Best thing about casting spells, was that you could also use them in various ways. Like casting fire on your own knight with a flame shield and throw him into enemies damaging others and healing him and so on
Especially if you give said knight Move +3, and perhaps even Germinas Boots, he could vastly extend the range of your spell well beyond what your wizard could reach, while also keeping your wizard at a very safe distance from the enemies you want to blast.
FFT is by far the best Tactics style game out there for story, gameplay and classes, Imo. I recently started the Caos Omega mod for it that blanaces and chagnes classes and fights, been really fun so far.
The only thing I really don't like about it is the story. It's just way too political for my tastes, and I feel like certain aspects of it are a bit vague. Heck, I recently just beat the game twice back-to-back because after the first run, I had other builds I wanted to try. And even doing that, with going through the game the one time, then again with the plot fresh in my mind, I still don't really understand what the main villains were ultimately trying to accomplish. Like, aside from just being evil, I don't really get what their end goal was, if they even had one. Especially when it doesn't really feel like the humans, and the Lucavi possessing them are even on the same page.
I think the real issue is that devs are terrified people might break their game's balance. The more complicated the mechanics, the more likely players are to find exploits. So, they end up simplifying mechanics wherever possible. Replacing exploitable features with tedious ones. FFT is very breakable, exploits and imbalances galore. When will they learn that's part of why we love it so much.
Funnily enough, the devs admittedly built this game with broken OP units in mind. They wanted players to have that power fantasy. Mind you, I do not recall which interview I saw that said that though, but I do remember it being said.
the imbalance are earned through knowledge tho. you don't get OP randomly in this game. Tactics is amazing exactly because there are imbalanced things BUT you can totally play and clear EVERY content without using any of it. Its a choice and that's why other games are boring, there are no such choices.
I feel like the biggest problem with the game's balance doesn't even have anything to do with that, necessarily. It has to do with the game not presenting you with enemies that pose a very significant threat, aside from maybe a couple bosses. For the most part though, you're just fighting guys who have access to the same skills as you, but don't take advantage of the job system in any sort of an interesting or significant way. Meaning that if you have any idea of what you're doing, you're pretty much always going to be stronger than the enemies you're fighting, when in a tactical RPG, it should be the other way around. It would be a lot more interesting if you had to go up against enemies who likewise abused the system (albeit to less extreme degrees) to not only present the player with a wider variety of challenges, but also to help teach the player that the sky is the limit, and perhaps give them ideas of things they can try themselves. Like maybe having mages with Equip Sword, or have a battle where you need to take down a bunch of knights with the heaviest armor available at the time, and Damage Split to make them that much harder to take down. Instead, pretty much all of the enemies throughout the entire game are as bare bones as they can be.
I agree. I love the charging system as well ever since it first debuted in the classic FF4, and it's been feature in some mainline FF but not all; however, it really does translate well in a Tactical game like FFT. Additionally, one of my favorites JRPG series (the Tales series) features a charging time system for spells as well which I find just as fun to play around with. I like how some characters have an ability to store a charge and release the spell later with no charge time, allowing for better combo routes and style.
I didn't mind the system as much as how it was presented. You had to constantly be checking menus that filled up the screen every turn to know where every queued order was going to happen. I'd hoped things like the second screen on a DS or WiiU would prompt a revisit of it, but no luck. Visible turn orders have been pretty common lately (Octopath, Triangle Strategy, Chained Echoes), and I think having the turn order and execution of charge skills always visible through one of those would be a lot more intuitive and player-friendly.
Absolutely. Bigger screen shows and better resolution would absolutely make a visible turn order an expectation for me, and it would be great for charge.
The problem with charge time in Final Fantasy Tactics was that it made almost all magics unviable. The enemy would be targeted and then they would either move out of range of the tile the spell was targeted on or they would move in range where you nuked your own people from the AoE targeted on the character.
@@canisblack Assuming your speed is equal to the enemy's, and your CT is roughly equal, they will move first, allowing you to get your spell off easily. On occasion, you couldn't pull off even a quicker spell before an enemy moved, especially later on in a fight as unit CT started to stagger out, but "unviable"? No.
@@TitaniumLegmanYeah you could jump through all of those hoops... Or you could just run melee fighters and ignore needing to jump through said hoops, and still win. For the mechanic to be good and make mages effective, it needs to offer something that you would have no desire to play around. It needs to be more optimal than this.
@@TitaniumLegman Well OP said the issue with it in FFT, not the issue overall. I think almost any mechanic can work with the right scaffolding around it. There are some good ways you could change it. For instance, you choose a target area for the spell but once it comes back around to casting the spell, you could choose to cancel it (maybe you made a huge miscalculation or something else bad happened) or for some spells you could make the AOE by a tile or two in any direction (depends on the game and the size of the maps FFT has smallish maps so moving it 2-tiles might be too flexible). Perhaps this comes with like a 15% damage penalty. There are ways to help play around some of the worst aspects of these sorts of mechanics without reducing all the risk associated with them.
I also like the mechanic because it forces you to be vulnerable, and the added risk helps make it 'tactical'. The catch 22 is i think it only worked well in tactics becase nobody took the time to check turn order, so you were always second guessing yourself and building anticipation.
I think no one has bothered to duplicate it because theres just a niche audience that enjoys it. Most people who enioy casters prefer going into combat fully capable of bringing their best spells to the forefront and having it take effect immediately. People who play casters want to dominate the battlefield. Thats whats fun for alot of people. Now personally i dont have issues with the charge system. I'm ok with it but i dont mind it going away either. If i were to re-design the charge system it would be mages could cast whatever spell they want, it takes effect immediately BUT depending on the strength of the spell, it delays the time when they could go again. Essentially, a speed penalty to depict how powerful magic drains their faculties. To take this further, i'd even add that certain spells could impose defensive penalties during the extended wait that only gets removed once the mage gets their turn again. I wouldnt mind if the charge mechanic shows up again in the new FFT. What i'd like to see removed is the job levelling system. I hated having to stop myself from levelling in classes i wanted learn skills from because it had bad growths. I'd like for stat growths to be tied to the character themselves. That will allow me to freely jump around different classes without worrying about stat growths or having to create "farm units" whose sole job is to boost by JP gain in a class i dont want to level up in. For example, me wanting to play with jump but not wanting to level up as a lancer/dragoon so i create a bunch of lancers just to speed up JP gain in battle and prevent the class i want to add jump on from performing actions/gaining xp in lancer.
It sounds like you're looking for this explicitly in tactical RPG's, but they have this in Grandia and the Zeboid games. When your turn comes, you set your command and different commands have different delays until they actually trigger. While a command is waiting to trigger, it is vulnerable to counter play. In the Zeboid games, there are particular skills that trigger fast and cancel and delay the target if the target is "charging."
Honestly, I loved it as well. I feel like one of the main reasons that people didn't like it is because they aren't patient. Instant gratification has kind of taken over... if they have the mana to cast a spell, they don't want to have to wait to do so. In terms of balance and actual tactical gameplay considerations, I've always been a firm believer in the charge time system being one of, if not the most balanced and tactically involved system that exists. As you described with the reference to FFXIV, when your entire group has to focus on protecting someone who has a spell with a long cast time but a massive impact on the battle, it feels good, it is tactical in nature, and it reinforces the different roles ACTUALLY playing their part instead of effectively just gunning to ram as much dps down the throats of your enemies as possible (which, lets be honest, is where games like FFT tend to fall short with the introduction of characters and abilities like TG Cid and his kit instantly making the game easy mode) as quickly as possible. These people are complaining because they don't actually enjoy the tactical portion of a tactical rpg. When a caster is squishy, then they generate threat by just beginning to start their charge time to cast the spell, so enemy units target them and try to stop said spell from being cast, it makes you have to actually think of a way to actively protect that caster during the charge time, and that is a successful application of tactical considerations and team composition in a TRPG. Building up mana is, too, but is significantly LESS tactical, involves significantly LESS team coordination, and really doesn't feel satisfying at all in completion.
wait, people dislike the charge system? it doesn't work in many tactics type games (most work turns in phases so charging doesn't make sense) really the charge system compliments tactics' CT turn order system, which itself is an oddity in that it lets you disrupt enemy plans by taking your turns in the middle of theirs, so to speak the game has a certain interactivity that other tactical games like BoF lack, and the charge system compliments this type of game well honestly i didn't even think about how most games don't have such a system, but yeah it's kinda wild that you're right
Exactly. That's why I feel games like Tactics Ogre, great as they are, lack a certain amount of moment to moment interaction. There's not much you can do to stop an enemy from doing a big attack once they have the resources to do so. You can try to mitigate the effects of said attack, but in most cases you're helpless to really stop it. In FFT, you absolutely can, and that what makes it special.
I know some games (radiant historia is the first that comes to mind) that have this system but doesn't force it into magic, but in the "wait" command that's useless in most rpgs, giving the command good use, you choose a point in cue to set a turn and end the current one, to make it different from defend that is recieve less damage and end your current turn, charge magic is used in rpgs with cue systems as a balancing act or a risk reward mechanic, last time I played FFT1 that was all risk, mid reward as some advanced classes can do a technique that has most advantages of normal magic techs with next to no wait time.
I´ve been trying for a while to find that balancing aspect that would make magic in my TTRPG feel impactful but not overpowered in comparisson to the other more martial or mystical (read miracle/willpower based) and THIS! thanks for reminding me this was a thing. Haven´t played FFT in a bit and I can´t believe it just eluded me. Casting time representing the complex mathematical calculations needed to twist the fabric of space and time to manifest energy out of nowhere and in a controlled manner. The higher the Spell´s level, the longer it takes. The more adept the caster the more abilities and tricks they can use to optimize their output. Amazing, thanks so much dude!
I do like the charge system in FFT. Another system I thought was interesting was the HP spending for certain skills which was used in Fire Emblem 3 houses and Fire Emblem Gaiden. Just using health as a resource in games in general I find interesting.
It's interesting you bring this up, because FFT's charge mechanic was actually included by necessity to mask spell graphic loading times, rather than something they wanted to include. Matsuno said they weren't happy with it.
@@TitaniumLegman YT's deleting my attempts to link the interview. But it's from an Unsung Story kickstarter Q&A. Here's the exact quote, which you can google: Q: “FFTA and FFTA2 moved away from Charge/cast times, which I felt heavily took away from the depth of those games. Will Charge/Cast times be a core component of this game? One of my favorite mechanics in FFT was casting time." A: Sorry, there won’t be casting times in this game. In fact, the reason why FFT included a casting time system at all was to allow the game time to load graphic effects. This was a necessary consideration due to PlayStation loading times and memory concerns. Speaking as a developer back in those days, I can tell you that we weren’t happy with it.
This was an interesting system, but it favored martial jobs without charge. Yes, you can cast a big spell and wait 2-3 turns, but in that same time, a martial job can take out several units and not have to worry about enemies moving or not being in the right place when the spell is cast. If the charge abilities had better targeting, like any unit on the field, I could see it as a better system. I believe this is also why other systems out there, like D&D don't usually have 2+ rounds to cast spells. Simply because targeting has a range, and waiting for the thing to happen slows down the experience. D&D dropped it after 2e, and it seems like Squaresoft/Square-Enix learned a similar lesson afterwards. That is not to say it is not something can't be improved upon if reintroduced, or give it options, like if you want to have a charge time, have the targeting increased and/or additional damage or effects for doing so.
Personally I don't think charge will go away as it's part of the mechanics for it. For Tactics Ogre wise, I don't think that system had been in the game from the initially so not suddenly introduce to it make sense. Well charge system is around for a fair bit of games as I remember, for example recent games, UO and Sword of Convallaria have this as well. And FFT isn't first to introduce charge. Basically it's a form of Time Taken to charge with there should be a lengthy or much longer cast time. Langrisser did introduce longer charging time much stronger spells in 4 and 5 (I think 3 also but I can't recall it now) Those DnD game also uses this logic.
Pillars of Eternity 2 does this with spells in its turn-based mode. Some spells take a whole turn, some go off instantly, and many will fall somewhere in between. You can also build characters to have faster cast speed.
I know a tactics game that had a delayed magic which cast after a turn(after enemies moving) . But people never liked it since it was hard to predict enemy moves. So that it is changed to desperation move which is cast when a rage gauge is full (like from fighting game)
The charge mechanic is great, it adds a layer of risk/reward and makes its so you can either do terrain denial or glue a spell to a target. Because the higher level spells take longer to charge, you cant just spam them. The added damage that mages take while charging, glorifies their glass cannon archetype. Speels and summons remain powerful through the game. Never mess with a female mage fully decked out with MA plus gear, with the samurai job class slotted.
Looking at the comments, I didn't realize how unpopular charge time was. I like it but then again, I'm an overly baised fan like you. I find very few faults with FFT and inconvinces are fixed by the Remixed mod. Also I assume you find joy in mastering higher learning curves. The content I make on my channel is nothing but niche games because, it's the only thing in gaming I'm truly passionate about. So good on you for not chasing what'll just make you popular. Quality content does deserve soul, in my opinion.
I could listen to people talk about final fantasy tactics all day. Awesome vid. I'm actually designing a tabletop card game similar to fft. Its currently in the testing phase.
I remember when I stood outside of target 2 hours till opening to pick up back in ‘97. Then after beating in a few times I eBay’ed it. Then got a copy of war of the lions. And all the name changes and what not was as hearing nails on a chalkboard.
