well as a constant reinforcement of the basic theme of all RPGs: You get stronger as you play. To save time, I’m going to paste in a bit of a post of mine from the forums over at giantitp.com:

“FF1 is basically a dungeon crawler: you have to make several trips into the cave, slowly exploring it, getting the weapons out of the chests, and gaining strength. The level system is designed not to have you come back later to kill the ogres that were giving you ire, but to come back now and kill the ogres who were giving you ire. In a few levels you go from being able to handle 3-4 groups before you have to leave, to like 10, to them not really being a big deal at all.”

I’m only going to say that once, since it’s basically true of all the early games through 5, at least, and remnants of it are still visible in 6 on. The main thing that makes FFI good is that you build your party, name them after your friends, and then save the world. Back then, that’s all an RPG really needed to be fun. Of course, writing was fairly weak and we got a bad translation, but the game still supplied a decent challenge as well as inventing the possibility of what were basically challenge runs. Four white mage party, anyone?

Final Fantasy II’s main strength is, I guess, that it was the first game in the series to focus on developing the story. The leveling system’s also pretty cool: people get better in what they’re good at, and get worse in what they’re bad at. Your customization options are more open, but they’re probably too open, and there’s a bunch of minor flaws in the design, still, like gaining levels in magic making the spell cost more, since it does more damage. It’s pretty easy for your spells to outpace your MP growth, especially where Cure is concerned, and especially considering that this game is balanced, like most other RPGs, for you to slowly be using your MP through the entire dungeon. Like I said, I haven’t gotten very far in this game personally, so I don’t have a lot to say.

Final Fantasy III’s main strength is the amazing class system, which it was the first game, at least in the series, to really fully develop. You can—and the game practically forces you to—change your classes to change the strategy that you use in different areas and against different bosses. That’s a totally solid design philosophy, really. It wants you to actually use the systems that it put into play. Of course, in the end there’s only a few feasible strategies for beating the final boss, but should that really be weighted as strong as the mini tunnels, or the boss where everyone has to jump constantly to not die? This is where FF really hit the right stride where customization was concerned. It’s not too complicated or open, like FFII’s, but there are still a lot of fun and silly things you can do. Additionally, the game has some really neat moments, which are primarily where the story focus in FF games is, anyway. There’s the part where you fly off the island the entire game up to that point took place on, since it’s just one floating island orbiting a much larger world. Then everything’s underwater, so you have to raise continents and get a submarine. That whole “world manipulation” thing ends up being a pretty important theme in V and VI, too, very neat. Maybe we could see another game that draws from that? Parallel worlds has been a pretty successful theme for the Zelda series, so why not go back to some old gameplay themes in this series?

On that note, here’s a serious problem with most of the more modern FF series. When they try to do something for nostalgia, rather than actually being nostalgic, like, say, SMRPG does when you go through the curtain in Booster’s tower and come out as 8Bit Mario, they just point to something that all the games have, like Crystals, and then bill the whole game around being nostalgic even though it in no real and meaningful way represents the design qualities of the old games (I’m looking at you, FFIX.) It’s not doing something clever, where the player can go, “heh, that’s silly,” they’re doing something like naming a volcano after the same locale in an earlier game and being all, “DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?”

Four Warriors of Light and even Tactics A2 are more nostalgic games than IX was, since they’re actually designed around the sensibilities that made FF good in the first place: party customization. Maybe if we saw more of that, and a real development of it, we’d be able to get more players interested in the game. Maybe if you developed that and then drew in some multiplayer and online elements—like, say, a versus mode, or character trading, which are both great elements from Pokemon that are frightfully under-ripped-off—we’d see more sales. Hell, if everyone else was playing a Final Fantasy Arena, I sure as hell would be too. Do you know how bad I’ve wanted a game like that since I was in fourth grade? Really bad. I can’t be the only one. A lot of people probably want the game and don’t even know, since they didn’t come up with the idea. You just gotta make the things people want, and then make them good. That’s what FF1-6 all were, man.

FFIV is so good because holy shit, that scene where Cecil turns into a Paladin, or the part where you go to the moon, or pretty much any scene where a main character dies. The game’s full of cool moments like that. On top of that, you just have a really fast and easy to play game, since this is before stories get all complicated. I don’t need to see an hour of cutscenes between every dungeon (again, looking at FFIX here.) Almost all the time you spend playing FFIV you actually spend playing FFIV. That’s another major thing the series should return to. We got it right with scene skips, but honestly, why would you even make the scenes of skippable grade quality, anyway? Why not just make the cutscenes quick and to the point, like they were way back in FFIV. Heck, they were even pretty fast in the latter stages of IX, and most of them are real painless in FFX. A lot of the cutscenes in FFXIII are fast, but on the other hand, a lot aren’t, and the sheer volume more than hampers that being a real good quality.

