Level Up! Seize the Experience!

Most of my Kombo colleagues are on Twitter, and I’ve gotten to know one in particular through our Final Fantasy obsessions. Okay, so mine is a mostly new obsession, but that’s not the point.  Today we had a rather interesting discussion on the evolution of turn-based combat, and I got a nice history and terminology lesson.

It started when I mentioned that I received Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy III (DS port) for Valentine’s Day, so I better really get cracking on finishing Final Fantasy VII and X. Nick said those were his top two favorite FF games. Even though FFVII is his favorite, FFX is the only FF game where he liked both the combat and the leveling up systems. FFX sports Conditional Turn-Based combat and a sphere system for leveling up and learning new abilities. I think he liked FFVII’s story better, and that’s why he ranks it higher, but he really doesn’t like the ATB system. I had to ask for a definition.

So he taught me that ATB stands for “Active Time Battle,” and it means that partymembers and enemies have to wait to take their turns when the ATB gauge is full. Players can issue commands to the party before the gauge is full, but no one will do anything until that moment. At least now I know what it’s called. So far I’ve been calling it a complete waste of time.

At the same time, it beats Lost Odyssey’s method of commanding all your partymembers at the very beginning of your party’s turn (although your partymembers’ turns may be interlaced with the enemy’s turns) before you can even see what your attacks will even do. When an enemy is about dead, I really dislike telling everybody to do some attack or defense before anyone can do anything when only one attack will do. It’s also a complete waste of time, but apparently it has a real name too: Traditional Turn-Based Battle.

So while learning about ATB, I learned that FFX was the first game to introduce CTB. Everyone actually takes a turn, so you can take as much or little time as you want ordering your partymember, and the choices you and the enemy makes in battle influences the order of future turns.  That explains why I felt so much more relaxed during FFX battles. FFVII makes me so antsy, especially when I’m scrolling through my item list for that damn Turbo Ether and the enemy’s gauge is full. He’s going to go again, because he doesn’t need to scroll through his item list. He has no items to scroll through. He just wants to kick my blonde, spikey-headed ass. At the same time, the battle bores me because more often than not, we’re all sitting around waiting for gauges to fill when I’ve already doled out commands.

So yay for me, I’ve learned something new so I can sound more like I know what I’m talking about. It helps with credentials a little.

While learning all of this terminology, guide writer Dan Birlew bursts in to say, “I HATE those kind of battle systems. Except in Final Fantasy I, where the system was balanced enough that it worked.” However, I’m not sure what system he was talking about. ATB? CTB? Traditional? All turn-based combat? He hasn’t written me back to clear it up. 

Trackback URI | Comments RSS