I used a Gameshark back in the day to unlock the Non-Charge ability and it instantly made a ton of jobs viable. It's basically the only way I saw Cloud's limits and most of the Summon spells. Maybe you could argue that using those skills as an instant is too powerful, but there was still a Short-Charge variant that was learnable and seemed mandatory for a ton of jobs.
I think that the Flintlock from FFTA2 is the closest thing we've had to a charge time in FFTA (1 turn to Prime), the only problem is that Roar exists (and is pretty common too) to rip the pom-poms off of any Moogle who DARES to Prime in the vicinity, and that the payoff is mid. Too bad that no other classes use the Prime buff to balance it, like the Cannoneer or Parivir.
The tactics games by Rad Codex (they've done, Voidspire tactics, horizon's gate, kingsvein, and some others) do have the charge system as well. They are also similar to FFT in the sense that you can combo different jobs and passives for your party. My issue with their charge system is that it needs a step above in order for you to cast it. The charge spells are powerful and hit an area but most of time, the enemies just walk away from the aoe. You need to reduce the amount of squares they can walk or create blocks (There are spells for that) in order to lock them in place until the cast time ends. I ended up only using said spells with stationary enemies.
1) It's deeply unintuitive and the UI isn't set up for it right now. Most people just do not understand how CT works and can only vaguely grasp turn order generally. Part of this is that the UI is not set up well to explain how it works and you need to read a mechanics FAQ to learn some of the crucial details. There would need to at least be a turn order timeline (like in LUCT/TO:R) that immediately predicts when the Charge move is going to go off. 2) It was not very well-implemented in ways that make some classes and characters less fun to play. It's mostly well and good for mages, but the entire Archer class feels boring because its whole active skillset is nothing but minute variations on Charge+X. Dragoons and Cloud are in similar weird boats where, unless you understand how things work, stuff just moves out of the way and you get frustrated. Again, mages can get around this somewhat with big AoEs, but it can still be an issue. 3) It scales terribly. Every tick, units gain CT equal to their Speed, and Charged abilities advance toward their resolution. In the early game, this is relatively balanced, and if Speed was invariant other than by class selection, equipment, and buffs, this would be fine. But Speed has a growth coefficient, meaning it will go up over time, and even a few points in Speed growth can have an outsize impact on how quickly units get turns: The difference between 10 and 15 Speed is a turn about 3 ticks faster on average, which is enough to get out of a Fire 4 that started charging after the character's last turn. Unit Speed roughly doubles from 1-99 in most jobs, so by normal endgame levels it's maybe 40-50% higher than it started at across the board, which is pure downside for Charge abilities; and worse, Ninjas both get way higher Speed multipliers than other jobs but also are rewarded for building for Speed because their weapons use it for damage calculations. Combine this with lots of degenerate movement and attack range options for lategame player builds and I find that enemy mages just aren't threatening anymore; their Charges are basically buffs to make them more easily one-shotted by dual wielders. Notice that this is much less of a problem in Tactics Ogre, because the overwhelming majority of influence on action frequency in LUCT/Reborn comes from equipment and buffs, and base RT remains static; thus, Folcurt will always act faster than most other characters in a given class with similar loadouts, but he will never start moving so quickly that he's lapping people absent tons of buff/debuff stacking. TL;DR it's not a bad mechanic, but FFT implements it badly. SPD needs to be invariant to not unfairly punish Charge users later in the game and the UI needs to clarify the distinction between ticks and turn order so that it's easier for the player to grasp.
A turn order mechanic would be good. FFT suffers from the limitations of the console era it's from, but I don't hold that against it. As far as speed base classes, that's a separate balance point that doesn't actually impact the functionality or Charge, and ALSO is only an issue when you start really min-maxing, which only a fraction of a fraction of players will do. I care about the average player experience when designing mechanics, anything else is secondary.
Counter points; 1) FFT did have a turn order timeline, it was just not obvious. the easiest way to check the turn order we to simply press left or right when selecting a skill. 2) We do not talk about Archers, the red-headed step-child of jobs. As for Dragoons, it was simply knowing your turn order and planning for it. 3) Magic scales terribly, not the charge mechanic. And, yes, I agree, speed should be a fixed stat, only affected by gear and spells/skills. Fun fact; the Thief job has a higher speed stat growth than the ninja.
@@TitaniumLegmanThe charge times for archers were utterly garbage past the first few. Why would you spend more than a turn charging when you could just repeatedly basic attack and do more?
Nice video! I agree with the broader point (that magic needs drawbacks if its "per-turn" effectiveness is higher than other options, and MP isn't a good one on its own), but I also agree with other commenters that FFT's specific implementation isn't the best. You mentioned Jump, and it's a good example of the how badly balanced CT can be: any of the stronger versions are essentially impossible to use unless the enemy is Immobilized, and then you start running into team comp balance issues (could any 2 other party members do a better job than 2 slots dedicated to locking enemies down for charge characters?). I think the CT system would be a lot better if enemies used it more (immobilizing themselves effectively by charging attacks on you), or if the maps were more strategic with more elevation and chokepoints (spells being able to fire vertically is a big advantage over melee, it just often isn't relevant). Of course, if we start "What if"ing FFT, we'll be here forever. 😅 Thanks for the video and take care! Always fun to dust off the game designer hat and chat about this stuff!
One thing I would have liked to see is some kind of fast casting tied to job level. I know there's a short charge ability with Time Mage, or at least I think it is Time Mage. It makes sense for magic to take time to cast as the PSX version has incantations that occasionally pop up. It would also make sense for the more practiced a character is at their job to get better at casting those spells. I'm not even saying level 8 should be like 50% or more efficient even 25% seems like a good fit. That said, I run at least one and sometimes two mages in basically every playthrough. I do actually enjoy the charge system and think it was executed quite well for the era.
Semantics, but the "charge system" is just the speed system, but for skills that utilized (read: needed) it, which revolved around its CT system. It worked in FFT because it was likely "balanced" (whatever your interpretation of that word for this game may be) around a unit's speed stat in mind. Another game using it would need to copy or implement a very similar system in place to make it work.
Of course. Charge is intrinsic to how FFT is designed. You could say the same about how other games handle mana and action points. If it's designed for the system tho, I think it's the best way to do mana.
Kingsvein. Combined with mechanics that allow for range extension and insane interaction with the map, there's nothing quite like ambushing an entire room with your charged earthquake from stealth, using the earth to launch your traps like a catapult into a team to start a fight. God I love that game. Rad codex makes some badass strategy games.
@@TitaniumLegman You should, Rad codex is basically a one man studio, but they have some incredibly deep SRPGs. Kingsvein hooked me in, but then Horizon's Gate is just like...what if FFT let you have a ship fleet and do merchant stuff, and I guess now we're doing Golden Sun puzzles over here. I forgot that part, one of the things their games do is letting you interact using combat mechanics on the world map constantly. Don't want to do the raft puzzle? Have your wizard freeze the water. Don't want to fight that boss? Throw him off a cliff and go back for his crown on the rocks below later. Want to skip reloading your crossbows or guns? Slap on a bandolier and just equip 4 of them at once 🤣
There really is a lot that FFT did that a lot of newer tactical games seem to ignore. On top of the charge time for spells or big skills but also height. I know Tactics ogre does but other seem to ignore elevation all together, maybe giving a slight bump or hill but otherwise no real impact on the maps or characters being able to use it to advantage.
When I was a kid, I hated the charge mechanic because it meant my attacks could miss, or other such nonsense. Nowadays though, as an adult who actually understands strategy (seriously, when I was a kid, my idea of strategy was charge in at full speed and hit stuff, to the point where the only accessories I would ever use were the Battle, and Germinas Boots, and I thought all other accessories were complete garbage), I very much appreciate the charge mechanics for how much more thought they require the player to put into their actions. Not to mention how you can place a spell to be charging in advance to manipulate the movements of the upcoming enemies, or even do something like place a Fire spell onto your own Red Dragon, then move the dragon into position to blast the enemies while simultaneously healing the dragon. Heck, during a recent play through of the game, I even found myself wishing that there was a mechanic where you could willfully increase the charge time of spells. Because sometimes a spell would go off one turn earlier than I wanted it to, such as if I needed an extra turn to get into position for buffing the party, or I wanted to cast Raise on a character, but wanted it to fire off immediately after the enemy's next turn instead of immediately before so that my revived character wouldn't be instantly taken out. Also, if you have the foresight, it can be fun to take advantage of charge times with a mime. Get one character charging a spell. Then, while the spell is charging, get your mime into position for the spell to hit the intended target, while your wizard perhaps hit nothing at all.
@@IzraelGraves During my last couple runs, I used a few monsters. I decided to try playing the game by actively using all 16 possible units in my party. Swapping them around to suit whatever my needs were in any given battle, and getting the slackers caught up in levels while doing proposition quests. And because I personally find humans to be rather boring (this is a general opinion, not necessarily tied to Tactics specifically), I decided to throw in some monsters as well to mix things up. On the first run, it was only a Red Chocobo, and Worker 8. But on the second run, I threw in a Red Chocobo, Cockatrice, Red Dragon, and Great Malboro. Speaking of which, I also considered attempting that sort of thing with Worker 8, but he's so slow that it doesn't work quite as well with him. Still, he is handy in that you can place down something like Bolt 4 or Meteor, and not need to worry about him getting destroyed by your own spell.
I've actually thought about whether a tactics game where commands are given in the present, while actions happen in the future after 'setup' time (after charging in your case) would be more or less enjoyable/interesting. I'm no where near the expert you are when it comes to tactics games, but I want to speculate on why it's not used more often. Keep in mind that I'm largely reasoning about all actions being delayed, not just magic in this case. - It vastly complicates the combat system. If you give the unit a command and it is done immediately, the game state never changed between the two steps. But if the command happens on a delay, then the game has to consider whether the unit still able to even carry out the command by the time they're ready. This is further complicated if the game allows compound turns like Move and then Cast. Now the first part of your command could fail (eg. the spot you're moving to is occupied), and it's not obvious what should happen to the second part. Damage prediction and such that come standard with modern tactics games also become misleading, but that's a more minor issue. - It could potentially be very frustrating for players to be on the wrong end of this kind of a system. It's gratifying to see an action happen as soon as the command is issued. But if the player is constantly targeting into the future and then getting interrupted or missing, that could lead to a frustrating experience - the time/resources wasted is higher than just, say, wasting a turn by missing an attack. - It allows for more abusive playstyles that AI can't effectively challenge. In a game where both sides are human, mechanics can be dynamic and designed to significantly punish or reward the players conditionally. The expectation is that the player facing an extremely punishing ability would 'play around it'. This is not the case in single player games, where generally players end up trivializing the game if they discover some abusive playstyle or build, because designing the AI to know to deal with everything is hard - sometimes even the game designers themselves will not anticipate what kind of strategies the AI will face. I think a charge system is appropriately high-risk/high-reward that it would lead to a lot of abusive playstyles. Granted, you could argue players figuring out abusive playstyles to trivialize the game is a fun thing. Overall I'm not saying a delay/charge system doesn't work, but that it's difficult to get right. It certainly allows for a deeper game. I think if the scope is more limited where it only applied to some spells which all behaved in a similar way, then it could avoid the issues above. But like I said, I was more thinking about the concept of delayed actions in general.
I do like the Charge system in FFT, generally, because the game is also generally balanced around it.. Geomancy spells do significantly less damage than a big BLM spell but also are free and instant. FFT's charge system adds a system of trade-offs for power. And those are fine. Obviously some units do not have to make those trade-offs, the unique class units, but generally I feel like the base game classes that are openly available are generally pretty balanced, in part due to cast times. Even Calculator, it has a horrendous base speed, which effectively acts like a cast timer between shots.. but cross-classing can alleviate a lot of that balance too, lol. Also.. it makes *sense* that spells need to charge. FF4 has cast timers too, and some spells are better than others *because* they have a low charge time, but might have lower power or a higher MP cost.. stuff like that just makes sense in brain.
After watching this video I was like I KNOW I played something with a charge system, but it took a few days before it clicked and I finally remembered WHAT it was. While more of a turn based JRPG with light TRPG elements instead of a proper TRPG, a good chunk of the Trails/Kiseki/Legend of Heroes series runs a charge system for it's version of magic [Arts]. All spells have charge (typically heals are shorter, attacks are reasonably long). Some spells target a zone of the battlefield, while others home in on the selected foe even if the foe moves. On the downside the minmax builds may be mega-OP and make a lot of that redundant/unneeded on some of the games. And some players take issue with having to chose between manual move without attacking (bonus of reduced wait time for next turn) vs. letting the game automove you to the game's choice of end destination if you try to attack a foe that requires moving to get close enough to hit that turn. Basically the combat combines the visible turn order and some actions give shorter/longer delay system of FF10. Plus a lighter version of the FFT charge system. Plus a Xenosaga series-like "bonus effects" on certain turns. From a story perspective, Trails in the Sky is the 'best' starting point, but it has slow pacing issues and is not on many systems (only PC, PSP, and Vita with a Switch remake in the works). (also honorable mention to the Grandia series, where charging spells and non-maxed weapon skills can be outright canceled by certain basic attacks or skills, as other comments have mentioned).
