Author's notes

This one has been sitting around for a while. In my project files, this sketch is listed as "Game 5 (Sketch 14)", reflecting the fact that I made after "Game 4" and "Game 6 (Sketch 5)", that is, Shepherd's World and Paleburg. That means it's been sitting around since the start of February. I made it one morning when I woke up way too early and I was too restless to fall asleep again. I made Paleburg the same day or maybe the day after. Since I had two games ready to go that week, I decided to pocket the less interesting one and save it in case I was ever too sick, tired, busy, or miserable to make a game one week. This week I wrapped up a game jam that I spent way more time on than intended just in time for an unstable neighboring hegemon to casually threaten nuclear war. It seemed like as good a time as any for a day off.

This one was kind of a "practice" game. I made it with the aim of familiarizing myself with RM2K's sample game data. I thought this would be a good way to have more complex player characters inside of the 60-minute time limit, letting me make "bigger" sketches faster in the future. This investment hasn't paid off yet, but it still might. My enthusiasm for using these premade pieces in a new game is presently low, partly because I've (for now) moved away from the 60-minute time limit, partly because there are other things I'm more excited about that don't mesh with the premade pieces, and partly because I was not that enthused about the results of this experiment.

So what did I learn? A few little things. 

• For how tiny their Defense increases are, the default armors are, largely, not worthwhile.
• Dragons make a terrible first boss. This is the single biggest factor in the sketch's catastrophic runtime. Grinding up to level - I think I was like, 15? - is a joyless slog. I used a Dragon because I thought it was the weakest enemy to appear alone in a premade enemy formation. Looking through the list now, I see there are actually a couple weaker options (Mimic, Treant, Harpy), any of which would have worked out better. I imagine I missed this because I was in a rush.
• Blind is surprisingly good. If it wasn't as good as it was, I would've needed to grind even more to beat the Dragon. It's too bad that status ailments are concentrated in such a small number of characters - I believe only Carol and Helen learn any. Three full characters have no spells at all, which makes them kind of unappealing to use in a game like this.
• Permanent stat-up items are way overpowered for how much they cost. They totally trivialize the last act of the game. Between this and the Dragon thing, the difficulty of this sketch is overwhelmingly concentrated in the early parts of the game.
• Gomez has really low HP. Why is his HP so low? This shit sucks. I should have just stuck with Brian.

The more exciting lesson in this had to do with structure. For this game, I divided the world into three maps and populated each with approximately one-third of the premade encounter formations, one town that sold approximately one-third of the premade equipment, and one boss gating the way to the next area. 

From this I can almost see something interesting starting to emerge. I am kind of in my "generic era" with RPGs right now, finding that I get disproportionate pleasure from simple, boring RPG experiences. (For instance, I recently had a blast playing Breath of Fire 1). Truthfully, I found it fun to grind up for the Dragon. The problem for me was not that I had to grind, but that I had to do it for so long with virtually no changes to the experience for most of its length.

If I center this experience, it starts to become a little clearer where improvements can be made. Having different regions within maps (or even dungeons) would give a greater sense of progression within acts, more opportunities for risk-taking and goal-setting and attrition as you attempt to seek out higher risk/reward enemies in more remote locations. I think you could make something interesting out of this sketch just by changing around the distribution of encounters and the contents of shops. 

But I have an admittedly romantic view of the RTP resources, of "generic" RPG aesthetics. And I feel like simpler game and narrative structures let them shine through more clearly. This is related, I'm sure, to a frustration I expressed recently with "overly" "designed" games. Somewhere in this mess of feelings is a fantasy to meaningfully inhabit this body of systems and aesthetics, but not to feel excessively demanded upon, communicated with. An aesthetic of designerless challenge. An impossible, contradictory thing. Part of the magic of retro RPGs is the difficulty in imagining the people who could have made them, the processes by which they could have been made, the intentions that went into the particulars of their design... There's something beautiful and mysterious in these games, which all feel like they could never be made now. But this feeling is rooted in nostalgia, orientalism, commodity fetishism... I think it's a dangerous impulse to indulge, although it probably won't stop me.

...

If you've read this far, I'll let you in on a little secret. There's a Final Fantasy II as well, which attempts to leverage the lessons I learned in this sketch to make a more satisfying default DB grind-'em-up. The result was nearly unplayable. For this reason I don't plan to release it officially. If you're curious, you can play it here.

Final Fantasy II adopts a similar format to Final Fantasy, but it's more ambitious. There are 5 overworld regions instead of 3, and they all share the same map. Each contains a dungeon with tougher enemies than its surrounding overworld region and a boss at the end. Defeating the boss lets you add a new member to your party, which includes only Helen to begin with.

This is the thing that made me call the game unplayable. I had severely underestimated what an advantage it was to begin the first Final Fantasy with a full party. In my test of the first game, it didn't take long to reach a point where I could safely trounce any encounter in the first region and afford to kit my party out with the best available gear. In the second, with just one party member available, it's a joyless slog. There's something interesting to this shape, too - I think it has more power to draw attention to the specific design of different enemies. But in its current form I had no desire to push boulders uphill long enough to find if its structural experiments worked out.

The corollary of this lesson is that it's a miracle the first Final Fantasy turned out as well as it did.

But it's gotten me closer to what I want out of an ultra-basic RM2K RPG. I'd like it if some sort of "Final Fantasy III" emerges, whether within the weekly sketch framework or not.

...

Final Fantasy was completely implemented in one hour. After I finished testing it (which took at least 2 more), I found there were two errors on the third overworld that made finishing the game impossible. Because they were tiny, I decided to correct them before release. One was that the mountain path to the airship was obstructed; the other was that the wrong page of the final boss event was set as default.