Final Fantasy was once a game in thrall to tradition; in the past 20 years, it has become an on-going revolution. Final Fantasy 9 was the last mainline instalment to make use of the Active Time Battle system, which had carried Square’s flagship series for no less than six games across two console generations. Since then, no numbered Final Fantasy has given us the same battle system twice. Each entry has been an experiment, obliged by changing audience expectations and company dynamics such as the promotion or loss of key staff. All have sought to stand apart, but much as Active Time Battle isn’t a clean departure from the turn-based systems that precede it, so most Final Fantasies circle back to ATB in some way, striving to rebottle the lightning.
We see this, of course, in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, an exquisite but flawed attempt to blend the rhythms of the old FF7 battle system with the action movie choreography that has long hypnotised the likes of Motomu Toriyama, FF7R’s co-director. Where battle in Final Fantasy on PS1 resembles a quaint theatre production, with characters lining up against painted backdrops (FF9’s intro actually concludes with a brawl on-stage), battle in FF7R is a sprawling, hyperactive mess of flying limbs and blades, streaking projectiles and screen-whiting detonations.
A truly comprehensive overview of Final Fantasy’s battle systems would take several books. In this piece I explore a particular aspect – time. Among the things I neglect is the impact of systems and situations outside combat, such as the fatigue too often created by the old random battles. How characters improve obviously has a huge impact on how you handle them in the fray – in FF2, characters enhanced their skills by using appropriate weapons, while in FF8, you’d draw magic from enemies to power up character stats. I also don’t talk about the influence of Final Fantasy’s stablemates, notably Chrono Trigger, which offered its own interpretation of ATB, and Dragon Quest, which has undergone evolutions of its own, but generally cleaves closer to the systems and spirit of 90s RPGs.
Open a menu, however, and you can plunge the proceedings into slow motion, which is both a tactical aid and a window back through history upon the stately pantomimes of Final Fantasies gone by. The gorgeously dragged-out motions of the remake’s cast echo the long-winded combat animations that gave Final Fantasy on PS1 so much of its charm – the camera swooping around the active character as they channel magic or prepare to swing. In the remake’s “Classic” mode, your involvement is restricted to that window of slow-mo – outside of it, characters move and act by themselves. FF7R’s curious hybrid approach isn’t, for me, a patch on the old school, but I’ve always been fascinated by Square Enix’s attempts to outgrow the battle systems of the classic games without losing touch with them entirely. Specifically, I’m fascinated by the way all these implementations of combat serve as reworkings of the concept of time.
Let’s step away from Final Fantasy for a second and think about what time is, and how our understanding of it has changed in the past few hundred years. According to the classical Newtonian worldview that prevailed up till around the 19th century, time is a constant, linear progression that sweeps everything else along with it, a river flowing from past through present into future. Today, we know that time is far more nebulous, at once entwined with space such that larger masses actually slow down time nearby, and at least partly the product of our brains, external methods of timekeeping and various social conventions. We might revert to the linear notion of time in everyday speech for convenience’s sake – I’ve done so in this very paragraph. But we understand that time is to some degree a fiction, continually invented by those ostensibly “caught in its flow”, and in particular by artists such as the creators of videogames.
Take the turn-based battle system used by the original Final Fantasy, way back in 1987. Its modelling of time may only reflect the computing capability of its era, but there’s something magical about it, something later games have lost. A fundamental point about turn-based battle is that time isn’t measured in seconds, but actions. Time does not simply pass during such clashes; rather, it passes when a character does something. There is no steady onward movement in the Newtonian sense – your heroes and their opponents must make choices in order for the present to become past. Time is, in fact, a collaboration between these warring parties, necessarily predicated on an exchange of blows.
The player, naturally, sits outside this representation of time, which makes combat both less and, in a way, more overwhelming. It means that we’re able to lean back and consider our strategies, however close-fought the encounter. But it also allows us to spend eternities inside the instant before a killing blow, a miraculous escape. Towards the end of a gruelling boss fight, when both your tank and your healer character are running on fumes, time feels less like being swept along by a river as hopping between boulders above a roaring waterfall. These intervals are intriguingly reminiscent of accounts of near-death experiences, where survivors talk about time “slowing down”. When you’re conscious of danger, your amygdala – a part of the brain that processes emotions and some aspects of recollection – becomes more active, layering up additional memories as though stacking attack commands. Thus, in hindsight you might feel as though your brain had gone into overdrive, packing more detail into every second.