FFV is good for, hell, I don’t know. The job system is cool. It really established the roots that FFT would take off and get crazy with. How come we haven’t seen a game with FFV’s gameplay style with FFT’s advanced character and job customization system? That seems like a money combo to me. Again, FFV has good moments, like Galuf’s solo round with Exdeath, and it has a very cohesive design in general, since you end up going to a lot of the same areas again in the second and third worlds, and then sort of a “zone revisitation” in the final dungeon. Very cool design—after FFVI, we wouldn’t really see elements like that again. I guess that’s part of the reason everyone was bitching about FFXIII’s linearity. You actually can’t go back to an earlier dungeon, only now it’s all different. More than the game just being a line, which most FF games really are, it’s a line that goes constantly forward.

FFVI was for the majority of my life my favorite Final Fantasy game, and the reasons for that are numerous and generally not very legitimate anyway. The reason VI is good is because of the characters—and as a BA in English/Creative Writing, I’m not going to say they’re incredibly deep, but they’re at least two-dimensional for the most part. The characters are all caricatures, but they’re good caricatures. They’re far more developed than what we got in FFIV, and the game’s all the better for it. This is especially important in light of the fact that almost every cutscene in FFVI is incredibly quick and painless. You’re still spending the majority of the game actually playing the game, rather than watching pointless cutscenes. Everything is direct and to the point.

The gameplay’s also top-notch, and, as far as I’m aware, is basically the only game to really merge the two disparate ideas of having characters be customizable but also have their own unique schticks. To be fair, it’s not as fully developed as it should be since you can only raise stats and learn magic through the customization, but it’s still an amazing effort and a lot of what makes the gameplay in VI really unique. Since there are twelve party members, and you can only field four at a time, the slight differences between characters make the party building element really fun and unique. So, how about we see more stuff like that? What if every character had a distinct class like Engineer, and then there was a subpool to draw from that contained things like Black Mage, White Mage, or Knight, and you used those elements to learn skills that you slotted into the character in a style of FFV and FFT? Do you guys see what I’m getting at in general, here? What I’m getting at is: what FF needs to do is actually look at the gameplay elements that comprise the entire series, and then build off of them. Instead they just decide every time to build an entirely new system of gameplay. Hell, even this far back, the only real similarity between 4-9 was the ATB. The subsystems (ie, class system, material, magicite) were all incredibly disparate. They weren’t blocks that built off of each other, they were separate entities entirely.

To be honest, Final Fantasy VII isn’t really my favorite in the series, but I do still like it. I’m not as enamored with it as everyone else… but that doesn’t really matter. So here’s what, in my opinion, makes FFVII really good: it focuses on making things “cool.” This is almost assuredly what makes it so popular and gives it so much longevity stateside. We like things to be cool. Japan likes things to be cool, too. This is sort of the direction that FFXIII took, but I guess maybe they just focused too much on it. “Oh,” they probably said, “let’s get rid of towns, because towns aren’t cool.” Yeah, but Sector 5 and Wall Market are amazing. The things I really dig in FFVII basically all happen in Midgar. It’s got a good mystery behind it, and while I personally think the reveals were all terrible, it at least has some merit in terms of how it’s set up. Materia has a lot of interesting elements built into it, mostly where linking and combining links is concerned, but they overfocused on that and all the characters ended up being really samey. This is especially disappointing because, if there had been a mix like there was in FFVI, materia would probably be the best subsystem FF has ever had. Imagine if Yuffie had Throw as a default command, not as a materia, then most materia was focused around passive bonuses (again, like FFT and FFV) or around magic, summons, or stats. All they really need to do is pick two main series FF games at random and then force their subsystems together, then build up the resultant Frankenstein into something amazing. Going back to marketing for a moment, “being cool” is basically why people like all those FPSes. They just need to reach a good medium between the things that makes VII cool—like the final boss, the motorcycle chase, the entire opening, fighting the WEAPONs—and the things that make an FF game an FF game, like towns, a world map, and hey, didn’t they already strike this balance once? I think that game was called Final Fantasy VII. Why aren’t any of the sequels to FFVII actually anything like FFVII, by the way?

Final Fantasy VIII I actually really enjoy, but the game always kind of peters out for me sometime during the second disc. Junctioning is an interesting subsystem, but it’s probably the easiest thing to break the series has ever had. The characters, for the most part, devolve back to FFIV levels of characterization—Selphie is upbeat, Quistis is a total hottie, Zell likes hot dogs. Squall’s development is more or less amazing assuming you’re willing to give it a chance, but it’s easily overshadowed by Tidus’s, and the complete lack of a supporting cast really devalues it. I guess that’s all I have to say. I’m not really sure what elements they could take from FFVIII to make a good and popular game, honestly. Laguna?