Though it's a Job System JRPG not a Tactics RPG, I've seen a Charge Magic Mechanic in Mary Skelter 2 and Final. The stronger Spells take time to charge, at first I didn't like it but after getting Cinderella and making her a Paladin and raising her Speed Stat while giving a passive to let her get the 1st turn in to set up to take damage away from the rest of the party. (Because if the caster gets hit the spell isn't triggered) Then I had 2 Blood Witches charging AOE High Level Magic with a Leech Job charging a AOE Magic Defense Debuff on the enemy (I gave this party member Speed raising gear to make sure it triggers beforehand) to wipe out my opponent but if something happens I had a physical attacker finishing off the scraps. Long story short I ended up loving this as it offers another level of strategic thinking.
It’s dependent on a more complex initiative/turn order system, something most games have moved away from for a few reasons. 1) It’s complicated. FFT did not do a great job explaining how speed interacted with turns or cast times, and unless you read a guide on mechanics, you weren’t likely to understand it fully. 2) Systems that allow fast characters to get more actions than slow characters are incredibly prone to imbalance. There’s a reason characters that give other characters extra turns (haste-type casters, dancers in FE, Quicken in FFT) are always extremely powerful. Compound that and you get stuff like vanilla Phoenix Point where a single character can clear the entire map in one turn. 3) Generally, this sort of mechanic with slow mages moving slow (both in distance and turn order) and casting slower makes them significantly weaker for offensive play, when you’re constantly advancing. However, due to defense being simpler than offense for enemy AI, the bulk of battles have the player in an offensive role. This is why having high movement horse leaders on nearly every squad in Unicorn Overlord; when the game expects the player to advance constantly, speed of action is vital. Summoners with their big slow AoEs were cool in FFT, but they were not good.
I hated it as a kid, but I grew to like it due to the, ahem, tactics, required to use it effectively. To the haters, learn to read the timing system and it becomes much easier
Love the charging method, but i think it was implemented well. Specifically for the higher damaging spells. Too often, are you skipping multiple turns to deal damage when you couldve let off smaller moves. Reminds me of why people dont use Hyper Beam in Pokemon. But if the power of the moves justified it, and the charge time was reduced on a bunch of them, then it would be better. First spells should pretty much be instant (in my version, first spells, like fire1 and Cure1, would for "Acolyte" Job class). Meanwhile, Fire2 (in my version, would be for the class that specializes in Fire spells) would be similiar to Fire1 but require more mp. Fire3 would have larger AOE, more damage, more mp, and longer charge time. Fire4 would be on 1 target, equal mp to fire3, deal massive damage, maybe more charge time (think Kamehaha vs dodon ray for the dragonball fans). Then the Summon would deal damage similar to fire4 but with massive AOE, Longer charge time, and much more MP. But at most, you'd only skip on turn for any spell. Fire 1 and 2 would be pretty much instant, fire 3 and 4 require you to wait longer but not skip a turn, summon skips a turn but is the pinnacle of the element's power. For me, Wizard/Black mage would do dark magics (like Unholy or other moves that mostly enemies have) and poison spells. And i would have a specialist of each other element (fire, ice, thunder). Earth would be geomancer, Holy would be Priest. Summoner would probably be the thunder element but renamed. Mystic's spells would be spread across other spell users but be the Ice element. Mediator would also have its abilities spread to other classes and renamed and become the fire user likely.
From a game design perspective, the big issue is balancing these abilities. Because they take longer, they need to hit extra hard, but that runs the risk of being OP. On the flip side, if you mess up the placement, or something else happens that makes your previous target/targets no longer viable, it's now a HUGE waste of resources for the player which can be a big enough swing that you might have irreparably screwed yourself over. It can also be very difficult to visually display, assuming there are several of these abilities going on at a time. The balance between power and action economy is just REALLY hard to strike. I also think that it generally kind of feels bad to a lot of players to have one of these misfire or just to have a unit sit around and not actually do anything on their turn half of the time (depending on the way charge attacks work in your game). I think charging works better if you have a battle timeline, like Final Fantasy X, wherein every ability you used could affect where you were on the timeline. So it was viable in the late, late game to just get a ton of speed on a character and abuse Quick Slash, or whatever it was called, over and over. The idea being that instead of you losing an entire turn to charging, which is a HUGE loss of action economy for the player, you are instead pushed back some on the action timeline but not too far. I think this also adds a lot of granularity for balancing the ability for the game dev. If you are able to make it so that your mages work on MP and charging, then you could have some Mages that are like burst focused, with low charges but high MP costs vs slower mages who are slower over the course of a fight, but end up being more consistent due to not running out of MP very often.
Probably in my top 10 favorite games of all time. My only gripe with the game is that there's no Red Mage. Before anyone says it, because people have said it before, a main black/sub white or vise versa is a Sage not a red mage. :P
Could've done more with it. Like, what if Throw Stone refunded 50% CT and halved movement next turn, and what if other wait-type options existed? What if archers weren't the only class who could customize charge lengths? (sure, some spells had longer timers, but MP was the main thing, and spell selection often only caught edge cases, and more often the edge case just dictated your target selection). Or what if your mage could "hold" a spell so that it triggered on the friendly target's action (or loss of action), or could even target your ally's melee attack square? It was a little janky to orchestrate turn order stuff and maybe that minigame is rewarding if you studied it more, but it definitely feels chaotic at first glance. Dorter is sort of peak one-shotting the foolish charging wizard, but sometime halfway through the game, you just pile on the power creep and nothing seems to matter anymore. Granted, you could just bench Orlandu, but you can't make me.
Archers needed more diversity in what they could do. Anything more than like 10 CTR was worthless, and they didn't have anything fun like snipes, point blank shots, or long shots.
That's a pretty good mechanic, but Sword of Convallaria has units with charge magic. The most genius mechanic that has never been duplicated is the increased range of an archer's arrows as he gets higher in map elevation. An archer who can instantly teleport to the highest point on the stage and blanket the field with arrows was one of the most satisfying builds. Not even Baldur's Gate 3 uses height to determine arrow trajectory.
CT was nice, but the lack of default visual indication was annoying. I'd prefer visible queue when you select a spell to show when it gets cast in the global turn order. You can do it through menus but it's annoying still. So combine the CT with Tactics Ogre turn order display.
I liked the idea of charge times but they needed to be shorter especially when you had skills equiped to reduce cast times... a good example was cloud you basically couldnt even get off a limit break ever even if you had quick charge on him 7 to 10 turns with quick charge was ridiculous 😅
@@TitaniumLegman you couldn't use any of the strongest summons as a summoner for the same reason, anyone who said well they are to powerful I would point to Orlando, the sky pirate, or Ramsa as a dark knight
I think it was replaced because dumbdumbs didnt like it. like you said, it requires forethought. And gaming as a whole is constantly being dumb down so more people can enjoy it. and by doing so makes it less enjoyable for people that actually like complex mechanics. Just like the quest marker. Why figure out where the thing is when a floating marker leads you right to where you need to go. This was changed because dumbdumbs couldnt find the cave down the river.
CT charge time, has always been a cool element of FFT. It’s unfortunate how the magic system just gets overblown by classes with instant abilities. Chemists have instant healing, guns fare better than Archer’s charge, the holy sword abilities being too powerful, and scaling of melee classes to one shot mages especially when charging users receive bonus damage, scaling with Speed issues, where you can start an extra turn before your spell charge finishes, wasting an action.
Delayed reward and high learning curve, most people will ignore it in favor of something easier to use that's why they made it easier to use in FFTA and TA2. Frustration is the best way to get someone to drop your game. That's why the Vagrant Story flopped despite being a great story, the battle system was just too frustrating for most people. The FF14 example, how often do black mages eat a mechanic just to not have to move out of leyline? It's honestly a meme at this point.
It’s still funny to me that Tom argues so fervently to nerf Orlandeau - something many peeps vocally oppose. Now, knowing his adoration of charge time which folks are largely in favour of losing in the future? It’s even *more* hilarious… Tom, I’d be worried for your ego if you weren’t such a genuinely kind person based on how you interact with us. Even when I don’t agree with you (you hate FFXIII *and* love both FFXV and FFXVI… Whuh?), you’re never being an ass about these things. Just firm about your opinion, really… and knowing that my own lack of self-confidence is debilitating, having a healthy sense of ego and opinion is a healthy thing to possess.
I think one of the problems with charge is that not everything interacts with it, and so it feels like a penalty, part of it comes from some of the story characters being pretty busted. I do prefer it to starting with zero MP though, it feels so crappy to unlock a big spell and then never use it because its too expensive and you don't want to base your team around it.
I think the charge system was a great dynamic. However, later in game, it gets a bit tedious. When it takes X amount of turns to perform a spell, while other forces could be taking their time destroying your faction. It gets left by the wayside. But don't get me wrong, FFT system was super strategic and thoroughly enjoyable. A little flawed, yes. But! It was always enjoyable
I was bord a few weeks ago and managed to download fft wotl on my psp cause I have the original and love it I just wanted to finally try wotl. Love the game still but never can find anyone for the online stuff but I understand but now wish I had done it years ago to see what those was about.
I think the biggest problem was mid game onward. Long charge times made many spells effectively worthless due to how fast characters can get end game and how hard they can hit, by endgame even Short Charge didn't mean you could fire off tier 4 or even 3 tier spells effectly without taking serious damage Dorter is good example of this, it's arguably the hardest fight in the game and it's right at the beginning. Basic spells were doing comparatively huge amounts of damage and closing in immediately could easily spell game over if you couldn't drop the Black Mages before they got their mojo working Later? Oh, he's casting Fire 3... that's not a threat that's overkill in bonus damage for my Lightning Stabbing Knights and my cracked Ninjas Meanwhile in playthroughs with exclusively Black Mages you find yourself favoring basic spells because of their short charge speed. Same thing with Summoners How they could've fixed magic to be more impactful endgame was make a spell casting speed stat that could speed up charge time which could be enhanced by gear, stat growth, and skills like Yell/Accumulate For instance, a character spent most of their time leveling up as a Time Mage? Now they can cast Meteor as fast as they move, got gear that improves cast speed with the Short Charge support? Now the Time Mage can cast it faster than a basic Fire spell from a naked Black Mage. If the opponents already moved my Time Mage starts casting it soon after, they can do nothing but take the L as they wait for their next turn
Thing is Mages weren't that much more powerful to compensate. You could just use Draw Out, Holy Sword skills or a lot of other attacks that were just as powerful with no MP use OR Charge time.
This mechanic harks back all the way to the grand daddy of RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons. Yet even DnD abandon this mechanic when they released 3rd edition, and since then there has been discourse of mages being over-powered.
Didn't even finish the video because charge magic in SOC. That said ff tactics was a little to easy if I remeber, pretty sure u got exp for hitting yourself and can level up super fast with it. Pretty sure I was so over leveled that I never needed to use charge attacks when a single as was enough half the time. Love the game tho and final fantasy games in general. Fire emblem is still my favourite in the genre.
Personally the charge system is just not that fun to me. It can be interesting but it cam also be boring. Missing your attack that changed leaves you feeling like you wasted your unit. Personally i think charges should track or they need to just give magic more tactical uses and eliminate charge. That is how magic is done in Our Adventure Guild and that is my favorite magic system. Your mages start with full mana meaning your best spells are available from the start. The tactics come in with choosing the best spell for the job while also conserving mana. You have spells that can move a single target instantly, apply DOT, stun your enemies, or even take action points away from the opponent. Higher cost spells usually affect more targets but will leave you dipping into your limited potion supply. They give mages immediate effectiveness of other units without arbitrarily limiting them with turns of complete inaction.
@@TitaniumLegman true but you don't have to wait 3 turns just to miss. You can miss at the point you make the decision and immediately get back to strategic play the next turn rather than waiting on a decision that made sense several turns ago
What are you talking about? >points at Kingsvein >points at Convallaria I know you've been playing at least one of those, that IS the Charge mechanic. Fiddling with exactly how long you charge for is way less interesting than burning the ground with your giant meteors or debuffing enemies as soon as you start casting. The only thing we're missing is targeting your own dudes with Firaja and running them into the middle of the enemy. Although we're also lacking quite a bit in Mana control in depleting enemy offensive resources. The primary thing stopping us is the pace of combat. In order to make a single battle not take hours, we've had to streamline the whole system and drop a unit in 1-2 hits. That is fundamentally too punishing for squishy mages standing still for ages, and is overkill if your megaspell does 2.5x the damage of someone's max health.
@@TitaniumLegman Because it shouldn't be ALL spell casting. Cantrips are necessary for similar reasons, you need SOME of the things mages can do to be same turn so that disrupting them is not so automatically meta. You can, in theory, equip a non-spell second job to handle all your cantrip needs in an FFT system, but it's clunky with needing to invest half your kit. Don't get me wrong, SoC is absolutely not the role model to use for a comprehensive system, but a lot of the pieces are there. Don't forget Alert. More Charge mechanics than what's already there might work for a game like The Last Spell, but with the current pacing of story-driven srpgs we're close to the limit of what flows well.
@@benedict6962 Oh I would definitely like there to be cantrip style spells that are weak but circumnavigate the charge, that would be cool. It's a good addition to an otherwise strong system.
The only charge I don't like is when my Archers best, longest charge won't ever hit a square because everyone gets to move before she shoots lol I'm still confused how the super long charge is supposed to even work.
