Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

https://wollay.com/2023/05/25/new-blog-and-new-project-cube-world-omega/

3 years later my man slithers back out of the woodwork

But FF wasn't king of turn-based genre nor it ever focus on that. FF was king of cinematic storytelling...at least in late 90s to early 2000.

If somebody ask me about king of turn based games I'd think about rpg games with a top down perspective and strong focus on strategy, or roguelike genre. So games like Divinity Original sin 2, baldur's gate 3, Fire emblem, Into the Breach or Slay the spire would be the kind of game that I would associate with turn-based focused gameplay.

If somebody ask me about cinematic story telling game I would think about cinematic action adventure games or interactive movies, with a more immersive gameplay. So games like The last of us, god of war, witcher 2 or Detroit become human would be games I would associate with cinematic narrative focused video game.

It's obvious that Yoshida's vision of cinematic narrative focused video game is closer to last of us and witcher 2, but less like Divinity Original sin or baldur's gate. You are the main pov character and you directly control everything about the pov character. Every other character aren't you, nor they are a "unit" of yours. Therefore if they want to focus on narrative it makes perfect sense to pick a one controllable character genre like action but not multi-character and management focused genre like turn-based.

To me Yoshida simply picked a direction that FF and him was good at, which is tell stories with cutscenes. At one point FF was more gameplay and strategy focused: FF3, FF5, FF12 were FF that didn't focus on story that much. But all of these titles sold worse than narrative focused FF like 6, 7, 8, 10. It's obvious that customers prefer narrative focused FF, so it makes perfect sense to push for that direction more with genre switch IMO. Rather than abandoning the genre, to me it seems like it is enhancing one aspect that FF and Yoshida is best at.

"King of turn-based" doesn't necessarily mean it's got the best turn-based gameplay system. It simply means that it's a turn-based game that delivers what's perceived as the best overall experience (hence its popularity), when compared to the rest of turn-based games (probably for reasons that are not solely predicated on gameplay, like the high production quality in terms of music, graphics, animations etc), especially Japanese ones (we think of JRPGs when we think of FF, so I don't think anyone is comparing FF to Baldur's Gate).


Also, keep in mind that, while I do agree that it shouldn't come as a surprise to people that FF16 is going full action (since their intent to slowly transition into action has been clear for years, perhaps since the first FF13 reveal in E3 2006), the only non turn-based mainline FF is FF15, a salvaged side FF13 game (that was received poorly to boot). FF has always been turn-based for 12 out of the 13 main offline titles. So it makes sense that, in a lot of fans' minds, FF is essentially a turn-based game. Denying the strong association of FF with turn-based isn't warranted.


That being said, I actually agree with you in that, what defines the FF experience is the strong presentation (art, story, characters design, world, music etc). But I don't think that their implementation of turn-based system is bad nor boring. I think it fit the style of these games. The battle aesthetics were great (transition from map to battle screen, backgrounds, animations, monster designs, music etc). Some people just enjoy seeing the different effects of magic. How Fire progresses from Fire to Fira to Firaga. Something we're surely gonna miss is cinematic abilities (with all their flare and silliness) like Squall's Blasting Zone, Zell's My Final Heave (and everything Zell does), and cool ***like Lionheart. Everything will have to happen fast now as to not break the pace of the game, since its focus is action (they will probably make up for that with cinematic cutscenes as parts of major battles).
I doubt anyone wants to spend their days running into random battles because they enjoy the battles per se.


So, all things considered: I don't think that the next FF should be turn-based. One has every right to prefer for it to be so, but FF changes with its leadership, and as long as it retains its strong presentation, it's still a good FF in my book.


And since I talked about this topic of FF16, here's my other cent:
I find it problematic to use DMC5's sales as a reference point to question the economic validity of the move to hire Ryota Suzuki, aka "the DMC5 guy", as the battle director for FF16.
First off, while he worked on DMC5, I believe he was one of many designers, not the lead battle designer. He also worked on many other stuff. Second, while the gameplay of FF16 seems to resemble DMC (at face value at least), I'm quite sure Yoshi-P didn't hire Suzuki while thinking of DMC. He is probably thinking (and actually stated) of blokcbuster games like God of War, Horizon etc. All those games had focus on action. So I think it's the wrong conclusion to jump to: that because they hired "the DMC5 guy" that the game's experience will suddenly be similar to DMC5. DMC5 is a completely different experience.


Anyways, I gotta stop here, so I'll end with this: as for SE's top management being idiots, that's probably true lol.

Sad news. Apparently D&D Honor Among Thieves supposedly didn't do so hot at the box office. The first movie to motivate me to hit up a theatre since Covid first started. Not to mention I thought it was a solid movie both on its own and as a D&D tie-in.