Final Fantasy IX is sort of a huge letdown for me. I definitely enjoyed it as a kid, but now I feel that I bought into the hype a little strong. There’s really not all that much in it that’s truly nostalgic. Distinct character playstyles was only done before in IV and VI, and VI included heavy customization. IX does have a decent amount of customization with the abilities, but a lot of their effects aren’t even apparent in the game normally, which basically turns it into “get the best.” But here’s something about FFIX that’s amazing that Square actually DID decide to build off of: learning abilities from weapons. It’s kind of an odd system if you take it at face value, but when you look through all the games it appears in and see the way it’s used, it has an extremely valid reason to stick around: if you’re into it, you can get abilities sooner. If you steal from Baku, you can get the second knife at the very beginning of the game, a full five hours before you’re able to buy it normally, and by using synthesis you can get all the abilities earlier. This is true in Tactics Advance, and even more true in Tactics A2, where you actually have a decent amount of control over the types of equipment you get. This, right here, is an excellent example of Square doing what it goddamn should be doing.

Final Fantasy X is one of my favorite games, and is currently my favorite in the series. Of course, the reason for that is just because it has the best story, both in terms of well developed characters (even throwaways like Rikku are more developed than 90% of FF characters… Kimahri’s worthless, though) and actually good writing. The story might be tripping balls, but it DOES make sense by the time you beat the game, possibly unlike FFVII’s and FFVIII’s (which as far as I’m aware, literally does not make sense.) The battle system for FFX is downright amazing. They basically took ATB and then removed time limits for attacks. The way buffs are spread out between characters, and the way each character has a distinct capability and use in battle, is absolutely amazing—but the most important element is that the game actually makes you use those differences. In most FF games you can get away with just jamming attack and curing where necessary, because the basic fight command is incredibly unbalanced, moreso once you start getting things like 4x Strike. In FFX, you can’t really get away with that. Even in random battles you need a balanced party and to swap in and out to deal with different types of enemies (another fairly unique aspect of FFX is that monster groups are almost never a single enemy, or formed of a single type of enemy.) Of course, if you want to be a total badass, you can do a no swap challenge with a bad party makeup—say, Tidus, Auron, and Rikku—and you’ll still be able to hobble through the game. Very good encounter design, even better boss design. FFXIII gets encounter design right, but not as right as FFX does, since you don’t really need to do a wide variety of strategies to deal with most things. It’s just COM RAV RAV, SEN when needed, MED when needed, open with debuffs. That’s basically the standard in any FF, and most RPGs as a whole.

Brief nod to FFX-2: game is actually amazing. Mission based gameplay doesn’t really end up working for it, and all the weird fanservice in a game that seems pretty intended for girls (considering it’s a magical girl video game) is extremely offputting, but this is basically the best iteration of the ATB system we’ve ever got. The reason is mostly because they took the “moves having different recharge time” thing from FFX (or really from FFT, or Tactics Ogre) and built that into an already good system. The problem is that for some reason they only do things like this in games that they’re already planning on screwing up.

Final Fantasy XI is an online game, so it definitely gets the multiplayer aspects right. It’s got great art direction, though it could stand to be fantastic’d up a bit as everything’s a might generic. I kind of like the approach to storytelling as something incidental, especially considering most FF games don’t have a terribly good story.

Final Fantasy XII is a trainwreck, and since I feel like I already covered most of what made FF games good, I’m not gonna focus on this one for very long. What? This is already six pages long?

…Holy shit. I’ve only been writing for a couple hours. Uh. This kind of got away from me. Oh well. I hope you’ve enjoyed this terribly long article so far, but we’ve still got a bit more.

Anyway, Final Fantasy XII is an incredibly deceptive game. It seems really good to start. The characters all start in different places on the license board, so maybe it’s like FFX: distinct characters with some customizability. No, it really goes for full blown customizability. Then the problem becomes that, no matter how you customize your characters, they’re for all intents and purposes the same. The game starts off with what seems like a good story—two street urchins want to make it big. That worked out for Aladdin, right? Then it gets into this weird politics plot and overfocuses on that, forgets the characters you started with (which is probably a good thing because they were terrible) and then forgets the weird politics plot and crystals lol. So the story’s bad, most of the characters are bad, and the subsystems are bad. The main gameplay would be alright if this was an MMO, or if it wasn’t trying to be an MMO and you just had to control every character. You pretty much already can, since all magic can be manually controlled, so the only thing you’re really losing is selecting the “fight” command. But it’s really just cumbersome and unimportant to do so, since using gambits is easier.

