Summary
TheFinal Fantasyseries is no stranger to change. While innovation has been foundational to the story of video games, few other series besidesFinal Fantasycould claim to have grown or set standards quite like they have. SomeFinal Fantasygames felt like they were moving with the times, but others were distinctly ahead of their time.
It’s too easy to use “ahead of its time” generally to mean “innovative” or “excellent.” However, whether it was an original idea, borrowed, or received well by critics and gamers at the time, theseFinal Fantasygames championed a feature that would not catch on until years later.
Final Fantasy 7blew audiences away with its transition into the third dimension, cinematic mastery, and mature themes, but many wondered why the character models in-game couldn’t more closely resemble those seen in its full-motion video sequences. WhenFinal Fantasy 8arrived, RPG fans were astounded to see that their comments were on-point, with every visible character rendered realistically (something that would become a standard for almost every RPG and non-RPG video game to come).
Final Fantasy 8didn’t just innovate on presentation, but it reinvented many systems thought to be fundamental to the format. Each character was a blank slate to customize from top to bottom, beyond their limit breaks. Gold (or Gil) came from a staggered salary rather than monsters. Although the junction system was imperfectly executed, it eliminated the need for grinding, as character stat growth was tied instead to equipable items (or spells), and in one ofFinal Fantasy’s most controversial design decisions, it used global enemy level scaling.
Final Fantasy 12introduced the Gambit System, a programmable AI scripting tool that let players define how their party members acted in battle using “if-then” logic (for example, “if at low health, then use a healing spell”). This allowed for a level of party micromanagement automation that felt revolutionary, and offered a level of tactical depth that foreshadowed the AI-scripting systems now common in party-based and strategy RPGs.
Twelveisan underratedFinal Fantasygamein many ways, but this feature is one of its most underrated mechanics. Gambits can become a little too granular for some, and the system left many feeling as though the game was playing itself, as even the active character had their Gambits control their actions. However, its adoption from games likePillars of EternityandDragon Ageshows that there was great merit to the mechanic, even if its refinement was off.
Although the terms “class” and “job” are typically used synonymously to describe a character’s role (usually in battle), job denotes a more casual fixture.Final Fantasy 3introduced the concept of moving from one to another, although generally, the job transfers were more like promotions.Final Fantasy 5perfected the idea, allowing characters to swap between an up-close and personal fighter and spell-slinging black mage.
A character’s base stats might influence their best fit, but characters have to gain experience in each job to get better at them. This innovation went away until later games unearthed it, such asFinal Fantasy Tactics,10-2, and13.Job switching later influenced other RPGslikeBravely Default, Dragon’s Dogma 2, andBlue Dragon.
It is an understatement to say thatFinal Fantasy 7was a game-changer in video game culture. Its extensive use of full-motion video (FMV) cutscenes helped sell the PlayStation and signaled a shift toward cinematic storytelling. Besides being visually gorgeous (for the time), they were integrated with gameplay and narrative beats, something few titles attempted in that era.
FF7was also ahead of the curve thematically. Its story tackledthe dangers of corporate greed, ecological disaster, and terrorism with a seriousness rarely attempted in blockbuster games. Those environmental themes are more relevant than ever and echoed in countless games (and beyond) that followed.
Final Fantasy 10introduced the Conditional Turn-Based Battle (CTB) system, letting players see turn order in advance and manipulate it, a design choice that would later influence titles like Trails in the Sky and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga and signalled well before its arrival a welcomed renaissance ofmodern turn-based games. It demonstrated how a turn-based RPG could feel not only tactical but fluid, fast-paced, and satisfyingly responsive.
Even more revolutionary was the full voice acting.FF10was the first in the series to feature it extensively, helping bring characters to life in ways text boxes couldn’t. Combined with expressive facial animations and dramatic cinematography, it paved the way for modern cinematic RPG storytelling.
While today’s technology allows game developers to produce games with fast-paced, complex gameplay and sublimely rendered graphics, that was not the case in the late 80s and early 90s. Turn-based RPGs were the genre with which Square was able to tell the stories it wanted to deliver with the same level of detail thatthe tabletop RPG games that inspired themhad originally contained.Final Fantasy 4introduced the Active Time Battle (ATB) system, a blend of real-time urgency and traditional turn-based combat.
With ATB, characters have individual timers that fill based on their speed stats, demanding that players act quickly rather than waiting passively.Final Fantasygames would stick with menus in battles untilFF16, but the move toward action-oriented play prompted many JRPGs and tactical-based games likeChrono TriggerandGrandiato adopt a similar mechanic (for good or for bad) and arguably led the way to the action-RPG hybrid.
The golden age of MMOs may not be in the past, but from the early 2000s to mid-2010s, it seemed as though just about every other game studio was catering to everyone with an internet connection. While there were MMOs beforeFinal Fantasy 11, none had even considered building one on a game console.
Now, online play on consoles andeven cross-platform playis commonplacein games likeFortnite,Diablo 4, andFF14.However,Final Fantasy 11pioneered the idea and did so with the bare-bones online infrastructure that the PlayStation 2 could provide.