So when I was a kid, I was always wondering why JRPGs tended to be so strategically shallow. I'd get bored of them and quit half way through because the gameplay didn't meaningful change and I'd get tired of it. They were my favorite genre in some ways and one of my least favorite in others. But the truth I didn't realize yet then was: developers want the gameplay shallow. It's the same reason why almost all JRPGs let you level grind as much as you want until a level cap way higher than what you ever need: the games are intended to be something anyone can finish. In other words, they're easy. But devs don't want them to feel easy, so they try to complicate the gameplay or make it feel hard without it actually being either. Charge system going away in favor of MP gain over time is an example of this. It's meant to feel like you're carefully managing a resource, but actually it's really obvious how to make the best use of it. Charge was nuanced so not everyone liked it or could wrap their head around it so devs got rid of it. I ended up quitting JRPGs because of this mindset they have.
Yeah, casting time was apparently ridiculously complicated in PnP AD&D, but man did it work in the Gold Box video games. I LOVED when I saw it in this game. But D&D did away with it! The only other series I can think of that does this is Legend of Heroes starting with Trails in the Sky And I LOVE it in that series, too. What they both do fairly well is they give a relative cost to using the instant healing abilities (items are money!).
Sword of Convallaria sorta has a charge system on some spells and abilities, but it isn't quite the same. However I miss FFT's ATB system where performing less actions means a character's turn comes back around quicker... AND WHY TF CAN'T I ROTATE THE MAP IN SoC?! Sorry that one's been bugging me, lmao.
Casters in FFT stress me out when u r on level with them. As someone who isn’t big with ranged physical melee in this game casters are…gruesome at times. But yea the charge system is so much fun and it makes u think way more than just firing off spells like a freggin machine gun.
The charge system was such a sad loss in the FFTA games. It adds a nice extra layer of complexity to the game. Was what we had in FFT perfect? Absolutely not! But it's so fixable that mods have been doing so for ages. And even what's in vanilla doesn't start to really crack until later on - beyond it being just as unintuitive as most of the rest of the game. Learning roughly how charge time works is still way better than going into Gariland unaware that you have other party members or getting softlocked at the end of Chapter 3.
Correct and correct. I think people's issues with Charge are more just issues with all the rough edges FFT has. The more you play the game and learn it's functions, the happier people tend to get with it. That's due to the underlying design of everything involved, and I love that so much.
Charge does not scale well into the late game, the number of ticks required to activate a charge competes with the enemies speed. Charge +10 has a speed of 5, meaning anyone with 6 or more speed would never be hit by it without aid. Speed increases for everyone as they level. Unlike Cloud's Limit ability, Charge is not effect by the Quick Charge ability (lame). Since charge does not interrupt your ATB, it acts like free damage and doesn't slow you down at all, so in the early game its great.
Charging would have been a lot better if it was more consistent like one turn a charge 3 or whatever is 2 turns and then next time a charge 3 is 9 turns. Archers charge 5 on up are pretty much unusable.
@@TitaniumLegman I guess the benefit of their charge skills being mostly useless is that they don’t scale damage all that much. Better to just normal attack than throw down a charge for an extra 5-10% damage. That will almost certainly get dodged 😂. I so wish archers were better in Tactics. Such a cool class.
The charge skills are based on CT so the number of actions that occur between setting the skill and it triggering varies depending on how many other units fill their CT bar during that time. It's true that the larger charge skills are increasingly useless because they just never trigger in time, but the trick to use them is to press right before choosing the charge level and compare them to the ACT list. You can then select the most powerful available charge skill that still triggers just before your target's turn. If you target a slow enemy that just ended their turn, you can get in one of the higher charges, but even if the enemy will be acting soon, you can usually squeeze in at least a +1 or +2 and get a little extra damage at no real cost and without having to guess how much charge would be best.
FFT charge time is a core mechanic, so I doubt they would be able to alter, reduce or even remove it. The fact that FFT did not do the side vs side turn system, opting for an individual turn order is what I find astounding. So few games take this approach, which I find to be the real crime here. There was even a mod for XCOM2 that implemented it into the game. Too bad the mod author never updated it for WoTC... The biggest issue in FFTs magic system was that it was completely outclassed by the faster and more guaranteed physical jobs. With multiple more variables, calculations and mechanics affecting it, magic was quite simply too convoluted to invest in. Not only that, WHITE MAGIC COULD MISS!! Now, the one mechanic that I would like to see get scrapped is that ridiculous zodiac affinity. it's implanted into everything and has absolutely no value other than being yet another calculation value. It adds nothing and most did/do not even know it exists. interesting note, I also have many job reworks and alterations penned... Especially archers and mages.
It’s gone from turn based tactics games because it’s very clunky when strictly turn based. It works great in games with real-time mechanics where you have much better control of when to do things, but FFT’s implementation was rough. You already had limited ways to control turn order, as you couldn’t delay turns, only skip them so that the next would come faster, and charge just added another layer to the awkwardness. It really showed in the physical jobs, with Archers and Dragoons suffering while Samurai, Ninja, Monks, and the special Knights thrived. MP/AP Charge systems work better for the speed based turn order style of tactics games because they play more nicely within their own systems. It allows for them to scale with Speed instead if fighting with it and puts setting up big spells and abilities more in the player’s hands than hoping your speed lined up well enough to get a good Charge timing. The system could be modified in some ways to make it better. Say for example, you select the area after it’s done charging. Or you charge it, then it’s held for you to unleash when you get your next turn. Speed could also affect Charge or maybe the character has a separate stat for Charge speed. But at that point, you’re borderline doing MP/AP Charge, just with an added command and a bit of vulnerability. It hasn’t come back for a reason.
My issues with the FFT charge mechanic: #1: You risk your mages specifically having nothing to do. With smaller battlefield sizes, your individual unit strength matters more, so having a unit where you might have nothing to do because the charge time is too little, or you're forced to use weaker abilities due to it, just doesn't feel good. Like, you talk how good this is for Mages, but think about how weak Archers are in FFT, who have a similar charge mechanic, because they can't really get enough out of their Charge ability. #2: Magic is friendly fire. Your options are either put the ability on the ground, and hope enemy units walk into it, or put it on an enemy unit, and risk the AoE not hitting the right targets, or worse, hitting your own units. Yes, you can plan around this, but there's a difference between Can and Have To, and Have To, again, generally feels worse. When I played FFT, I much preferred Summoners over Black Mages, because they'd have larger AoEs and no Friendly Fire while dealing similar damage for a little more MP. #3: Other units aren't balanced around Charge mechanics. Someone else brought up the Sword Knights, who can do better damage instantly, or most of the good melee classes, who deal their damage immediately, or Geomancers, or especially Calculators. Most of them do not have to deal with a charge-up time for their abilities. As done in FFT, I feel Mages are weak because so many other classes can deal damage quicker. #4: Not a FFT problem, but thinking about using this in Tactics Ogre. There are a decent number of RT altering abilities in Tactics Ogre, so if you set up a Charge ability on a unit, then another unit used an RT ability to speed up them before the Charge wore off, it could ruin your strategy without you having a real way to plan around it. Really, the core is that, as a player, you want your strategy to work because of your direct actions. You want to use powerful abilities but you want to limit them, its much easier to build to the powerful ability rather than have it but have it take a long time to work. That's not to say that Charge couldn't work, rather it'd need to be built into the game, as an option. Have an RT system where you can increase the damage or range or AoE at the expense of charge time, that'd work. Having a couple of classes have to deal with a mechanic that holds them back really doesn't work for me.
Maybe I'm just out of touch, but my response to charge abilities in FFT was to never touch any class that used charge time. Why bother waiting around to cast a spell when you can just punch a hole through the black mage? It's not that charge time can't be worthwhile, but as far as my experience ever conveyed, FFT ain't it. Biggest problem is, when IS my ability going to go off? There's no turn order. Kingsvein and related games use charge time to much greater effect. You can see when your spell will go off, and manipulating movement is core to the experience. Granted, not all spells HAVE charge time, but the spells that DO are well worth using due to high damage and AOE. In FFT, trying to get those charge spells to actually hit anything was very much not worth it when Ramza could just waltz up and punch a hole through anything in front of him. The damage output vs. time investment was never there.
You can see when the charge ability will trigger before you select it in FFT. It's really a black mark on the UI that it's in an obscure place and a lot of players don't find it. If you press right in the ability list before selecting it, the ACT window will open and it will show you exactly when the ability will trigger and who will take their turns before and after. Using this information, you can switch down to Fire from Fira, if Fira would be too slow, or you can seek out an enemy who doesn't have a turn coming up for a long while.
@@TitaniumLegman it's their opinion. How is your opinion somehow objectively correct and mine is wrong? The simple fact is, whether you like it or not, most people try the magic jobs in FFT and decide "Screw this. The game's hard enough as is. I'm going pure physical." Maybe they'll include a white mage for heals.
@@sr71silver nah, anyone who actually plays the game understands and appreciates the magic classes. That's not an opinion. It's fact. So yeah, they're wrong.
@@TitaniumLegman I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not. What right do you have to tell people that they are wrong about their own opinions on what they do and do not like? That just makes you sound like an arrogant asshole. Also, if it was such an amazing system that everyone liked then game developers would have put it in more games or large groups of players would have been asking for it. Neither of which have happened. So, clearly, yours is the minority opinion. Also, no. People who play the game over and over again "understand appreciates the magic classes." That is a very small subset of the player base of any game. Most people play a game once and then move on to something new. So no, most of the player base does NOT understand the charge system. Not least because it's never explained. Hell, the fact that you can look at the turn order list isn't even explained. And that's one of the most useful tools in making optimal use of the charge system. You just have to accidentally stumble across it. I'm not saying you can't do some cool shit with the charge system. I've done it. Anticipating damage and pre-casting a heal or extending your range by targeting your own unit with an AoE and then running them into the enemy are neat. But claiming that the entire system is objectively awesome but also universally liked is just a lie.
Nah you on your own on this one, I think most people didn't care for charge type things. Just clogs up the turn orders, there were no ground indicators to show something was being cast somewhere if you didn't already know the AoE. Not to mention you're never seriously casting your high end spells, they always take too long to actually go off and lack the distance to keep the caster safe.
@@TitaniumLegman FFT is more influential for its story and characters. There may be a niche hardcore group of players that love the nitty gritty, but most people just grind out some monks and ninjas and call it a day until Orlandeu.
@@TitaniumLegmanNah people I knew who played it back in the day didn’t like it. Everyone just didn’t use those abilities. It can still be popular and influential without considering the charge mechanic. If that mechanic itself was so influential we would have seen it in more games. That mechanic by itself was so not influential that you noticed no one uses it and made a video about it. FFT is one of my favorite games of all time but the charge mechanic is meh. It’s been meh in all games that used it before FFT, it never feels good to miss multiple turns only to have your cast hit a fraction or none of the targets you intended to.
@@xxJing if it was the story and characters that were influential, people wouldn't be making grid style turn based strategy games with equipment and classes lol
Best thing about casting spells, was that you could also use them in various ways. Like casting fire on your own knight with a flame shield and throw him into enemies damaging others and healing him and so on
Especially if you give said knight Move +3, and perhaps even Germinas Boots, he could vastly extend the range of your spell well beyond what your wizard could reach, while also keeping your wizard at a very safe distance from the enemies you want to blast.
FFT is by far the best Tactics style game out there for story, gameplay and classes, Imo. I recently started the Caos Omega mod for it that blanaces and chagnes classes and fights, been really fun so far.
It's so amazing that near 20 years later...this is still one of the best games ever made. It is flawed? A bit. Is it fun? Yup! Deep combat? Yup!
I don't really see the flaw in the game. Even the old localization was fine.
The only thing I really don't like about it is the story. It's just way too political for my tastes, and I feel like certain aspects of it are a bit vague. Heck, I recently just beat the game twice back-to-back because after the first run, I had other builds I wanted to try. And even doing that, with going through the game the one time, then again with the plot fresh in my mind, I still don't really understand what the main villains were ultimately trying to accomplish. Like, aside from just being evil, I don't really get what their end goal was, if they even had one. Especially when it doesn't really feel like the humans, and the Lucavi possessing them are even on the same page.
I think the real issue is that devs are terrified people might break their game's balance. The more complicated the mechanics, the more likely players are to find exploits.
So, they end up simplifying mechanics wherever possible. Replacing exploitable features with tedious ones.
FFT is very breakable, exploits and imbalances galore. When will they learn that's part of why we love it so much.
Funnily enough, the devs admittedly built this game with broken OP units in mind. They wanted players to have that power fantasy.
Mind you, I do not recall which interview I saw that said that though, but I do remember it being said.
the imbalance are earned through knowledge tho. you don't get OP randomly in this game.
Tactics is amazing exactly because there are imbalanced things BUT you can totally play and clear EVERY content without using any of it.
Its a choice and that's why other games are boring, there are no such choices.
You get OP with Scream, Yell, and Cid.
As long as they don't limit ur levels with this remake like they did with tactics ogre
I feel like the biggest problem with the game's balance doesn't even have anything to do with that, necessarily. It has to do with the game not presenting you with enemies that pose a very significant threat, aside from maybe a couple bosses. For the most part though, you're just fighting guys who have access to the same skills as you, but don't take advantage of the job system in any sort of an interesting or significant way. Meaning that if you have any idea of what you're doing, you're pretty much always going to be stronger than the enemies you're fighting, when in a tactical RPG, it should be the other way around.
