Final Fantasy

Which Final Fantasy? I don't like any of them.

Final Fantasy is well known and well-regarded. It is a Japanese style RPG. The characters of Final Fantasy are recognisable, ‘beloved’ and highly marketable. However, the single-player of final fantasy is banal to the point of excruciating boredom. Commands are issued to your four characters by choosing one of four buttons at the start of each round of combat: “Fight”, “Magic”, “Item” and “Run”. ‘So,’ you may say, ‘you have four options to use in each round. That’s a decent number of options for a menu system first developed in 1987!’ You might say that AND IF YOU DID YOU WOULD BE WRONG. For, as you may be well aware, Final Fantasy has a class-based system throughout most of its incarnations.

An ‘optimal’ party consists of a Fighter, a Black Mage, a White Mage and an X (where X is ‘anything that isn’t black belt’). A fighter will always be attacking. A black mage will always use magic. A white mage will use magic, or, in an emergency only, a one-use Phoenix Down to resurrect a fallen comrade. The ‘X’ will do only one of those things (if X is the black belt, that thing will be ‘dying, followed by wasting a phoenix down’. Oh, Black Belt, is there any joke you can’t be the butt of?). To summarise – the optimal use of each character is limited to ONE choice out of ‘fight’, ‘magic’, or ‘item’. It is rarely a good idea to use ‘item’ outside of boss battles, specifically the last and most difficult. Lastly, there is the run command, equally useful for all characters. The only caveat to that statement is that if you want to run away, you’re generally running from a powerful monster. The more powerful the monster, the less likely you are to be able to escape. Thus, one should regard the interface as a sort of spiteful illusion: you have one button for each character.

To top it off, each character needs to be as close to the maximum level as possible (a modest cap of ‘level 99’ seems to be the standard) to have a decent chance of survival against the final boss, or the ‘bonus boss’ that follows it. So that’s one button to press, for 99 levels, at which point you mix things up a bit with careful use of items and then you win. The importance of choice and emergent play is not held in very high regard at Square-Enix, I fear.