So I’ve been replaying Final Fantasy XIII. First it was as a joke (torture myself for the Extra Life marathon), but then it was because I was honestly enjoying the unique battle system that the game has to offer. FFXIII’s battle system offers a fun evolution of the earlier Final Fantasy games’ ATB battle system.

However, Square-Enix made a major mistake with the combat – they didn’t take everything to its logical conclusion.

Final Fantasy XIII’s combat is all about switching your party’s AI via class changes. There are 6 classes, each of which has a very definite role to play. There’s a tank class, a healer class, a debuff/ailment class, and a buff class. Finally, there are two classes for direct damage – one boosts the enemies’ damage multipliers and the other class deals massive damage once those multipliers are up.

Each of these 6 classes have a distinct role to the point where the player can feel largely useless controlling someone manually since the AI is quicker (no need to fumble through menus) and has few choices to make since once a class is chosen, what you should do with that class is usually obvious. The key is deciding which classes to use and when to switch them, not on how to use them.

What Square-Enix should have done is removed the whole concept of a main character & manually entering commands all together, in favor of a greater focus on controlling the entire party in real-time. In short, get rid of the micro-management and expand on the macro-management.

Here’s what I would do.

Change to a 4-6 person party (with less micro-managing, we’re free to add complexity elsewhere with a larger party).

Several menus adjacent to each other, one for each character. Each menu has a list of all available classes for that character. By moving up & down, you change the current class (no need to press a button), while left & right allow you to switch between characters. This would allow for quick control of the entire party’s AI at all times without the need to limit yourself to a handful of preset layouts.

L1/R1 move the enemy cursor between enemies, determining which enemy will be the focus of the party’s attacks.

L2/R2 move the player cursor between your characters, determining which character is currently the focus of the party’s buffs, heals, and support.

Face buttons are assigned to up to 4 equipped summoned monsters which can attack if they have enough energy. Tap the button for a regular summon attack, hold it for charged attacks (slower, more powerful, more expensive). Unlike traditional FF games, summon attacks do not pause the game so the player will be encouraged to use them to create combos with the actions of the party.

This system would focus more on the strengths of the current FFXIII battle system, while increasing the scope (larger parties, more enemies) and complexity (more classes & combinations). Finally, the summon attack system helps to make the player feel involved and compensates for the lack of micromanagement over individual party members.

Thoughts?

10 Responses

  1. I wasn’t a particular fan of FFXIII, but I think your suggestions rob it’s mechanics of all the elegance that were it’s only real strength. I agree with the sentiment behind them, but I think my instincts would lead in a slightly different direction.

    Selecting commands was absolutely pointless (well, barring a few cases where applying a specific buff would help because the AI was terrible at that, or you needed to toss a Phoenix Down, but), and I think that even having the option made the game less fun, I can agree. Mashing A to select autobattle was annoying. The removal of it is perfectly fine, and opens up room for more synergistic elements.

    Increasing the party size I’m pretty neutral on. It’s fairly… unrelated to manual control: the original game could have easily had all six characters on the field at once (ignoring technical limitations, perhaps), but it would cause quite a lot to be going on at once (personally I prefer a lower ideal point here), and—  well, it kind of breaks the choice of the paradigm shifts? Especially if combined with your idea of individually selecting them. I’d find it really surprising if one character /ever/ left Medic, and another would be dedicated to swapping between Synergist and Saboteur as whichever timers ran out. The paradigm shift system was effective because each one was was a different choice: Com/Rav/Med was uniformly useful, sure, but sacrificing the chain boost and damage from Com/Rav/Rav to get healing was a huge difference. (Though the lack of any penalty for going /slowly/ was a major problem – the Zeboyd time-scaling mechanic would really have changed the game.)

    I was going to comment on the UI issues of navigating a grid of classes where your cursor didn’t stay in vertical alignment when you hit left/right, but then I realized you could set it up as a wheel and keep the current role in the center, so that works.