It would be a lot more interesting if you had to go up against enemies who likewise abused the system (albeit to less extreme degrees) to not only present the player with a wider variety of challenges, but also to help teach the player that the sky is the limit, and perhaps give them ideas of things they can try themselves. Like maybe having mages with Equip Sword, or have a battle where you need to take down a bunch of knights with the heaviest armor available at the time, and Damage Split to make them that much harder to take down. Instead, pretty much all of the enemies throughout the entire game are as bare bones as they can be.
I agree. I love the charging system as well ever since it first debuted in the classic FF4, and it's been feature in some mainline FF but not all; however, it really does translate well in a Tactical game like FFT.
Additionally, one of my favorites JRPG series (the Tales series) features a charging time system for spells as well which I find just as fun to play around with. I like how some characters have an ability to store a charge and release the spell later with no charge time, allowing for better combo routes and style.
I didn't mind the system as much as how it was presented. You had to constantly be checking menus that filled up the screen every turn to know where every queued order was going to happen. I'd hoped things like the second screen on a DS or WiiU would prompt a revisit of it, but no luck. Visible turn orders have been pretty common lately (Octopath, Triangle Strategy, Chained Echoes), and I think having the turn order and execution of charge skills always visible through one of those would be a lot more intuitive and player-friendly.
Absolutely. Bigger screen shows and better resolution would absolutely make a visible turn order an expectation for me, and it would be great for charge.
The problem with charge time in Final Fantasy Tactics was that it made almost all magics unviable. The enemy would be targeted and then they would either move out of range of the tile the spell was targeted on or they would move in range where you nuked your own people from the AoE targeted on the character.
That's why you be smart, and bring gear on your front line that resits or absorbs the element of magic you most often use. Problem solved.
@@canisblack Assuming your speed is equal to the enemy's, and your CT is roughly equal, they will move first, allowing you to get your spell off easily.
On occasion, you couldn't pull off even a quicker spell before an enemy moved, especially later on in a fight as unit CT started to stagger out, but "unviable"? No.
@@TitaniumLegmanYeah you could jump through all of those hoops... Or you could just run melee fighters and ignore needing to jump through said hoops, and still win.
For the mechanic to be good and make mages effective, it needs to offer something that you would have no desire to play around. It needs to be more optimal than this.
@@IzraelGraves This just shows the game needs a balance pass, not that a system is bad.
@@TitaniumLegman Well OP said the issue with it in FFT, not the issue overall. I think almost any mechanic can work with the right scaffolding around it. There are some good ways you could change it. For instance, you choose a target area for the spell but once it comes back around to casting the spell, you could choose to cancel it (maybe you made a huge miscalculation or something else bad happened) or for some spells you could make the AOE by a tile or two in any direction (depends on the game and the size of the maps FFT has smallish maps so moving it 2-tiles might be too flexible). Perhaps this comes with like a 15% damage penalty. There are ways to help play around some of the worst aspects of these sorts of mechanics without reducing all the risk associated with them.
I also like the mechanic because it forces you to be vulnerable, and the added risk helps make it 'tactical'.
The catch 22 is i think it only worked well in tactics becase nobody took the time to check turn order, so you were always second guessing yourself and building anticipation.
FFT has 2 categories..
1: best game ever made.
2: Most underestimated game ever.
I think no one has bothered to duplicate it because theres just a niche audience that enjoys it. Most people who enioy casters prefer going into combat fully capable of bringing their best spells to the forefront and having it take effect immediately.
People who play casters want to dominate the battlefield. Thats whats fun for alot of people.
Now personally i dont have issues with the charge system. I'm ok with it but i dont mind it going away either.
If i were to re-design the charge system it would be mages could cast whatever spell they want, it takes effect immediately BUT depending on the strength of the spell, it delays the time when they could go again. Essentially, a speed penalty to depict how powerful magic drains their faculties. To take this further, i'd even add that certain spells could impose defensive penalties during the extended wait that only gets removed once the mage gets their turn again.
I wouldnt mind if the charge mechanic shows up again in the new FFT. What i'd like to see removed is the job levelling system. I hated having to stop myself from levelling in classes i wanted learn skills from because it had bad growths. I'd like for stat growths to be tied to the character themselves. That will allow me to freely jump around different classes without worrying about stat growths or having to create "farm units" whose sole job is to boost by JP gain in a class i dont want to level up in. For example, me wanting to play with jump but not wanting to level up as a lancer/dragoon so i create a bunch of lancers just to speed up JP gain in battle and prevent the class i want to add jump on from performing actions/gaining xp in lancer.
It sounds like you're looking for this explicitly in tactical RPG's, but they have this in Grandia and the Zeboid games. When your turn comes, you set your command and different commands have different delays until they actually trigger. While a command is waiting to trigger, it is vulnerable to counter play. In the Zeboid games, there are particular skills that trigger fast and cancel and delay the target if the target is "charging."
Honestly, I loved it as well. I feel like one of the main reasons that people didn't like it is because they aren't patient. Instant gratification has kind of taken over... if they have the mana to cast a spell, they don't want to have to wait to do so.
In terms of balance and actual tactical gameplay considerations, I've always been a firm believer in the charge time system being one of, if not the most balanced and tactically involved system that exists. As you described with the reference to FFXIV, when your entire group has to focus on protecting someone who has a spell with a long cast time but a massive impact on the battle, it feels good, it is tactical in nature, and it reinforces the different roles ACTUALLY playing their part instead of effectively just gunning to ram as much dps down the throats of your enemies as possible (which, lets be honest, is where games like FFT tend to fall short with the introduction of characters and abilities like TG Cid and his kit instantly making the game easy mode) as quickly as possible. These people are complaining because they don't actually enjoy the tactical portion of a tactical rpg.
When a caster is squishy, then they generate threat by just beginning to start their charge time to cast the spell, so enemy units target them and try to stop said spell from being cast, it makes you have to actually think of a way to actively protect that caster during the charge time, and that is a successful application of tactical considerations and team composition in a TRPG. Building up mana is, too, but is significantly LESS tactical, involves significantly LESS team coordination, and really doesn't feel satisfying at all in completion.
@@AWeakPrinny Phenomenally stated, correct and agreed on all points.
wait, people dislike the charge system?
it doesn't work in many tactics type games (most work turns in phases so charging doesn't make sense)
really the charge system compliments tactics' CT turn order system, which itself is an oddity in that it lets you disrupt enemy plans by taking your turns in the middle of theirs, so to speak
the game has a certain interactivity that other tactical games like BoF lack, and the charge system compliments this type of game well
honestly i didn't even think about how most games don't have such a system, but yeah it's kinda wild that you're right
Exactly. That's why I feel games like Tactics Ogre, great as they are, lack a certain amount of moment to moment interaction. There's not much you can do to stop an enemy from doing a big attack once they have the resources to do so. You can try to mitigate the effects of said attack, but in most cases you're helpless to really stop it. In FFT, you absolutely can, and that what makes it special.
I know some games (radiant historia is the first that comes to mind) that have this system but doesn't force it into magic, but in the "wait" command that's useless in most rpgs, giving the command good use, you choose a point in cue to set a turn and end the current one, to make it different from defend that is recieve less damage and end your current turn, charge magic is used in rpgs with cue systems as a balancing act or a risk reward mechanic, last time I played FFT1 that was all risk, mid reward as some advanced classes can do a technique that has most advantages of normal magic techs with next to no wait time.
I´ve been trying for a while to find that balancing aspect that would make magic in my TTRPG feel impactful but not overpowered in comparisson to the other more martial or mystical (read miracle/willpower based) and THIS! thanks for reminding me this was a thing. Haven´t played FFT in a bit and I can´t believe it just eluded me. Casting time representing the complex mathematical calculations needed to twist the fabric of space and time to manifest energy out of nowhere and in a controlled manner. The higher the Spell´s level, the longer it takes. The more adept the caster the more abilities and tricks they can use to optimize their output. Amazing, thanks so much dude!
I do like the charge system in FFT. Another system I thought was interesting was the HP spending for certain skills which was used in Fire Emblem 3 houses and Fire Emblem Gaiden. Just using health as a resource in games in general I find interesting.
Check out Othercide if you have not already, it could be right up your alley :)
It's interesting you bring this up, because FFT's charge mechanic was actually included by necessity to mask spell graphic loading times, rather than something they wanted to include. Matsuno said they weren't happy with it.
If that’s true then i wonder why the archer ability list even exists then 🤔
Do you have a source for that?
That's not true in the final product. Maybe it was used for an earlier version, but it is not necessary in the game as is.
@@TitaniumLegman YT's deleting my attempts to link the interview. But it's from an Unsung Story kickstarter Q&A. Here's the exact quote, which you can google:
Q: “FFTA and FFTA2 moved away from Charge/cast times, which I felt heavily took away from the depth of those games. Will Charge/Cast times be a core component of this game? One of my favorite mechanics in FFT was casting time."
A: Sorry, there won’t be casting times in this game. In fact, the reason why FFT included a casting time system at all was to allow the game time to load graphic effects. This was a necessary consideration due to PlayStation loading times and memory concerns. Speaking as a developer back in those days, I can tell you that we weren’t happy with it.
@disclaimin ya you tube will allow pedos and misinformation all day. A link though.... 🙄
This was an interesting system, but it favored martial jobs without charge. Yes, you can cast a big spell and wait 2-3 turns, but in that same time, a martial job can take out several units and not have to worry about enemies moving or not being in the right place when the spell is cast. If the charge abilities had better targeting, like any unit on the field, I could see it as a better system. I believe this is also why other systems out there, like D&D don't usually have 2+ rounds to cast spells. Simply because targeting has a range, and waiting for the thing to happen slows down the experience. D&D dropped it after 2e, and it seems like Squaresoft/Square-Enix learned a similar lesson afterwards. That is not to say it is not something can't be improved upon if reintroduced, or give it options, like if you want to have a charge time, have the targeting increased and/or additional damage or effects for doing so.
Personally I don't think charge will go away as it's part of the mechanics for it. For Tactics Ogre wise, I don't think that system had been in the game from the initially so not suddenly introduce to it make sense. Well charge system is around for a fair bit of games as I remember, for example recent games, UO and Sword of Convallaria have this as well. And FFT isn't first to introduce charge. Basically it's a form of Time Taken to charge with there should be a lengthy or much longer cast time. Langrisser did introduce longer charging time much stronger spells in 4 and 5 (I think 3 also but I can't recall it now) Those DnD game also uses this logic.
Pillars of Eternity 2 does this with spells in its turn-based mode. Some spells take a whole turn, some go off instantly, and many will fall somewhere in between. You can also build characters to have faster cast speed.
this game gives me feelings of nostalgia. played this years ago on PS 1
I know a tactics game that had a delayed magic which cast after a turn(after enemies moving) . But people never liked it since it was hard to predict enemy moves. So that it is changed to desperation move which is cast when a rage gauge is full (like from fighting game)
The charge mechanic is great, it adds a layer of risk/reward and makes its so you can either do terrain denial or glue a spell to a target. Because the higher level spells take longer to charge, you cant just spam them. The added damage that mages take while charging, glorifies their glass cannon archetype.
Speels and summons remain powerful through the game. Never mess with a female mage fully decked out with MA plus gear, with the samurai job class slotted.
Hell yeah, you know what's up my friend!
Looking at the comments, I didn't realize how unpopular charge time was. I like it but then again, I'm an overly baised fan like you. I find very few faults with FFT and inconvinces are fixed by the Remixed mod. Also I assume you find joy in mastering higher learning curves. The content I make on my channel is nothing but niche games because, it's the only thing in gaming I'm truly passionate about. So good on you for not chasing what'll just make you popular. Quality content does deserve soul, in my opinion.
Haha, I love seeing my mod get praised when I'm not expecting it
Tom is on a mission.
I could listen to people talk about final fantasy tactics all day. Awesome vid. I'm actually designing a tabletop card game similar to fft. Its currently in the testing phase.
@@ebonysoldier oh now that sounds very interesting! I'd be curious to see how it works once you have it in a state to show off. 👀
I remember when I stood outside of target 2 hours till opening to pick up back in ‘97. Then after beating in a few times I eBay’ed it. Then got a copy of war of the lions. And all the name changes and what not was as hearing nails on a chalkboard.
I used a Gameshark back in the day to unlock the Non-Charge ability and it instantly made a ton of jobs viable. It's basically the only way I saw Cloud's limits and most of the Summon spells. Maybe you could argue that using those skills as an instant is too powerful, but there was still a Short-Charge variant that was learnable and seemed mandatory for a ton of jobs.
I have such fond memories of making glass cannon black mages just to try and get one cast off
I think that the Flintlock from FFTA2 is the closest thing we've had to a charge time in FFTA (1 turn to Prime), the only problem is that Roar exists (and is pretty common too) to rip the pom-poms off of any Moogle who DARES to Prime in the vicinity, and that the payoff is mid.
Too bad that no other classes use the Prime buff to balance it, like the Cannoneer or Parivir.
