T w e n t y S i d e d

One of the sidequests in Final Fantasy X is the Monster Arena. About two-thirds of the way through the game, you get to the arena and the owner offers you a little job: Take special (slightly nerfed) weapons and run around “capturing” the monsters you fight. It works the same as normal combat, except that if you deliver the killing blow with the capture weapon, then the monster becomes part of the Monster Arena menagerie. You can then go back and pay to fight that monster anytime you like, as often as you like.

The immediate advantage of doing this that you can’t get a game over from fighting in the arena. Even if all of your characters are KO’ed, you just end up back at the entrance instead of the “Load Game” screen. The other advantages become more apparent later.

As you collect more of the later monsters in the game (and once you backtrack earlier parts of the game and collect those monsters) you will unlock certain special monsters. These are all unique boss fights, and there are dozens of them. If you’re like me and you enjoy challenging boss fights yet hate the defeat of game over then this is gaming goodness as its best.

Some of these boss monsters are prepoerously tough. Some require you to level up to maximum strength. Some are almost puzzles. Some just take a while to wear down. Some require certain special abilities or immunities to defeat. Some are just humorous. For the clever players, a few monsters offer some nice tricks / exploits that you can use to your advanatge.

Want to level up your hapless hero? First… get you one of these:

Not available in stores. Offer only valid while supplies last. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.

The Triple AP is hard to come by, but at this point you don’t need it. Just get any weapon and put Overdrive->AP on it. This means that your overdrive guage won’t charge, but instead those points will go into your AP (for you D&D players – AP is the Final Fantasy version of XP) and level you up. The trick now is to engage in behavior that would quickly or instantly charge up the ‘ol overdrive guage.

Set your overdrive mode to “comrade”. This means that when either of the other two characters in the fight take damage, your OD guage will charge. However, because you have Overdrive->AP, you’ll get AP when terrible things happen to your friends. Now your goal is to get into a battle and arrange for those awful things to happen. The best way way to accomplish this is to fight this guy:

Boo!

Don Tonberry.

He may be adorable, but he’s nasty. Whenever you do anything in battle: attack, cast spells, steal, cough in his direction, look at him cross-eyed, anything, then he auto-counters with “Karma”. Karma deals damage to the target according to how many monsters they’ve killed. I’m guessing, but I think it’s just the kill count x 100. This means Yuna has nothing to fear, but Auron, Wakka, and Tidus are going to experience some severe retribution.

I hope you’ve been a good boy…

You can probably see where this is going. Have the character with Overdrive->AP stand still (don’t attack!) and revive the other two guys whenever they get KO’ed. (Which should be every stinking round, unless you’re some sort of pacifist.)

You know the old saying, “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”? This time it’s really true.

These guys should be taking many times their max health in damage, which is key. (Note that if they have armor with HP bonuses on it, you’ll want to take it off. The bigger the gap between their MAX HP and the Karma damage they take, the more AP you’ll get. It should be, at minimum, three or four times their MAX HP.

This really hurts, ya?

So how well does it work? Take a look:

That… is a lot of AP.

That’s seven hundred thousand AP, or about 100 times what a normal battle would be worth. Note that if you don’t have Triple AP, you’d still get a respectable quarter million. This one battle earned me about fifty sphere levels, which would have taken ages doing things the normal way.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

In previous iterations of Final Fantasy, they had the Active Time Battle System, or somesuch. This was a turn-based game, but it was “real time / turn based” game. How it worked was this: Each character (and each foe) had a “time” guage that slowly filled.

When the time guage filled up, a menu would appear…

…which would let you choose what action you wanted to take. The menu started out simple at the beginning of the game, and as things progressed it became more complex. Eventually you could attack, cast lots of spells, use special powers, abilities / skills, use items, and summon powerful monsters to fight for you. The list of items grew to be quite large.

But while you’re fiddling around in the menus looking for the thing you want to do, your foes are taking their turns. They are controlled by a computer and thus don’t have menu lag like you do. Your other characters (you can control up to three at a time) are also charging up their turns as well. If two people are ready for their turn now, one of them must wait while you give orders to the other one.

Sometimes the guages charge quite slowly. Sometimes it’s nobody’s turn, and the combatants on both sides just stand there staring at each other until someone’s guage fills up. Then two or more characters fill up at the same time and it’s a mad dash to rush through the menus and assign actions.

This sucks a lot of strategy out of the game. You can have things all planned out, which characters will need to take what actions, but while you’re hunting around in the list for the thing you need, the situation changes. Another character is bady injured and suddenly instead of using an ability like steal, you need to heal them. So you back out of the sub-menu and start hunting around in the magic menu for a healing spell. Oh no! While you were doing that they were knocked out! Now you need to back out of the magic sub-menu and find an item to get them on their feet again. Both of your characters are idle and waiting to take their turn, and all of your careful planning and strategy is out the window because you’re not a menu master.

The net result is that strategy is still important, but it takes a backseat to having the menu memorized so that you can hammer away at the buttons and get to the desired action without looking. Down, right, down, down, down, X to heal. Down, down, right, down to summon Bahamut! Oops! Wrong button! You just wasted your turn! Ha ha! Meanwhile, the enemy is pummeling you with grim efficiency, unimpeded by menus.

The whole system got on my nerves in a profound way. It was like trying to look up a phone number while someone repeatedly slapped me in the forehead screaming, “Come on! What’s the number? Huh? Huh!?!”

Enter Final Fantasy X. They retained the same gauge system, but it was hidden under the hood. It used the guages to figure out who’s turn it was, but it didn’t actually linger waiting for the bar to fill. It just moved to the next turn in the sequence. If it was the player’s turn, the game waited for them to select their choice from the menu before moving on. Studying your options wasn’t going to give the computer the edge. This put the human and the computer on more or less equal footing, since menu navigation speed was no longer an asset in combat.

This eliminated the boring (and odd-looking) gaps in combat, and made battles a lot less irritating. In the image above, the vertical bar on the right shows the various time bars and what turns are coming up. Starting from the top, I can see the turns will go Rikku, Auron, Tidus, Rikku, Auron, Monster, Tidus, Rikku. I can suddenly plan several moves in advance. Battles are now very strategic. I love it.

So of course the die-hard fans hate it. People who had played previous versions didn’t like it at all, and wanted their forehead-slapping menu game back.

This is a killer problem for developers. I really do believe that for newbies, the newer system is more interesting and more fun than the old. People who have been playing this game for a decade underestimate just how troublesome it is for a newcomer. New players are far more likely to become a fan of the new. But for old-schoolers, it’s no longer the game they fell in love with.

I know that for this the old-school fans will brand me a heretic, and I’m ok with that. People invest a lot of themselves into these games, and its hard to citicize the game without offending the fans. In this case, the die-hard fans won. The upcoming FF game will have the Active Time Battle Thingy instead of the system FFX uses.

Sigh.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.