I mean, I'm not desperate for a sequel or anything. It's just unfortunate.

idk what you kids smoking. FF is the king of turn based in every sense.
As someone who actually played the first FF's on NES and famicom when they were released, there were no other turn based games at the time. If there were any they weren't known in Japan or the US. FF made turn-based gameplay a thing. there were a couple of script/explore games on the amiga and commodore 64, and one jungle game on the Atari but they weren't in anyway like FF.

EDIT: Points for trashing FFXIII bro.

I liked 13s art, music, characters but not playing it lol

I'll assume you were 10 at the time and forgive you.

Dragon Quest: May 27, 1986
Final Fantasy: December 18, 1987

FF is a better game, not gonna dispute that one, but DQ1 and DQ2 (January 26, 1987) were both released before FF1. DQ3 was released two months after FF1 (February 10, 1988)

I stand corrected.
Also this is a great historical look into Square and FF origins, Sakaguchi, Tanaka and Uematsu

Don't forget about Phantasy Star 1 & 2!

Y'know if anyone's pining for a good turn-based RPG, I've bought a couple recently.

Ruined King is a deeply complex game with a lot of video-gamey rules and layered mechanics. I find it really challenging, but never unfair. I'd even argue its pacing is on par with Final Fantasy X, which is one of my favourite parts of that game. And as a cherry on top, the roster includes two of my favourite League of Legends characters :P

Cassette Beasts is a lighter and much more chill game than Ruined King, but actually operates sort of similarly. They do a great job of informing the player how everything interacts so it never feels overwhelming or complicated, yet the mechanics are layered in such a way that every strategy is going to feel really personalized. They put a lot of effort in the little details.

Both games also have S-tier soundtracks.

mission acucklished

Whatchu mean Acucklished? Did you not do Odin Prime 13 times to come to the bitter realization that Aphmau is in fact not in love with Luzaf but in love with the player character? :o?

Nearly all of the the big name rpg games in 1980 were turn based because of system limitations AND DnD trpg(which was what video game rpg inspired from) was turn based.

Akalabeth (or Ultima 0) released in 1979 set the foundation of rpg gameplay formula.

Wizardry 1 and ultima 1 released in 1981 enhanced it and made this gameplay formula a thing.

DQ released in 1986 copied wizardry and ultima's formula and turned it into Japanese console style.

FF released in 1987 copied DQ and build more on top of that. Both DQ and FF established console style rpg at that time.

FF wasn't the game that started turn based rpg genre nor represent it, it was turn based because system limitations forced it. And everyone else kinda made rpg that way at that time.

FF didn't invent turn-based rpg gameplay but it brought change to rpg genre by introducing strong story telling and presentation. Then such style of focus became a thing a decade later.

Edit: quickly checking wiki dnd video game from 1975 was even earlier than Ultima. But it wasn't as well-known I guess.


Americans were the one who invented turn based role playing games, made Richard Garriott(creator of Ultima) rich and sent him to space by buying countless copies of Ultima, but they don't know about non-FF RPGs in 1986? :P Come on....I don't believe that lol.

Not known by console gamers =/= not known in the US. If you've never heard of non-Japanese rpg in the 80s, that is probably because console gamer community was more seperated from PC community back then.

Japanese definitely know wizardry, it it quite popular in Japan. Japanese even made their own version of it. they still make tons of DRPG today which was inspired by wizardry.

Personally I almost always separate aesthetics and polishness from game mechanics even though they both enhances playing experience. Battle animations belongs to aesthetics category, but turn based battles is all about effective choices variety and depth to me. In that case turn based FF had many questionable execution such as forced skill variety with elemental weakness or nerfing status ailments on bosses. But it is easy to ignore the flaws because the game was very polished.

I highly doubt this approach still works in 2023 anyways. I am pretty much immune to awesome special effects these days because there are too many games and movies spamming awesome special effects everywhere. FF's graphics had the "WOW" factor from 6-7, 7-8, 9-10 and possibly 13+v13 because of the improvement from the last generation. Then the "wow" factor diminished after ff15. What worked in the past just doesn't work anymore.

My biggest problem with turn based system in a narrative game is how they fundamentally place restrictions on each other. Like every character must have a defined party role for gameplay purpose. So the characters have to be created to serve that purpose even if the story doesn't need this character, which makes the story ultimately less interesting(or vice versa with the story first-gameplay second approach).


11, 12, 13(even the first one), 14 aren't turn based. Despite 13 has the name ATB it doesn't feel turn based. Older ATB kinda count as turn based because it feels more like ATB is being used to determine turn orders. In FF13 you directly control 1 character and there are no "wait" between turns. So I personally don't see it as turn based.

If you ask anyone what their relationship with D&D was in high school there are only 3 answers.

1, I played D&D.

2, I beat up kids who played D&D.