The tactics games by Rad Codex (they've done, Voidspire tactics, horizon's gate, kingsvein, and some others) do have the charge system as well. They are also similar to FFT in the sense that you can combo different jobs and passives for your party. My issue with their charge system is that it needs a step above in order for you to cast it. The charge spells are powerful and hit an area but most of time, the enemies just walk away from the aoe. You need to reduce the amount of squares they can walk or create blocks (There are spells for that) in order to lock them in place until the cast time ends. I ended up only using said spells with stationary enemies.
1) It's deeply unintuitive and the UI isn't set up for it right now. Most people just do not understand how CT works and can only vaguely grasp turn order generally. Part of this is that the UI is not set up well to explain how it works and you need to read a mechanics FAQ to learn some of the crucial details. There would need to at least be a turn order timeline (like in LUCT/TO:R) that immediately predicts when the Charge move is going to go off.
2) It was not very well-implemented in ways that make some classes and characters less fun to play. It's mostly well and good for mages, but the entire Archer class feels boring because its whole active skillset is nothing but minute variations on Charge+X. Dragoons and Cloud are in similar weird boats where, unless you understand how things work, stuff just moves out of the way and you get frustrated. Again, mages can get around this somewhat with big AoEs, but it can still be an issue.
3) It scales terribly. Every tick, units gain CT equal to their Speed, and Charged abilities advance toward their resolution. In the early game, this is relatively balanced, and if Speed was invariant other than by class selection, equipment, and buffs, this would be fine. But Speed has a growth coefficient, meaning it will go up over time, and even a few points in Speed growth can have an outsize impact on how quickly units get turns: The difference between 10 and 15 Speed is a turn about 3 ticks faster on average, which is enough to get out of a Fire 4 that started charging after the character's last turn. Unit Speed roughly doubles from 1-99 in most jobs, so by normal endgame levels it's maybe 40-50% higher than it started at across the board, which is pure downside for Charge abilities; and worse, Ninjas both get way higher Speed multipliers than other jobs but also are rewarded for building for Speed because their weapons use it for damage calculations. Combine this with lots of degenerate movement and attack range options for lategame player builds and I find that enemy mages just aren't threatening anymore; their Charges are basically buffs to make them more easily one-shotted by dual wielders. Notice that this is much less of a problem in Tactics Ogre, because the overwhelming majority of influence on action frequency in LUCT/Reborn comes from equipment and buffs, and base RT remains static; thus, Folcurt will always act faster than most other characters in a given class with similar loadouts, but he will never start moving so quickly that he's lapping people absent tons of buff/debuff stacking.
TL;DR it's not a bad mechanic, but FFT implements it badly. SPD needs to be invariant to not unfairly punish Charge users later in the game and the UI needs to clarify the distinction between ticks and turn order so that it's easier for the player to grasp.
A turn order mechanic would be good. FFT suffers from the limitations of the console era it's from, but I don't hold that against it. As far as speed base classes, that's a separate balance point that doesn't actually impact the functionality or Charge, and ALSO is only an issue when you start really min-maxing, which only a fraction of a fraction of players will do. I care about the average player experience when designing mechanics, anything else is secondary.
Counter points;
1) FFT did have a turn order timeline, it was just not obvious. the easiest way to check the turn order we to simply press left or right when selecting a skill.
2) We do not talk about Archers, the red-headed step-child of jobs. As for Dragoons, it was simply knowing your turn order and planning for it.
3) Magic scales terribly, not the charge mechanic. And, yes, I agree, speed should be a fixed stat, only affected by gear and spells/skills.
Fun fact; the Thief job has a higher speed stat growth than the ninja.
@@TitaniumLegmanThe charge times for archers were utterly garbage past the first few. Why would you spend more than a turn charging when you could just repeatedly basic attack and do more?
I've only played FFTA and yeah this system sounds dope as hell.
Nice video! I agree with the broader point (that magic needs drawbacks if its "per-turn" effectiveness is higher than other options, and MP isn't a good one on its own), but I also agree with other commenters that FFT's specific implementation isn't the best. You mentioned Jump, and it's a good example of the how badly balanced CT can be: any of the stronger versions are essentially impossible to use unless the enemy is Immobilized, and then you start running into team comp balance issues (could any 2 other party members do a better job than 2 slots dedicated to locking enemies down for charge characters?).
I think the CT system would be a lot better if enemies used it more (immobilizing themselves effectively by charging attacks on you), or if the maps were more strategic with more elevation and chokepoints (spells being able to fire vertically is a big advantage over melee, it just often isn't relevant). Of course, if we start "What if"ing FFT, we'll be here forever. 😅
Thanks for the video and take care! Always fun to dust off the game designer hat and chat about this stuff!
One thing I would have liked to see is some kind of fast casting tied to job level. I know there's a short charge ability with Time Mage, or at least I think it is Time Mage. It makes sense for magic to take time to cast as the PSX version has incantations that occasionally pop up. It would also make sense for the more practiced a character is at their job to get better at casting those spells. I'm not even saying level 8 should be like 50% or more efficient even 25% seems like a good fit. That said, I run at least one and sometimes two mages in basically every playthrough. I do actually enjoy the charge system and think it was executed quite well for the era.
Semantics, but the "charge system" is just the speed system, but for skills that utilized (read: needed) it, which revolved around its CT system. It worked in FFT because it was likely "balanced" (whatever your interpretation of that word for this game may be) around a unit's speed stat in mind.
Another game using it would need to copy or implement a very similar system in place to make it work.
Of course. Charge is intrinsic to how FFT is designed. You could say the same about how other games handle mana and action points. If it's designed for the system tho, I think it's the best way to do mana.
Kingsvein. Combined with mechanics that allow for range extension and insane interaction with the map, there's nothing quite like ambushing an entire room with your charged earthquake from stealth, using the earth to launch your traps like a catapult into a team to start a fight. God I love that game. Rad codex makes some badass strategy games.
Oh yeah, you recommended that one to me in the past! I gotta check that out.
@@TitaniumLegman You should, Rad codex is basically a one man studio, but they have some incredibly deep SRPGs. Kingsvein hooked me in, but then Horizon's Gate is just like...what if FFT let you have a ship fleet and do merchant stuff, and I guess now we're doing Golden Sun puzzles over here.
I forgot that part, one of the things their games do is letting you interact using combat mechanics on the world map constantly. Don't want to do the raft puzzle? Have your wizard freeze the water. Don't want to fight that boss? Throw him off a cliff and go back for his crown on the rocks below later. Want to skip reloading your crossbows or guns? Slap on a bandolier and just equip 4 of them at once 🤣
There really is a lot that FFT did that a lot of newer tactical games seem to ignore. On top of the charge time for spells or big skills but also height. I know Tactics ogre does but other seem to ignore elevation all together, maybe giving a slight bump or hill but otherwise no real impact on the maps or characters being able to use it to advantage.
I bet I could change your mind. But why would I want to? You're 110% correct.
When I was a kid, I hated the charge mechanic because it meant my attacks could miss, or other such nonsense. Nowadays though, as an adult who actually understands strategy (seriously, when I was a kid, my idea of strategy was charge in at full speed and hit stuff, to the point where the only accessories I would ever use were the Battle, and Germinas Boots, and I thought all other accessories were complete garbage), I very much appreciate the charge mechanics for how much more thought they require the player to put into their actions. Not to mention how you can place a spell to be charging in advance to manipulate the movements of the upcoming enemies, or even do something like place a Fire spell onto your own Red Dragon, then move the dragon into position to blast the enemies while simultaneously healing the dragon.
Heck, during a recent play through of the game, I even found myself wishing that there was a mechanic where you could willfully increase the charge time of spells. Because sometimes a spell would go off one turn earlier than I wanted it to, such as if I needed an extra turn to get into position for buffing the party, or I wanted to cast Raise on a character, but wanted it to fire off immediately after the enemy's next turn instead of immediately before so that my revived character wouldn't be instantly taken out.
Also, if you have the foresight, it can be fun to take advantage of charge times with a mime. Get one character charging a spell. Then, while the spell is charging, get your mime into position for the spell to hit the intended target, while your wizard perhaps hit nothing at all.
Oh now that's clever. I never used monsters, so it never occured to me to use a dragon as an elemental time bomb. 😂
@@IzraelGraves During my last couple runs, I used a few monsters. I decided to try playing the game by actively using all 16 possible units in my party. Swapping them around to suit whatever my needs were in any given battle, and getting the slackers caught up in levels while doing proposition quests. And because I personally find humans to be rather boring (this is a general opinion, not necessarily tied to Tactics specifically), I decided to throw in some monsters as well to mix things up. On the first run, it was only a Red Chocobo, and Worker 8. But on the second run, I threw in a Red Chocobo, Cockatrice, Red Dragon, and Great Malboro.
Speaking of which, I also considered attempting that sort of thing with Worker 8, but he's so slow that it doesn't work quite as well with him. Still, he is handy in that you can place down something like Bolt 4 or Meteor, and not need to worry about him getting destroyed by your own spell.
I've actually thought about whether a tactics game where commands are given in the present, while actions happen in the future after 'setup' time (after charging in your case) would be more or less enjoyable/interesting. I'm no where near the expert you are when it comes to tactics games, but I want to speculate on why it's not used more often. Keep in mind that I'm largely reasoning about all actions being delayed, not just magic in this case.
- It vastly complicates the combat system. If you give the unit a command and it is done immediately, the game state never changed between the two steps. But if the command happens on a delay, then the game has to consider whether the unit still able to even carry out the command by the time they're ready. This is further complicated if the game allows compound turns like Move and then Cast. Now the first part of your command could fail (eg. the spot you're moving to is occupied), and it's not obvious what should happen to the second part. Damage prediction and such that come standard with modern tactics games also become misleading, but that's a more minor issue.
- It could potentially be very frustrating for players to be on the wrong end of this kind of a system. It's gratifying to see an action happen as soon as the command is issued. But if the player is constantly targeting into the future and then getting interrupted or missing, that could lead to a frustrating experience - the time/resources wasted is higher than just, say, wasting a turn by missing an attack.
- It allows for more abusive playstyles that AI can't effectively challenge. In a game where both sides are human, mechanics can be dynamic and designed to significantly punish or reward the players conditionally. The expectation is that the player facing an extremely punishing ability would 'play around it'. This is not the case in single player games, where generally players end up trivializing the game if they discover some abusive playstyle or build, because designing the AI to know to deal with everything is hard - sometimes even the game designers themselves will not anticipate what kind of strategies the AI will face. I think a charge system is appropriately high-risk/high-reward that it would lead to a lot of abusive playstyles. Granted, you could argue players figuring out abusive playstyles to trivialize the game is a fun thing.
Overall I'm not saying a delay/charge system doesn't work, but that it's difficult to get right. It certainly allows for a deeper game. I think if the scope is more limited where it only applied to some spells which all behaved in a similar way, then it could avoid the issues above. But like I said, I was more thinking about the concept of delayed actions in general.
I do like the Charge system in FFT, generally, because the game is also generally balanced around it.. Geomancy spells do significantly less damage than a big BLM spell but also are free and instant. FFT's charge system adds a system of trade-offs for power. And those are fine. Obviously some units do not have to make those trade-offs, the unique class units, but generally I feel like the base game classes that are openly available are generally pretty balanced, in part due to cast times. Even Calculator, it has a horrendous base speed, which effectively acts like a cast timer between shots.. but cross-classing can alleviate a lot of that balance too, lol.
Also.. it makes *sense* that spells need to charge. FF4 has cast timers too, and some spells are better than others *because* they have a low charge time, but might have lower power or a higher MP cost.. stuff like that just makes sense in brain.
My theory is that the reverse will happen in a remaster where they add a "charge" to other skills that don't have them like the Knight Abilities.
After watching this video I was like I KNOW I played something with a charge system, but it took a few days before it clicked and I finally remembered WHAT it was.
While more of a turn based JRPG with light TRPG elements instead of a proper TRPG, a good chunk of the Trails/Kiseki/Legend of Heroes series runs a charge system for it's version of magic [Arts]. All spells have charge (typically heals are shorter, attacks are reasonably long). Some spells target a zone of the battlefield, while others home in on the selected foe even if the foe moves.
On the downside the minmax builds may be mega-OP and make a lot of that redundant/unneeded on some of the games. And some players take issue with having to chose between manual move without attacking (bonus of reduced wait time for next turn) vs. letting the game automove you to the game's choice of end destination if you try to attack a foe that requires moving to get close enough to hit that turn.
Basically the combat combines the visible turn order and some actions give shorter/longer delay system of FF10. Plus a lighter version of the FFT charge system. Plus a Xenosaga series-like "bonus effects" on certain turns. From a story perspective, Trails in the Sky is the 'best' starting point, but it has slow pacing issues and is not on many systems (only PC, PSP, and Vita with a Switch remake in the works).
(also honorable mention to the Grandia series, where charging spells and non-maxed weapon skills can be outright canceled by certain basic attacks or skills, as other comments have mentioned).
Though it's a Job System JRPG not a Tactics RPG, I've seen a Charge Magic Mechanic in Mary Skelter 2 and Final. The stronger Spells take time to charge, at first I didn't like it but after getting Cinderella and making her a Paladin and raising her Speed Stat while giving a passive to let her get the 1st turn in to set up to take damage away from the rest of the party. (Because if the caster gets hit the spell isn't triggered) Then I had 2 Blood Witches charging AOE High Level Magic with a Leech Job charging a AOE Magic Defense Debuff on the enemy (I gave this party member Speed raising gear to make sure it triggers beforehand) to wipe out my opponent but if something happens I had a physical attacker finishing off the scraps. Long story short I ended up loving this as it offers another level of strategic thinking.
they also take double damage while charging
The original Final Fantasy Tactics got me into tactics JRPGs, and I don't think I've fully liked any other one since.
