The Illusion of Choice in Final Fantasy XII

There were a few different topics that I wanted to talk about regarding Final Fantasy XII. Party limitations and the license board were two major ones. When I sat down and really thought about each one, though, I realized that they were all just masked examples of the same thing. They were all illusions, making it look like you have a choice in how the game progresses, but all really guiding you down a surprisingly narrow track.

Recently I asked a question on Gaming.SE regarding how the damage calculation works in the game. I was treated to this gem of a quote in the comment of the accepted answer:

"I do think there's significance [in weapon choice], but not enough to force you to confine any one character to any specific weapon class. The game's not hard enough nor particular enough for it to affect the experience. Just do whatever you want."

What it boils down to is that the differences between the classes of weapons are mostly irrelevant. You have the choice of using whatever weapon you want, but in reality, all the damage equations and statistics just don't matter. You can make a decision, but it doesn't affect anything. That is the running theme in Final Fantasy XII. The game is still fun, but it's not open. Final Fantasy XIII was fun too, and that game is like watching a movie.

To get to the rest of the illusion, let's consider the character progression mechanic. First of all, there are six playable characters in the game, and you can have up to three of them active for combat at any time. Right away, you are given the choice of which character to use. But that seems mostly irrelevant right off the bat. They have their own unique stats, sure, but any of them can be built to perform any function, if that's what you want. Since every character can learn every ability available in the game, whatever differences they start with at first are quickly washed away as they all become mostly the same with maybe some subtle differences, such as what weapon they are wielding. Which, as we already addressed, is a non-choice in the first place.

Ah, but why not specialize, you ask. Why not have one character learn all the healing and status magic, and have another character learn all the black magic, and another character focus on using the best weapon? The answer is because you can have all the characters do all those things. The license board system looks like a giant grid with countless options for advancement in any direction you want. And if the license board was the only limiting factor, that would be completely true. You could focus some characters in one thing and other characters in another thing.

But the license board is not the only limiting factor. Just because you unlock a license to be able to cast Fira doesn't mean you can cast Fira right then and there. You still have to buy Fira from a shop. And the shops don't stock Fira right from the get-go; you have to make plot progress so the shops open up and sell higher quality spells and gear to you. It's not just true with Fira, it's true with weapons, armor, magic, technicks, and every other thing in the game that could get progressively better. The license system is merely a way to let you choose what to unlock first, not the let you choose between long-term character development options.

By the time you get to a new area with new gear and magic to buy, you have already acquired enough licenses so everyone in your party can use everything you have available now. Everyone in my party can heal, everyone in my party can use black magic to take advantage of an enemy's weakness, and everyone in my party can use basic attacks to deal adequate damage. Switching out characters is a mechanic primarily used if I don't have time to heal to get someone with a fresh HP bar in the fray, not as a strategic switch of active abilities to take advantage of a tactical weakness.

The world around Rabanastre, the starting city, seems enormous until you start exploring it. There are seemingly countless exits and places to visit, but you quickly realize that all of them are blocked off. Except one. The world looks huge, and there seem to be tons of places that I will eventually get to visit, but for now, I appear to be on a guided track, with only one thing to do and one way to do it.

That's not a bad thing. It's standard fare, expected, and embraced. I am still enjoying the game. It's just a little bit of a let down that I can't grind up and overpower my enemies quite as well as I can in other RPGs.

Dramatic Effect

I am prone to overreaction due to frustration. In fact, I don't take frustration very well at all. It's probably a big reason why I'm so picky when it comes to game design. Games that provide more frustration than enjoyment are bad, and games that provide more enjoyment than frustration are good.

The tricky part comes in because without challenge, there can be no enjoyment. If the game hands you every victory, you feel cheated. You didn't earn anything; you just had it delivered to you on a silver platter. But with challenge also comes frustration. Different players have different levels of tolerance for frustration. Those with high tolerance tend to like extremely difficult games, and those with low tolerance (like me) tend to like fairly forgiving games.

That's not to say that I don't like challenge at all. I just don't find the need to repeat portions of a game over and over only to get killed slightly further on each repetition, until I make it to the next checkpoint. I want a solid, steady pace, with regular progression and not too much mental trauma. The topic of challenge vs. frustration could be enough for its own full article, but I'll stop there. That's not the point of this article.

Since I'm so prone to frustration, and especially overreacting because of frustration, I tend to put games down in disgust fairly often. Sometimes I come back, and sometimes I don't. When I'm faced with "bullshit", as I so elegantly put it in my first article, I turn the game off and give myself time to cool down. I tend to rant in the meanwhile, and claim ridiculous things like "I'm never playing that game again, just based on the principle."

I have picked Final Fantasy XII back up, and enjoyed it a medium amount (it's no revolution, but it's entertaining enough). I had a friend assure me that in his playthrough of the game, he never experienced what happened to me. Since then, I've had the same thing happen to me again, and I turned the game off again at that point in disgust. I turned the game off a third time in disgust, but that was at my own stupid mistake, so I can't blame the game design for that.

