Fantasy Fighting Preview: Or…Final Fantasy XI Offline?
When we last covered the next installment of the Final Fantasy franchise, much information was still out in the open. We knew about the storyline, the lead characters, and the Judges that are set to be the main enemies of the game (even though in FF tradition the real final enemy will be someone totally different, most likely). We knew the game would be heavily influenced by the Final Fantasy XI engine with free-roaming worlds, fully adjustable camera. What we didn’t know, however, was exactly how the battles would be fought in this world, with this story, with these characters. Since E3 though, we’ve all been aware of the unique Final Fantasy XII battle system that takes snippets of old-school FF games, Final Fantasy XI, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – a risky proposition with a franchise that is always under a critical eye from fans and critics alike. Sadly, the release of FFXII keeps slipping; once a hopeful Fall 2004 release, now it’s looking like it won’t be until Fall 2005 before it’s finally in our hands. Until then, let’s spend some time with how the main aspect of the game will play out – the battles.
Final Fantasy XII focuses greatly on ADB, or Active Dimension Battle. In basic terms, ADB is basically the ATB somewhere mixed in a real-time situation. There’s no random battles, and there’s not even any ‘glass breaking’ when you shift into a fight like other games in this genre, like Star Ocean 3 or Tales of Symphonia. Instead, all enemies are on the screen, and you can engage them or wander off, in the style of Final Fantasy XI – though it’s really not known if you’ll have enemies that ‘go aggro’ as the FFXI lingo goes, meaning you’ll be chased around forever until you either die or find a safe zone. Anyway, fans of Final Fantasy XI will be right at home, and with the chances of enemies randomly spawning, you’ll never have a tough time finding combat. For traditionalists, this change may be jarring – it may be made even worse by a lack of ‘Victory Fanfare’ theme at the end of a fight (though this too may be FFXI-esque and the familiar theme plays when you level up).
That’s the short of it – the long of it is that the battle system is complex and yet not very difficult at the same time. Within the ADB lies ATB, and of course, the AI. The ATB is reversed this time around though – you set an attack, or whatever, and when the bar is full, the action is executed, in similar fashion to the delay when using items or special moves in Final Fantasy X-2. This allows, thankfully, for you to quickly swap characters and set their moves before they do anything if you see fit. If you don’t, the AI will do something on their own, hopefully intelligently. You can adjust their actions via something that was called ‘gambits’ at E3, which is more like a script determining their actions. Certainly this hopefully will turn out well, because if the AI is bad for CPU-controlled characters, things will be messy. There’s still hope Square will use a KOTOR-like ability to pause and set actions for characters a few turns ahead, but thus far that’s merely a rumored addition; unsurprising since Square Enix has been very secretive about much of FFXII since it was playable (in English, no less) at E3.
Though so far there’s six characters in Final Fantasy XII, you can only use three in a battle; however this is enhanced a bit by the ability to swap out party members on the fly out of battle, and the unique system where the game is not over until all 6 characters are KO’d. That’s right; if your main three characters perish, the final three can engage the enemy and clean up the mess. This also helps when certain enemies require different strategy, such as using Fran the archer as your long-distance attacker, Ashe as the magic user, etc. This concept presents two unique viewpoints on the challenge of FFXII – will the game be too difficult since you can go through your entire party before dying, or will it be too easy because of the same thing? Perhaps SE will have some tricks up their sleeve to create a balance.
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