Final Fantasy Pet Peeves

This post is more a whine session than anything else but I need to get a couple things off my chest. These are issues in Final Fantasy IV but also in other games in the series as well so it's not just from this game. As a status update, I'm currently on my way out of the Sealed Cavern (or whatever it's called) after fighting the EvilWall.

You know you have it rough when even the walls try to kill you

My first issue is with the Exit spell. I know this has been an issue in each game since at least two. I honestly don't recall the Exit spell being in Final Fantasy but it may have been. Due to the way the story progressed in I though, I don't think this would ever have come up.

Basically, the spell brings you back outside of whatever dungeon you happen to be in when you use it. Sort of a fast escape spell so that you don't find yourself in a no win situation. II, III and IV have all had this spell. Now, obviously, in certain cases, dungeons will have story elements as you come out of the dungeon which would potentially be circumvented by using the Exit spell. To prevent this, the developers simply disable the spell in these cases.

Too bad this seems to be all the damn time! Why give us a spell that we can only use some of the time and then just disable the rest of the time? I understand not wanting players to glitch past a story trigger, that would suck but why not let us at least teleport to the room the story element happens in? I'm assuming their thought process was to avoid spoiling any story element that happens since obviously, if we were taken to a specific room instead of taken out of the dungeon, we would know something was up. But don't we already know something's up since the spell failed? As soon as I realize nothing happened, I know that something's going to happen at the entrance of the dungeon anyway!

No, instead, they thought it would be fun to make you walk all the way back through the dungeon you just trudged through. Even the very first Final Fantasy game, one of the most merciless games in existence, gave you warp spaces so you didn't have to go all the way back. These dungeons always seem to be some of the hardest and longest dungeons in the games too. In II and III, they were irritating but not super common. In IV, though, it's almost every single dungeon since story stuff is happening ALL THE TIME! I'm not saying get rid of the story, just let me frickin teleport!

Remember that time the Sandworm from Dune teamed up with flying fish?

My next issue is back attacks. I'm all for a good challenge in games and I understand that they want to break up your party dynamics in certain ways periodically to keep you on your toes. Does it have to happen so frequently though? Sure, in the beginning it's always pretty rare. When I was grinding at the end of the game in III, though, it literally happened every three battles on average. EVERY THREE BATTLES. In three, you have to individually move each party member too so each time this happens, it wastes an entire turn, not to mention the initial advantage they get from having the back attack in the first place. Oh and don't forget to move them back again after the battle or else your next fight will have all your guys in the wrong positions again, assuming you don't get two back attacks in a row. In IV, picking Change for one member changes everyone which is certainly a step up but let's talk about the point of this type of battle.

So anyone who's played one of the classic Final Fantasy games remembers how there are two rows for party members. This system started with II and goes, I believe, through VI continuously. Front row members usually get some form of attack bonus but also are more vulnerable to attacks. Back row members take less damage or have higher evasion but often take a hit to accuracy and sometimes can't attack with certain weapons at all. The idea is that you stick your mages with low health and defense in the back row and your tanks up in front.

There's no real strategic reason to do anything other than this since the majority of battles are fought from a normal perspective and putting your mages up front is just asking for them to get killed. So why are these back attacks necessary? All they do is give enemies a free shot against your weakest characters, often resulting in them getting killed or at least taking huge damage that you will then need to waste healing potions to remedy. I would understand if there were a way to avoid these types of encounters but there isn't! It's not like the game is punishing you for doing something wrong, it's purely random. It's more like the developer who came up with rows and another one didn't like each other so the second came up with back attacks just to flip the first guy the metaphorical bird. Well, we're the only ones who lose from that deal. And get used to it, back attacks exist in a ton of Final Fantasy games.

You'd better be!

My final pet peeve for this post is the random battle percentages in general. Now, there's something that anyone who games should know about random occurrences, namely, they aren't truly random. When it comes to computers, there is no such thing as a random number generator. It simply doesn't exist. There are algorithms that attempt to come close to random chance but since a computer doesn't have the ability to just decide something, this simply doesn't exist. You can actually test this on an emulator copy of any classic Final Fantasy game. Basically, save state anywhere in a dungeon and move until you get into a battle. Now, load that save and move the same path. You will activate the battle in the exact same spot each and every time. In some of the NES titles, you'll encounter the same enemy formation too although the later ones determine the enemy formation later, apparently.

My point in explaining all this is that the algorithm(s) they used in each game up until IV, and probably through, absolutely suck. I can't tell you how often I'll go for a whole dungeon floor and not get one battle and then the next floor, I can't move more than a step before another battle activates. This happens frequently, it's like the algorithm is trying to average out it's percentages so instead of keeping a relatively even pace of battles, it flails all over the place causing this ridiculous imbalance in encounter rates. If you do a study on something that uses percentages as a result and come away with five results saying 10% and five results saying 90%, you don't write that whatever you're studying has a 50% chance of occurring. While that's technically true it doesn't give an accurate portrayal of what actually happens at all. That's how the encounter rates feel in this game. I could tell you that you have an encounter rate of 5% (I'm completely making that number up, I have no idea what the actual number is supposed to be.) but it's doubtful you'll see a ratio of one battle for every twenty steps very often.

Well, that's enough complaining for one day. These games are from another era and the series has evolved drastically since then. Random battles are almost never used anymore in RPG's for this very reason. It's a relic of a past time and it worked for them by saving cartridge space and presenting a relatively unique adventure for each player.

And so, I leave you all with one of my favorite bosses yet in Final Fantasy.

Game on!