3, I payed no attention to / never knew about D&D.

#1 has the leas number of respondents.

Moral of the story: more people have a negative view of D&D than a positive one.

Proth wishes he could get Aphmau.

We discussing turn based RPGs?

Take a peek at Chained Echoes, wonderful game. One of my favorites, and just came out late last year.

Preferences.
Idk, I'm sure you came across people still asking for FF to be turn-based. It's not my intention to convince either party to like or dislike SE's approach to FF16's battle system /shrug

I agree on the "WOW" factor, but I won't readily dismiss their ability to come up with "WOW"ing cool ***if FF16 went turn-based. They still pull VERY cool ***in 14 (despite ARR being almost 10 years old).

Again, preferences.
FF8 is usually hated on, and one common criticism is "the lack of party roles", which is actually one of its strong points for me (in both narrative and gameplay).
To some a boon, to others a curse. /shrug


I specifically excluded online ones when I counted 13 main offline titles :)
As for 12 and 13, I think they're perceived (which is more important for the sake of this discussion than strict definitions) to be more turn-based than they're not, and they retain the "FF feel" of battle (the focus is on choosing appropriate commands rather than timing your button presses).
15 strayed too far from being turn-based by not being one at all, and 16 is following suit.

I beat up the kids that beat up the D&D kids.

I have no idea who he is, I just saw this picture a while ago and Blazed's comment reminded me of it and I wanted to share it lol

There are many things in video games that can be considered "preferences" but bad logic isn't one of them. Implement debuffs in the system then make it doesn't work for no reason isn't preference, it's bad logic. At least I've never heard of anybody who implemented it this way explained their logic behind such choice. What did they want to achieve with such logic exactly?

I know many people still ask FF to be turn-based, but I don't think most gamers can correctly pinpoint what they really find missing in a newer FF that they disliked.

For example, many people complained FF13 being "too Linear", but FF10 was also pretty linear and yet nobody complained about it.....why is linear being acceptable in one game but not another? Most gamers can't pinpoint the real reason.

Some people said they prefer party based because it has a sense of companions. But can't this be achieved in action game with companions characters and better writing? Or like you said you like cool special effects, can't this be achieved in action games with slight change in mechanics?

Like I said in another post. Everyone that played FF in the 90s enjoyed the "feel" at that time. They don't find it in newer FFs, so they asked for turn based FF to have such "feel" back. It's strictly feeling based, not completely mechanics based. Some of the feels can't be accomplished with a different genre but some can. But everyone will just say "I want turn based FF back!" regardless of the feels that they seek.

Even if FF goes back to turn based I highly doubt the same feel can be replicated 100% anyways. Yoshida's team isn't Sakaguchi, their style is different as creators. and player's mindset has changed under different circumstances. Either way FF will change because times change, that's the nature of any entertainment products with multiple sequels.


FF8 character has party roles, it's defined by limit breaks and players decisions on what magic to equip.

The better example of SE trying to break party role for the story is FF7, in that game SE killed a character in the party. Story wise it was great, gameplay wise it sucked though. So SE stopped doing that in subsequent games. Which is unfortunate: That character being killed was one of the most iconic story moment in all of FF.

I just figured that if the game isn't party based then the writer can do more to their characters. Like having a character that is good at politics but bad at combat, but still has equal weight as every other companions. Or have multistep companions betray MC and leave but never really affect gameplay that much.

Here’s a really cool video that addresses why people don’t complain about ffx’s linearity but they do about ffxiii’s

design doc ffx vs ffxiii

Love the design doc series in general

Edit: key reason is organic world building vs data log. There’s more to it than that.

Ooof It's two god damn hours though. Even at 2x that's a lot.
Literally a walkthrough the entire game.

FFX's linearity was only its story, but it still gave freedom with everything else. I like when games allow you to grind as much as you want. Do you choose to save time and only level to the bare minimum for the next boss, or grind until monsters barely even give EXP anymore so the next boss is a bit easier? Do you do some side-quests, do some shopping, upgrade your gear? Do you level up just a couple of characters or your whole roster? You saw a treasure chest that you can't reach - do you try to figure out how to get it?

FFXIII isn't just linear by story. The entire game is a hallway. You have a fixed amount of encounters between bosses so you're always at the correct level to fight it. And even if you figure out a way to grind, it caps your level at every step anyway. Rarely are you ever given the ability to even talk to NPCs, and all of the shops are available at the save point. There's no exploration, and backtracking is made impossible by the way the game handles its set pieces (i.e. by cutscene transitioning the party by crashing a vehicle or falling from a great height).

And I could go on. Final Fantasy XIII isn't just my least-favourite Final Fantasy game, I think it genuinely altered my brain chemistry. It's the first and only time I could ever say I really, really hated a video game. I felt cheated, and it made me angry.