Grand Kingdom from NIS America. I loved that game but like half of it relied on online play. So now that its servers shut down, i pray for a sequel
I played X before tactics and I loved that it had the same system
It’s dependent on a more complex initiative/turn order system, something most games have moved away from for a few reasons.
1) It’s complicated. FFT did not do a great job explaining how speed interacted with turns or cast times, and unless you read a guide on mechanics, you weren’t likely to understand it fully.
2) Systems that allow fast characters to get more actions than slow characters are incredibly prone to imbalance. There’s a reason characters that give other characters extra turns (haste-type casters, dancers in FE, Quicken in FFT) are always extremely powerful. Compound that and you get stuff like vanilla Phoenix Point where a single character can clear the entire map in one turn.
3) Generally, this sort of mechanic with slow mages moving slow (both in distance and turn order) and casting slower makes them significantly weaker for offensive play, when you’re constantly advancing. However, due to defense being simpler than offense for enemy AI, the bulk of battles have the player in an offensive role. This is why having high movement horse leaders on nearly every squad in Unicorn Overlord; when the game expects the player to advance constantly, speed of action is vital. Summoners with their big slow AoEs were cool in FFT, but they were not good.
I hated it as a kid, but I grew to like it due to the, ahem, tactics, required to use it effectively. To the haters, learn to read the timing system and it becomes much easier
lmao that cut to the title screen was great
Im glad someone appreciated it. 😉
Love the charging method, but i think it was implemented well. Specifically for the higher damaging spells. Too often, are you skipping multiple turns to deal damage when you couldve let off smaller moves. Reminds me of why people dont use Hyper Beam in Pokemon.
But if the power of the moves justified it, and the charge time was reduced on a bunch of them, then it would be better.
First spells should pretty much be instant (in my version, first spells, like fire1 and Cure1, would for "Acolyte" Job class). Meanwhile, Fire2 (in my version, would be for the class that specializes in Fire spells) would be similiar to Fire1 but require more mp. Fire3 would have larger AOE, more damage, more mp, and longer charge time. Fire4 would be on 1 target, equal mp to fire3, deal massive damage, maybe more charge time (think Kamehaha vs dodon ray for the dragonball fans). Then the Summon would deal damage similar to fire4 but with massive AOE, Longer charge time, and much more MP. But at most, you'd only skip on turn for any spell. Fire 1 and 2 would be pretty much instant, fire 3 and 4 require you to wait longer but not skip a turn, summon skips a turn but is the pinnacle of the element's power.
For me, Wizard/Black mage would do dark magics (like Unholy or other moves that mostly enemies have) and poison spells. And i would have a specialist of each other element (fire, ice, thunder). Earth would be geomancer, Holy would be Priest.
Summoner would probably be the thunder element but renamed.
Mystic's spells would be spread across other spell users but be the Ice element.
Mediator would also have its abilities spread to other classes and renamed and become the fire user likely.
From a game design perspective, the big issue is balancing these abilities. Because they take longer, they need to hit extra hard, but that runs the risk of being OP. On the flip side, if you mess up the placement, or something else happens that makes your previous target/targets no longer viable, it's now a HUGE waste of resources for the player which can be a big enough swing that you might have irreparably screwed yourself over. It can also be very difficult to visually display, assuming there are several of these abilities going on at a time. The balance between power and action economy is just REALLY hard to strike. I also think that it generally kind of feels bad to a lot of players to have one of these misfire or just to have a unit sit around and not actually do anything on their turn half of the time (depending on the way charge attacks work in your game).
I think charging works better if you have a battle timeline, like Final Fantasy X, wherein every ability you used could affect where you were on the timeline. So it was viable in the late, late game to just get a ton of speed on a character and abuse Quick Slash, or whatever it was called, over and over. The idea being that instead of you losing an entire turn to charging, which is a HUGE loss of action economy for the player, you are instead pushed back some on the action timeline but not too far. I think this also adds a lot of granularity for balancing the ability for the game dev. If you are able to make it so that your mages work on MP and charging, then you could have some Mages that are like burst focused, with low charges but high MP costs vs slower mages who are slower over the course of a fight, but end up being more consistent due to not running out of MP very often.
Probably in my top 10 favorite games of all time. My only gripe with the game is that there's no Red Mage. Before anyone says it, because people have said it before, a main black/sub white or vise versa is a Sage not a red mage. :P
Could've done more with it. Like, what if Throw Stone refunded 50% CT and halved movement next turn, and what if other wait-type options existed? What if archers weren't the only class who could customize charge lengths? (sure, some spells had longer timers, but MP was the main thing, and spell selection often only caught edge cases, and more often the edge case just dictated your target selection). Or what if your mage could "hold" a spell so that it triggered on the friendly target's action (or loss of action), or could even target your ally's melee attack square?
It was a little janky to orchestrate turn order stuff and maybe that minigame is rewarding if you studied it more, but it definitely feels chaotic at first glance.
Dorter is sort of peak one-shotting the foolish charging wizard, but sometime halfway through the game, you just pile on the power creep and nothing seems to matter anymore. Granted, you could just bench Orlandu, but you can't make me.
Archers needed more diversity in what they could do. Anything more than like 10 CTR was worthless, and they didn't have anything fun like snipes, point blank shots, or long shots.
That's a pretty good mechanic, but Sword of Convallaria has units with charge magic. The most genius mechanic that has never been duplicated is the increased range of an archer's arrows as he gets higher in map elevation. An archer who can instantly teleport to the highest point on the stage and blanket the field with arrows was one of the most satisfying builds. Not even Baldur's Gate 3 uses height to determine arrow trajectory.
Lost Eidolons has a simplified system. Archers on castle walls get a range boost.
CT was nice, but the lack of default visual indication was annoying. I'd prefer visible queue when you select a spell to show when it gets cast in the global turn order. You can do it through menus but it's annoying still. So combine the CT with Tactics Ogre turn order display.
I liked the idea of charge times but they needed to be shorter especially when you had skills equiped to reduce cast times... a good example was cloud you basically couldnt even get off a limit break ever even if you had quick charge on him 7 to 10 turns with quick charge was ridiculous 😅
Cloud just needs a re-work in general.
@@TitaniumLegman you couldn't use any of the strongest summons as a summoner for the same reason, anyone who said well they are to powerful I would point to Orlando, the sky pirate, or Ramsa as a dark knight
I think it was replaced because dumbdumbs didnt like it. like you said, it requires forethought. And gaming as a whole is constantly being dumb down so more people can enjoy it. and by doing so makes it less enjoyable for people that actually like complex mechanics.
Just like the quest marker. Why figure out where the thing is when a floating marker leads you right to where you need to go. This was changed because dumbdumbs couldnt find the cave down the river.
CT charge time, has always been a cool element of FFT. It’s unfortunate how the magic system just gets overblown by classes with instant abilities. Chemists have instant healing, guns fare better than Archer’s charge, the holy sword abilities being too powerful, and scaling of melee classes to one shot mages especially when charging users receive bonus damage, scaling with Speed issues, where you can start an extra turn before your spell charge finishes, wasting an action.
Delayed reward and high learning curve, most people will ignore it in favor of something easier to use that's why they made it easier to use in FFTA and TA2.
Frustration is the best way to get someone to drop your game. That's why the Vagrant Story flopped despite being a great story, the battle system was just too frustrating for most people.
The FF14 example, how often do black mages eat a mechanic just to not have to move out of leyline? It's honestly a meme at this point.
You can easily kill a mage before their spell lands. Arithmetick is OP
and so is Orlandeau who has OP sword skills that cost NO MP and NO WAIT TIME
And that's why Orlandeau needs a nerf.
It’s still funny to me that Tom argues so fervently to nerf Orlandeau - something many peeps vocally oppose. Now, knowing his adoration of charge time which folks are largely in favour of losing in the future?
It’s even *more* hilarious…
Tom, I’d be worried for your ego if you weren’t such a genuinely kind person based on how you interact with us. Even when I don’t agree with you (you hate FFXIII *and* love both FFXV and FFXVI… Whuh?), you’re never being an ass about these things. Just firm about your opinion, really… and knowing that my own lack of self-confidence is debilitating, having a healthy sense of ego and opinion is a healthy thing to possess.
You'd worry about charge time in FFT...until you learn Swiftness passive from time mage
Waiting 9 turns to cast Flare? How about just 2
Charge magic vs cooldowns
I think one of the problems with charge is that not everything interacts with it, and so it feels like a penalty, part of it comes from some of the story characters being pretty busted. I do prefer it to starting with zero MP though, it feels so crappy to unlock a big spell and then never use it because its too expensive and you don't want to base your team around it.
Yeah, that's the thing. Sword skill characters are just way too busted lol
I think the charge system was a great dynamic. However, later in game, it gets a bit tedious. When it takes X amount of turns to perform a spell, while other forces could be taking their time destroying your faction. It gets left by the wayside. But don't get me wrong, FFT system was super strategic and thoroughly enjoyable. A little flawed, yes. But! It was always enjoyable
I was bord a few weeks ago and managed to download fft wotl on my psp cause I have the original and love it I just wanted to finally try wotl. Love the game still but never can find anyone for the online stuff but I understand but now wish I had done it years ago to see what those was about.
The indie games by Rad Codex have charge time for spells.
While we are at it, how does the Archer ability work? Is it worth to charge their attack?
I think the biggest problem was mid game onward. Long charge times made many spells effectively worthless due to how fast characters can get end game and how hard they can hit, by endgame even Short Charge didn't mean you could fire off tier 4 or even 3 tier spells effectly without taking serious damage
Dorter is good example of this, it's arguably the hardest fight in the game and it's right at the beginning. Basic spells were doing comparatively huge amounts of damage and closing in immediately could easily spell game over if you couldn't drop the Black Mages before they got their mojo working
Later? Oh, he's casting Fire 3... that's not a threat that's overkill in bonus damage for my Lightning Stabbing Knights and my cracked Ninjas
Meanwhile in playthroughs with exclusively Black Mages you find yourself favoring basic spells because of their short charge speed. Same thing with Summoners
How they could've fixed magic to be more impactful endgame was make a spell casting speed stat that could speed up charge time which could be enhanced by gear, stat growth, and skills like Yell/Accumulate
For instance, a character spent most of their time leveling up as a Time Mage? Now they can cast Meteor as fast as they move, got gear that improves cast speed with the Short Charge support? Now the Time Mage can cast it faster than a basic Fire spell from a naked Black Mage. If the opponents already moved my Time Mage starts casting it soon after, they can do nothing but take the L as they wait for their next turn
Thing is Mages weren't that much more powerful to compensate. You could just use Draw Out, Holy Sword skills or a lot of other attacks that were just as powerful with no MP use OR Charge time.
This mechanic harks back all the way to the grand daddy of RPGs: Dungeons and Dragons. Yet even DnD abandon this mechanic when they released 3rd edition, and since then there has been discourse of mages being over-powered.
Didn't even finish the video because charge magic in SOC.
That said ff tactics was a little to easy if I remeber, pretty sure u got exp for hitting yourself and can level up super fast with it.
Pretty sure I was so over leveled that I never needed to use charge attacks when a single as was enough half the time.
Love the game tho and final fantasy games in general.
Fire emblem is still my favourite in the genre.
Charge magic in SoC is a completely different beast to FFT.
Personally the charge system is just not that fun to me. It can be interesting but it cam also be boring. Missing your attack that changed leaves you feeling like you wasted your unit. Personally i think charges should track or they need to just give magic more tactical uses and eliminate charge. That is how magic is done in Our Adventure Guild and that is my favorite magic system. Your mages start with full mana meaning your best spells are available from the start. The tactics come in with choosing the best spell for the job while also conserving mana. You have spells that can move a single target instantly, apply DOT, stun your enemies, or even take action points away from the opponent. Higher cost spells usually affect more targets but will leave you dipping into your limited potion supply. They give mages immediate effectiveness of other units without arbitrarily limiting them with turns of complete inaction.
Missing a charged spell is the same as missing a normal spell or attack tho
@@TitaniumLegman true but you don't have to wait 3 turns just to miss. You can miss at the point you make the decision and immediately get back to strategic play the next turn rather than waiting on a decision that made sense several turns ago
Laughs in calculator
What are you talking about?
>points at Kingsvein
>points at Convallaria
I know you've been playing at least one of those, that IS the Charge mechanic. Fiddling with exactly how long you charge for is way less interesting than burning the ground with your giant meteors or debuffing enemies as soon as you start casting.
The only thing we're missing is targeting your own dudes with Firaja and running them into the middle of the enemy. Although we're also lacking quite a bit in Mana control in depleting enemy offensive resources.
The primary thing stopping us is the pace of combat. In order to make a single battle not take hours, we've had to streamline the whole system and drop a unit in 1-2 hits. That is fundamentally too punishing for squishy mages standing still for ages, and is overkill if your megaspell does 2.5x the damage of someone's max health.
@@benedict6962 sword of convallaria has charge spells, but it's nowhere near a comprehensive system for all spell casting.