So, let’s see. How could you fix FFXII? Make the cutscenes shorter, like in FFIV. Then it wouldn’t matter so much that all characters are underdeveloped, or maybe the forced writing economy would cause you to develop your characters quicker. Since the license board is basically a worse version of the sphere grid, you could just build off of the sphere grid in a more positive direction. Taking stats off of it was a good move, but having it be so small and so easy to create overlap between all your characters was not. Still, at least they’re actually building off of a system for once. They removed the world map, but you could still maybe do something with changing the world map—the one section that had wet/dry seasons was really cool, but maybe a bit too Banjo Kazooie. It also doesn’t have that element of “oh, I remember this place!” since you don’t really come back there, except when doing hunts. Actually, to be honest, hunts were the best part of the game, since they did occasionally make you go back to old places. It really reinforces what, if you remember from waaaaaaay back in the FFI section, I called the main theme of all RPGs. Anyway. If you did some of this stuff, that would be great. Anyway.

FFXIII is a dramatically underappreciated game, but for reasons I can more or less understand. I don’t really bemoan the loss of towns. The story they had basically made towns impossible, so it would’ve just felt out of place. I do bemoan the linearity, but honestly, almost all FF games were really linear. As I said before, the main flaw with FFXIII’s linearity isn’t that it forces you to go to A, B, C, and D, in that order, but, not only can you NOT go back to A or B, but you never HAVE to. Those are usually the parts of the game that are the coolest, just for the feeling of knowing where everything is. Locke’s individual quest in FFVI was one of my favorites because it turned that town you knew into a dungeon, and then having to go through that cave backwards was just, mmmmm. Adding some of that revisitation would’ve greatly benefitted FFXIII—can you imagine going back through some of the old stuff, like the Sunleth Waterscape or that crystallized lake from the beginning of the game, only now you’re going backwards, the enemies are buffed versions of their old selves (easy with <s>palette swaps</s> texture changes! The game already does that too often, though) and the boss is some revamped version of its old self? A handful of moments like that would really add some much needed impact to the dungeons. I dig the crystarium system, but I think it went too far in the opposite direction from the license board. Everything’s too separated. I guess it had to be, with the way abilities work in that game, so that’s not a big issue.

But, once again, they decide to just build the entire battle system from scratch. It’s at least kind of built off of the ATB, since it charges, and you can only act when it’s fully charged… but it also loses something considering you only control one party member. The focus on changing jobs in battle also seems derived from FFX’s party switching or FFX-2’s… changing jobs in battle, and that’s a strength, especially considering that’s the best aspect of the game. See? Look at that, they’re building up from what they’ve done, and are making better systems. You don’t have to start over from scratch in every game, guys. That’s really not necessary. The problem is they don’t know how to do this while also fixing other things. Sure, we want a good story… but we don’t really want watching cutscenes to be anywhere near 50 or even 30 or 40 percent of the game. How about some gimmicky challenge dungeons like the magnet cave in FFIV? Since everything in FFXIII is pretty much the same, it all kind of blurs together, and really drives home the fact that it IS so linear. There’s not really anything else you can do as a player besides go forward, and forward, and then go forward some more. There’s never been an FF game like this. That's exactly the problem.

Some people complain about game series never changing. In a lot of cases, like Dragon Quest and Zelda, they have a pretty decent point, whether or not you think it’s necessarily a bad thing. The games don’t change. The style and core gameplay, the presentation and themes, they’re always about the same. But that’s not true in Final Fantasy. The problem in Final Fantasy, actually, is the exact opposite. The games change too much. They don’t actually build on each other and get better. They just create a bunch of disparate experiences, which are for the most part pretty good, but certainly seem to be in a low streak right now. Maybe if they actually looked where they came from once in awhile, they’d be able to get out of this slump. Whenever they do that, they make good stuff, but it’s all mired by other bad elements so the games still fail, since games aren’t individual things, but are actually collections of a bunch of different pieces. Don’t try to create a nostalgic story if you can’t back it up with the gameplay! And, for the indie developers out there, don’t blatantly create games for the purpose of nostalgia without backing it up with quality in other areas.

TL;DR: Square needs to, rather than pretending to be nostalgic or trying to be cool, go back and look at the elements that made individual Final Fantasy games good, then develop and combine them in unique ways. We’re talking both about storytelling elements, but more importantly, gameplay elements. If they can be cooler and use a more western-friendly style, maybe include some multiplayer elements, that would be even better.

Myodesopsia

How to Fix Final Fantasy

Placeholding Everything.