Throughout Final Fantasy 15’s nearly a decade-long development, what has changed the most is its combat system. The game was canceled around 2012 and THEN it was picked up again and re-named around 2013. The story and characters were pretty much completely re-made. But are any of those changes for the better?
New combat system in Final Fantasy XV shapes up things for the better
The innovations in Final Fantasy XV are pretty huge. For one, other games simply don’t look as good. Your team and the enemy AI are also the best we’ve seen in any game. Also, it’s battle system is a unique mix of many genres that have been pulled off so well. FFXV was under the love and care of one of the original FF and KH heavy hitters for all 10 years of its development and only has been pushed back to rebuild the engine to this current gen.
Why is the combat no longer turn-based?
Maybe part of the reason it’s not turn based anymore is because of competition. It’s a fact that people nowadays are so accustomed to fast paced action games, rendering them seeing turn based games, boring as hell and slow. So, while there are still people who love turn based RPGs, FFXV is made to have real-time gameplay just like most games currently, because it has a wider range of customer which is a fact. In business perspective, we don’t believe that Square Enix can achieve a high number of sales making FFXV a turn based game as opposed to the current battle systems which is more popular. Especially when Hajime Tabata himself said in an interview that they need to sell at least 10 million copies of FFXV to make the FFXV project worth it/profitable.
You can still offer levels of tactics in a action game, in FF15, the action RPG isn’t extremely fast pace like a brawler, you have to attack carefully, block carefully, and seemingly have to strike using the correct type of damage to stagger enemies. Secondary effects like poisoning, paralysis, and buffing and debuffing, are only tools to make the game more interesting, they don’t actually have a lot of interest on their own. In this game, you can craft ‘magic’ which could have those effects. And if you are willing to spend millions of gils to create an ultimate magic to do 9999 damage, it’s very possible to make very useful tools.