@@TitaniumLegman Because it shouldn't be ALL spell casting. Cantrips are necessary for similar reasons, you need SOME of the things mages can do to be same turn so that disrupting them is not so automatically meta.
You can, in theory, equip a non-spell second job to handle all your cantrip needs in an FFT system, but it's clunky with needing to invest half your kit.
Don't get me wrong, SoC is absolutely not the role model to use for a comprehensive system, but a lot of the pieces are there. Don't forget Alert. More Charge mechanics than what's already there might work for a game like The Last Spell, but with the current pacing of story-driven srpgs we're close to the limit of what flows well.
@@benedict6962 Oh I would definitely like there to be cantrip style spells that are weak but circumnavigate the charge, that would be cool. It's a good addition to an otherwise strong system.
The only charge I don't like is when my Archers best, longest charge won't ever hit a square because everyone gets to move before she shoots lol
I'm still confused how the super long charge is supposed to even work.
So when I was a kid, I was always wondering why JRPGs tended to be so strategically shallow. I'd get bored of them and quit half way through because the gameplay didn't meaningful change and I'd get tired of it. They were my favorite genre in some ways and one of my least favorite in others. But the truth I didn't realize yet then was: developers want the gameplay shallow. It's the same reason why almost all JRPGs let you level grind as much as you want until a level cap way higher than what you ever need: the games are intended to be something anyone can finish. In other words, they're easy. But devs don't want them to feel easy, so they try to complicate the gameplay or make it feel hard without it actually being either. Charge system going away in favor of MP gain over time is an example of this. It's meant to feel like you're carefully managing a resource, but actually it's really obvious how to make the best use of it. Charge was nuanced so not everyone liked it or could wrap their head around it so devs got rid of it. I ended up quitting JRPGs because of this mindset they have.
Yeah, casting time was apparently ridiculously complicated in PnP AD&D, but man did it work in the Gold Box video games. I LOVED when I saw it in this game. But D&D did away with it! The only other series I can think of that does this is Legend of Heroes starting with Trails in the Sky And I LOVE it in that series, too. What they both do fairly well is they give a relative cost to using the instant healing abilities (items are money!).
It would have been peak except for black mages that cast so fast and deal so much damage.
The rest of cast times in other classes are fine though
Sword of Convallaria sorta has a charge system on some spells and abilities, but it isn't quite the same. However I miss FFT's ATB system where performing less actions means a character's turn comes back around quicker... AND WHY TF CAN'T I ROTATE THE MAP IN SoC?! Sorry that one's been bugging me, lmao.
Casters in FFT stress me out when u r on level with them. As someone who isn’t big with ranged physical melee in this game casters are…gruesome at times.
But yea the charge system is so much fun and it makes u think way more than just firing off spells like a freggin machine gun.
FFT is one of the greatest games of all time
You post a FFT video and I thumbs up it before you even ask
The charge system was such a sad loss in the FFTA games. It adds a nice extra layer of complexity to the game.
Was what we had in FFT perfect? Absolutely not! But it's so fixable that mods have been doing so for ages. And even what's in vanilla doesn't start to really crack until later on - beyond it being just as unintuitive as most of the rest of the game. Learning roughly how charge time works is still way better than going into Gariland unaware that you have other party members or getting softlocked at the end of Chapter 3.
Correct and correct. I think people's issues with Charge are more just issues with all the rough edges FFT has. The more you play the game and learn it's functions, the happier people tend to get with it. That's due to the underlying design of everything involved, and I love that so much.
they should make FFT2 and give you your charged casting. I would not want to have it in other games in my humble opinion
Charge does not scale well into the late game, the number of ticks required to activate a charge competes with the enemies speed.
Charge +10 has a speed of 5, meaning anyone with 6 or more speed would never be hit by it without aid. Speed increases for everyone as they level.
Unlike Cloud's Limit ability, Charge is not effect by the Quick Charge ability (lame).
Since charge does not interrupt your ATB, it acts like free damage and doesn't slow you down at all, so in the early game its great.
Go play Voidspire Tactics, Alvora Tactics, and Horizon's Gate.
The charge system is GAY. Couldn't stand that shit.
Charging would have been a lot better if it was more consistent like one turn a charge 3 or whatever is 2 turns and then next time a charge 3 is 9 turns. Archers charge 5 on up are pretty much unusable.
I'd be okay with a stacking charge penalty, that would be cool. The real answer for archer is that charge shouldn't be their entire class skill. 🤣
@@TitaniumLegman I guess the benefit of their charge skills being mostly useless is that they don’t scale damage all that much. Better to just normal attack than throw down a charge for an extra 5-10% damage. That will almost certainly get dodged 😂. I so wish archers were better in Tactics. Such a cool class.
The charge skills are based on CT so the number of actions that occur between setting the skill and it triggering varies depending on how many other units fill their CT bar during that time. It's true that the larger charge skills are increasingly useless because they just never trigger in time, but the trick to use them is to press right before choosing the charge level and compare them to the ACT list. You can then select the most powerful available charge skill that still triggers just before your target's turn. If you target a slow enemy that just ended their turn, you can get in one of the higher charges, but even if the enemy will be acting soon, you can usually squeeze in at least a +1 or +2 and get a little extra damage at no real cost and without having to guess how much charge would be best.
FFT charge time is a core mechanic, so I doubt they would be able to alter, reduce or even remove it. The fact that FFT did not do the side vs side turn system, opting for an individual turn order is what I find astounding. So few games take this approach, which I find to be the real crime here. There was even a mod for XCOM2 that implemented it into the game. Too bad the mod author never updated it for WoTC...
The biggest issue in FFTs magic system was that it was completely outclassed by the faster and more guaranteed physical jobs. With multiple more variables, calculations and mechanics affecting it, magic was quite simply too convoluted to invest in. Not only that, WHITE MAGIC COULD MISS!!
Now, the one mechanic that I would like to see get scrapped is that ridiculous zodiac affinity. it's implanted into everything and has absolutely no value other than being yet another calculation value. It adds nothing and most did/do not even know it exists.
interesting note, I also have many job reworks and alterations penned... Especially archers and mages.
It’s gone from turn based tactics games because it’s very clunky when strictly turn based. It works great in games with real-time mechanics where you have much better control of when to do things, but FFT’s implementation was rough. You already had limited ways to control turn order, as you couldn’t delay turns, only skip them so that the next would come faster, and charge just added another layer to the awkwardness. It really showed in the physical jobs, with Archers and Dragoons suffering while Samurai, Ninja, Monks, and the special Knights thrived.
MP/AP Charge systems work better for the speed based turn order style of tactics games because they play more nicely within their own systems. It allows for them to scale with Speed instead if fighting with it and puts setting up big spells and abilities more in the player’s hands than hoping your speed lined up well enough to get a good Charge timing.
The system could be modified in some ways to make it better. Say for example, you select the area after it’s done charging. Or you charge it, then it’s held for you to unleash when you get your next turn. Speed could also affect Charge or maybe the character has a separate stat for Charge speed. But at that point, you’re borderline doing MP/AP Charge, just with an added command and a bit of vulnerability. It hasn’t come back for a reason.
My issues with the FFT charge mechanic:
#1: You risk your mages specifically having nothing to do. With smaller battlefield sizes, your individual unit strength matters more, so having a unit where you might have nothing to do because the charge time is too little, or you're forced to use weaker abilities due to it, just doesn't feel good. Like, you talk how good this is for Mages, but think about how weak Archers are in FFT, who have a similar charge mechanic, because they can't really get enough out of their Charge ability.
#2: Magic is friendly fire. Your options are either put the ability on the ground, and hope enemy units walk into it, or put it on an enemy unit, and risk the AoE not hitting the right targets, or worse, hitting your own units. Yes, you can plan around this, but there's a difference between Can and Have To, and Have To, again, generally feels worse. When I played FFT, I much preferred Summoners over Black Mages, because they'd have larger AoEs and no Friendly Fire while dealing similar damage for a little more MP.
#3: Other units aren't balanced around Charge mechanics. Someone else brought up the Sword Knights, who can do better damage instantly, or most of the good melee classes, who deal their damage immediately, or Geomancers, or especially Calculators. Most of them do not have to deal with a charge-up time for their abilities. As done in FFT, I feel Mages are weak because so many other classes can deal damage quicker.
#4: Not a FFT problem, but thinking about using this in Tactics Ogre. There are a decent number of RT altering abilities in Tactics Ogre, so if you set up a Charge ability on a unit, then another unit used an RT ability to speed up them before the Charge wore off, it could ruin your strategy without you having a real way to plan around it.
Really, the core is that, as a player, you want your strategy to work because of your direct actions. You want to use powerful abilities but you want to limit them, its much easier to build to the powerful ability rather than have it but have it take a long time to work. That's not to say that Charge couldn't work, rather it'd need to be built into the game, as an option. Have an RT system where you can increase the damage or range or AoE at the expense of charge time, that'd work. Having a couple of classes have to deal with a mechanic that holds them back really doesn't work for me.
sorry to be that guy, but Sword of Convallaria has skills that require charge time
@@postgenregenres individual skills, not an entire baked in system.
@@TitaniumLegman fair enough. i'll get back to you in about 2 years ;)
CT is cool. Too bad they decided to screw Cloud over with it though.
Yeah he needs a major buff or design in the new version FOR. SURE.
Is FFt the best FF game ever?
Maybe I'm just out of touch, but my response to charge abilities in FFT was to never touch any class that used charge time. Why bother waiting around to cast a spell when you can just punch a hole through the black mage? It's not that charge time can't be worthwhile, but as far as my experience ever conveyed, FFT ain't it. Biggest problem is, when IS my ability going to go off? There's no turn order. Kingsvein and related games use charge time to much greater effect. You can see when your spell will go off, and manipulating movement is core to the experience. Granted, not all spells HAVE charge time, but the spells that DO are well worth using due to high damage and AOE. In FFT, trying to get those charge spells to actually hit anything was very much not worth it when Ramza could just waltz up and punch a hole through anything in front of him. The damage output vs. time investment was never there.
You can see when the charge ability will trigger before you select it in FFT. It's really a black mark on the UI that it's in an obscure place and a lot of players don't find it. If you press right in the ability list before selecting it, the ACT window will open and it will show you exactly when the ability will trigger and who will take their turns before and after. Using this information, you can switch down to Fire from Fira, if Fira would be too slow, or you can seek out an enemy who doesn't have a turn coming up for a long while.
@@scottgoodrich5430 Well, how about that. Doesn't change the fisting problem though.
Charging is the worst part of the game.
Nah, Archers ONLY having charge is the worst part of the game.
@@TitaniumLegman early game, it dramatically slows down the flow of battle. End game, all the charging jobs are ditched.
No other game has copied it because most people HATE it.
And those people are wrong.
@@TitaniumLegman it's their opinion. How is your opinion somehow objectively correct and mine is wrong? The simple fact is, whether you like it or not, most people try the magic jobs in FFT and decide "Screw this. The game's hard enough as is. I'm going pure physical." Maybe they'll include a white mage for heals.
to serious WRONNNNG
@@sr71silver nah, anyone who actually plays the game understands and appreciates the magic classes. That's not an opinion. It's fact. So yeah, they're wrong.
@@TitaniumLegman I'd say I'm sorry but I'm not. What right do you have to tell people that they are wrong about their own opinions on what they do and do not like? That just makes you sound like an arrogant asshole.
Also, if it was such an amazing system that everyone liked then game developers would have put it in more games or large groups of players would have been asking for it. Neither of which have happened. So, clearly, yours is the minority opinion.
Also, no. People who play the game over and over again "understand appreciates the magic classes." That is a very small subset of the player base of any game. Most people play a game once and then move on to something new. So no, most of the player base does NOT understand the charge system. Not least because it's never explained. Hell, the fact that you can look at the turn order list isn't even explained. And that's one of the most useful tools in making optimal use of the charge system. You just have to accidentally stumble across it.
I'm not saying you can't do some cool shit with the charge system. I've done it. Anticipating damage and pre-casting a heal or extending your range by targeting your own unit with an AoE and then running them into the enemy are neat. But claiming that the entire system is objectively awesome but also universally liked is just a lie.
Nah you on your own on this one, I think most people didn't care for charge type things. Just clogs up the turn orders, there were no ground indicators to show something was being cast somewhere if you didn't already know the AoE. Not to mention you're never seriously casting your high end spells, they always take too long to actually go off and lack the distance to keep the caster safe.
If this was true FFT wouldn't be as popular and influential as it is
@@TitaniumLegman FFT is more influential for its story and characters. There may be a niche hardcore group of players that love the nitty gritty, but most people just grind out some monks and ninjas and call it a day until Orlandeu.
@@TitaniumLegmanNah people I knew who played it back in the day didn’t like it. Everyone just didn’t use those abilities. It can still be popular and influential without considering the charge mechanic. If that mechanic itself was so influential we would have seen it in more games. That mechanic by itself was so not influential that you noticed no one uses it and made a video about it. FFT is one of my favorite games of all time but the charge mechanic is meh. It’s been meh in all games that used it before FFT, it never feels good to miss multiple turns only to have your cast hit a fraction or none of the targets you intended to.
@naika_hatesyou7319 if you're missing multiple turns trying to cast one spell your setup is bad. That's a skill issue.
@@xxJing if it was the story and characters that were influential, people wouldn't be making grid style turn based strategy games with equipment and classes lol