So while I did go back on my word and pick up Final Fantasy XII and have fun with it, I do not retract my game design points from that first post. The mechanic they used (in at least two places, so I have to assume it could be around any corner) is terrible game design. It just so happens that other parts of the game are fun enough to balance out somewhere above the "worth playing" cutoff.

The main point of this article, after all that rambling, is this. Just because one example might be an overreaction or even blatantly incorrect, it doesn't disprove the underlying concept of the article. If you happen to think blue shells in Mario Kart are not a comeback mechanic, that doesn't prove that comeback mechanics aren't stupid. Comeback mechanics may or may not be stupid, but that specific argument just doesn't work.

I'm not here to argue the minutiae of my examples. Some examples may be better than others, but remember that these are primarily opinion pieces. I'm open to changing my opinions, and I tend to be dramatic for the sake of proving a point, but please do not attack a straw man.

Final Fantasy XII

I am a year or five late to the party with this one, but I finally had my chance to play Final Fantasy XII last night. This game was so bad that I was inspired to create a blog just to discuss exactly what this game did to invoke my ire. I will continue to add posts to this blog, as I have been meaning to make a blog for a while, but this game really gave me no choice but to get off my lazy ass and really get on with it.

For those of you tired of my rambling and just waiting for me to get to the point, here it is. I will not be playing Final Fantasy XII again because it committed the greatest sin that a game developer could allow: bullshit.

But let's take a step back. I don't want to dive face first right into the bullshit. And I mean that both literally and figuratively. Instead, let's start by telling a story.

This is the story of a gamer who has heard terrible, terrible things about the combat system in the only game in one of his favorite franchises that he has not yet played. And no, Final Fantasy XI does not count as a Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy XII was the only real full-on single player epic Final Fantasy game that I had not yet touched.

I was critical of the combat system, because that was the main thing I heard people griping about. It's slow, sure, but this was the beginning of the game, and I only had one party member. Final Fantasy VII's combat system was slow too, when all I had to work with was Cloud and his basic attacks. At least in VII I got to actually tell him to attack each time instead of saying it once and juggling my controller while I waited for the battle to be over. But once I got more party members, I was sure that it would improve.

I was introduced to the licensing system, whereby you have to not only buy new weapons but buy the privilege of using them, each using separate currencies. It seemed a little odd, but what new Final Fantasy game doesn't introduce an odd new leveling system? Again, I was able to work with this. This game still had the potential to be fun.

After a few hours of gameplay, I found myself in the Giza Plains, where I was quickly introduced to many new classes of enemies. Hyenas and rabbits went down quickly and without any danger. Big owl/bear things were slightly more troublesome, but with two characters in my party now, healing between battles was a breeze. There was one enemy (who I would affectionately have referred to as "legs" had I any affection for this game) that posed a bit of a challenge, but really didn't give me too much trouble.

Put simply, at this point, I had been lulled into a sense of security. The game design so far had been leisurely and casual. When I saw another new class of enemy off in the distance (to the south, even, with my current quest being the vague "go south"), I did not think twice before engaging.  I ran up and stabbed him with my sword...and his health bar did not move even a single pixel.

That's fine, I thought. I'd just run away. I turned and started running, holding the "flee" button. Then I died. From full health, in a single, devastating blow, I was reduced to a corpse. The game prompted me to change party leaders, but that hardly helped, since my other character died immediately thereafter.

Teaching lessons to the players in video games is part of good game design. The player will make mistakes, and it is the game designer's job that early in the game, those are corrected and the player is able to carry on with improved knowledge. The problem is, I didn't make a mistake.

At no point in the game did the designers give any indication that such a thing could occur. Even after immediately realizing the battle was unwinnable, there was no chance to escape. It erased more than a half hour of progress since my last save point. I'm the kind of gamer who will save every time I walk past a save point, even if I just saved, because losing progress in this kind of game is akin to being punched directly in the balls.

There are other games where it is okay to lose your progress. In The Witcher 2 (another game I didn't finish but for entirely different reasons), every time I lost a battle, I learned something about the enemy that would help me next time. My character progress was set back minutes at the most, and my player skill had increased. These battles were well-designed because they increased my personal versatility and losing them helped me stand a better chance of winning them next time. This is very different from the experience I had with Final Fantasy XII. I lost a half hour of progress, my character stats and accumulations were lost, and I was no better off as a player than I was beforehand. There was no design advantage to putting an enemy that difficult in that location. It was purely frustrating, with absolutely no benefits.

It was bullshit.

I have a lot of games to play, and not a lot of time to play them. If a game can be this unforgiving and poorly designed early on, I don't want anything more to do with it. Final Fantasy XII is now tied for last place on the list of Final Fantasy games I've played, with Final Fantasy II (Japanese numbers; no I'm not talking about your precious Final Fantasy IV), which did the same thing to me ten years ago.