We give Square Enix some friendly tips for keeping the Fantasy alive.
CHOICE
Three paths are better than one.
This is the big one, and you’ll notice that it pops up a lot in this discussion. We live in an era of choice. We’re used to creating our own avatars in video games and choose how they develop. We spend hours perfecting that loadout of weapons so that our multiplayer experience is tailored just so. Heck, we don’t even let television networks dictate when we watch our favorite shows, thanks to DVRs and streaming services. We want what we want, when we want it, and we want to feel a sense of control over it. This thinking flies in the face of the design sensibilities of recent Final Fantasy games, however—it’s an RPG series that delights in its beauty as it funnels players down a linear track.
There a multitude of ways that choice can be injected into Final Fantasy. Some of these are ideas that are new to the series, while others are things that have appeared before but have gone away. If there’s anything to be learned from the seventh generation of consoles, it’s that players enjoy having a lot of choices—everything from choosing between good and evil to tailoring the options to their liking.
Party development is a great way to allow players choices throughout the game. I think it would be great to get back to having a larger cast of characters. Final Fantasy IV and VI each had huge rosters, which gave players a lot of variety in terms of combat and storytelling. Final Fantasy VI and VII had “hidden” characters as well, who could be missed entirely by less invested players.
Being able to interact with the party members through dialogue is also a great way to let players choose how much story they want. This was dabbled in with Final Fantasy IX, which featured optional vignettes with party members at key moments. Taking things one step further and allowing actual interaction with party members outside of cutscenes would give players a chance to connect with their characters on a deeper level, and possibly lead to optional quests and content. Final Fantasy XIII-2 experimented with this feature, but it was kind of clunky and rarely led to any meaningful dialogue.
Letting players choose how to level their characters is a huge addition that Final Fantasy has experimented with in FF X, XII, and XIII, but could be fleshed out even more. I’ve always loved the job system whenever it shows up, but all too often the characters in Final Fantasy end up being blank slates without a lot of combat personality. I’d love to see a blend of the older job system integrated with each party member having specialized abilities, adding more strategy to the way players outfit their group. Instead of something like the Sphere Grid or Crystarium which featured linear paths to character growth, I’d like to see a skill tree with ability points that need to be allocated. This is a more Western approach to RPG progression, but it bears mentioning that the original Final Fantasy took a lot of inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, so this would simply be a return to form.
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