    Mapping the face buttons to arbitrary unrelated-to-anything else Summon attacks seems really out of place. I can see why you’d do that – you need /something/ to engage the player – but doing that makes them your direct agency on the game. Very quickly I can imagine it feeling like you’re actually playing the summons and there are a bunch of random AI helpers (that, given mechanics, would be /frustratingly/ more effective) running around. I think the most intuitive use for them would be executing each character’s current ATB stock. That allows the unique ATB segment bar to stay extant (do you mash the button as soon as you have a single attack, store a three hit combo, six-point limit break?), actually take advantage of hitstun and managing the chain gauge, and works well in keeping a solid rhythmic focus of the game alongside swapping paradigms. I guess it sort of turns things into a Valkyrie Profile rip off, but is that really a /bad thing/?

    I guess you don’t have much to do with the analog stick under my ideas, though. There’s probably enough room for a menu of some kind (Items, Summons/Whatever else that TP gauge was used for?, selecting a main target).

    Once again I’ve rambled a lot and it’s not well organized, but it was fun! Hopefully I’ve said something worth reading?

  2. I admit, it’s an intriguing idea. I wonder if they kept a little main character atb style control just out of fear of being TOO different from previous FF games, even though that’s kinda the point with FF13. I wouldn’t mind the game as much with this style of combat, as it could be more fast paced and offer an alternative to the gimmicky one off summons of FF13. Playing through Shining in the Darkness right now makes me realize that really, a straight up hallway doesn’t have to be a bad idea for a game…but it needs twists, turns, it needs to not play itself. So, even with the new idea for a battle system, I think FF13 would still be a little crippled by the story, characters, and overtly linear design. It would be a better game, but I still probably wouldn’t like it.

  3. I think it sounds fun for a game that is already doing that. I wouldn’t want it to become a common place rpg combat style, but for the FF 13 series, it sounds pretty fun. I guess for me, I enjoy micro managing more than macro managing. Its one reason I really enjoyed FF 12 because I could literally change characters as needed, put one person to stealing until I get what I want and then burning enemies, and so on. I would want to play your combat style though. It sounds interesting and I have a feeling if I actually played it my thoughts on the matter would change drastically.

  4. I think this could work, but only if it also allowed for FFXII’s Gambit system to be used in conjunction. Many times I felt the AI was not the best, and while most classes were fine, the classes that focused on buffing and debuffing could almost never be left to their own devices reliably.

  5. I love the idea. Expand the party and scale while cutting back individual commands, but still expand command to every party member. This could be utilized really well in a war setting, fantasy or otherwise. Great thoughts as always!

  6. I found a lot more enjoyment in the battle system once I learned to let go and just press Auto-Battle all of the time. Then, switching to macro-management, it was much more enjoyable. This presented me with the problem of just constantly pressing X in order to select Auto-Battle every time it was available, which isn’t all that fun or engaging.

    I think your ideas are excellent, and I really like the ability to change the focus of attacks and healing with the shoulder buttons. However, the one issue I see is that you don’t have the quick shifts provided by the Paradigm Shift system. In your system, if I want to go with a pattern where I use Tri-Disaster (3 x Ravager) until the enemy is staggered, and then switch to Cerberus (3 x Commando), I would have to do that manually. While staggered, the chain gauge lowers pretty quickly, so the timing is really important. As another example, my entire party might’ve just been hit by an area of effect attack, and I need to quickly shift to Sentinels and Medics in order to keep myself alive. This problem is exacerbated since you propose having 4-6 party members, so now I need to change the roles of all of them in a limited window of time.

    If you could find a way to incorporate a small number of preset paradigms into the system, so that you can quickly change all of the roles at once, I think that would fix this last issue. That lets you do real-time role tweaks in the middle of the fight, and then change everyone to your preselected roles when the timing is really important. Perhaps you could sacrifice one of the summons to make one of the face buttons, perhaps Triangle, the paradigm selection menu?

  7. I like this a lot. it gives you a lot more control of the party and gets rid of things that to me caused the most dislike of the system. A not having the whole system open from the start. B the idea if the leader dies its game over.

    I think 4 member system would work best, this still gives meaning to having different characters active for different fights. question i have is would you change the Crystarium? I felt that system as well was very much on rails.

  8. Seems like an improvement. I didn’t really mind it as it was but I agree that they should have either gone more traditional, or really, fully committed to the design principles of their system.

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