“What were they thinking?!?!” is a phrase in the dictionary of anyone who has played a terrible game. How could this make it past testing? How did the designers put this in with no issue? Why did they put this in? What were they thinking? When something about a game is bad, it’s easy to ask any of the above questions, but people rarely seek answers to these questions, and I want to use my knowledge of game design and theory to answer the question: What were they thinking? Let’s find out.
Street Fighter X Tekken
The year is 2010. Acclaimed fighting game Super Street Fighter IV has been out for several months and is a hit with Street Fighter fans, amassing 1,800 entrants in EVO that year and another Capcom fighting game is being teased. Tekken is still riding it’s release of Tekken 6 several years prior with Tekken Tag Tournament 2 in the works behind the curtain. The fighting game revival of the 2010s is in full swing with fans on both sides of the Tekken And Street Fighter aisle and at Comicon Street Fighter X Tekken is announced.
Cross over fighting games are nothing new to the Street Fighter and Capcom, with other acclaimed fighting games like Capcom Vs Snk 2, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, and Tastunoko Vs Capcom. This is Tekken’s first foray into the cross over fighting sub-genre but the first teasers look amazing. The hype for this game continues to go through the roof and fans are excited to see gameplay. Eventually, gameplay is shown and fans are able to get their hands on the new features doubts begin to sprout amongst the fans.
First is the Pandora System, which is a system which allows the player to sacrifice a character (each player uses 2 separate characters) to power up the other character for a limited amount of time and this causes some stirring after Marvel Vs Capcom 3 has launched with the relatively overpowered X Factor comeback system. Pandora ended up just being a small speed bump compared to the other big new feature of Street Fighter X Tekken and the largest reason it’s remembered in infamy:
The Gem System
The Gem System was something completely unique to SFxT and is a feature that hasn’t since and may never be repeated in a fighting game in the future. Before fighting the opponent, the player may select 3 “gems” to add to their team. Gems give your character a buff depending on what happens in the match and come in several colors which affect the game differently. Some gems increase the damage your character does, some reduce the damage your character takes, and some even makes inputs easier for the player to preform and some even auto block for the player in exchange for meter. The entire system is rather odd and brought up many questions of balance and the idea of pay to win. Gems can be won through gameplay, but before SFxT had even released Capcom had announced that some Gems would be DLC and there were even pre-order exclusive gems. While they may try to keep them balanced, some gems will be better than others and if some of those gems are locked behind paid DLC, a player only has the choice of buying that DLC or playing at a disadvantage.On the other side of the coin, if them gems barely affect the game or if they’re too hard to activate, why have them in the game at all? Both of these doubts came to a head when Capcom doubled down on them by announcing that the gems cannot be turned off which was answered with groans from the community. The players would get the ability to not equip any gems which became standard for some tournaments, but online not running gems was putting you at an immediate disadvantage. At the end of the day, most gems didn’t impact the game, with the exception of the auto-block gem, which players used not as the training wheels as intended, but instead as a anti-mix up tool. Other than the auto block gems, they were largely ignored and people tried not to use them when possible because it felt off. They barely affect the game, so why use them? Why include them in the first place? One may ask:
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!
As opposed to my Final Fantasy II WWTT?!?!, I have interviews with both Seth Killian and Ono-san to refer to, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to be primarily drawing on the interview with Seth Killian that can be found here
Without the input of Seth Killian, from my perspective, the main reason to introduce the Gem system is to, in a way, create more characters. Even though Player A and Player B both play Ryu, one may play a more offensive Ryu that gets rewarded for knockdowns and cross ups while the other may play a much more defensive Ryu that prefers to throw fireballs and keep a distance. Each player has gems that reward them for doing what they prefer, and they end up with two different characters, not unlike the Grooves from Capcom vs SNK 2. This allows players to explore characters they know and love in different ways or try to change their play style to tailor themselves to certain gems. A major hurdle a fighting game has to overcome is how to keep people playing when they’re just playing the same gameplay loop over and over, and changing the way your play your characters is a good method of reaching that end as we’ve seen in other successful fighting games like CVS2 and Street Fighter Alpha 2. Not only do players find a character they like but they can further explore the character by experimenting with different Gem combinations and changing the players experience with the primary gameplay loop. Now, moving onto what we learned through Seth Killain from the Eurogamer interview.
Seth largely talks for Ono-chan and the design decisions for the game in defense for the Gem system and gives good insight into the thought process on the developers side. The auto block and auto combo gems are primarily to help newer players get into the game. They’re mostly there for the friends of the people who play fighting games to help bring them into the game, but it seems from the interview they didn’t think people would use the gems in more competitive play. Moving onto the rest of the gems, Seth goes into details of the mind games that goes into choosing gems. If player A has a gem that require 3 grabs to activate and they’ve done 2 grabs so far this game, Player B now know that A is trying to fish for another grab to activate the gem. Player A also knows that player B is going to try to avoid getting grabbed again and can now take advantage of their fear by playing the mind game. This is an interesting reason, however, something interesting is that Seth downplays the affect of the gems later in the article as not completely game changing and something that won’t make a lesser player beat out a better player. He mentions the balance of the gems is something they have worked on for the better part of development and none of them will be overpowered, but the end result was underwhelming and a weird addition to a game that didn’t need it.
Conclusion
In my opinion, every fighting game is an experiment. Every fighting game brings something new to the table which makes every fighting game, even the bad ones, interesting in their own way. The Gem system was a worthy experiment into character customization that ultimately failed. The idea of making everyone’s character unique is a worthy pursuit in fighting games, but when the major focus on these games is competition where people are going to find the most efficient, strongest, and best gems for every occasion to create a meta, balance is a hard thing to keep up. This gives the designer two choices: Make the gems extremely important and ultimately overpowered to the point they dictate the main game, or make them barely affect the game to not damage the main game. Personally, I think the way they went with Gems, the latter choice, was the best choice to go with, however, there was also the choice of including them in the first place. I would love for something like this to work in the future, but SFxT was ultimately a reason why this can’t work.
Thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions of games with design choices that made you ask “WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!” feel free to submit it into our ask box at the top of the website page or comment it on our facebook page!
What Were They Thinking?!?! - 1 - Final Fantasy II
Introduction
Hello everyone! This is Ty with JRPG Book Club. This is my little part of the blog that I get to write up any segment that I want and I’ve honed in on one of my favorite quotes from a certain video game reviewer:
“WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!” ~ James “Angry Video Game Nerd” Rolfe
It’s very easy to ask ‘what were they thinking?!’ and end the criticism at that. Video games, much like movies and television shows, are filled with intention. With the exception of bugs, everything in a game is put there intentionally and serves some sort of function, but designing and assembling a game is an arduous and labor-intensive feat and at the end of production something implemented may not come out ideally. A feature may not work as intended or may even simply just not have been as fun as the developers intended which may lead to frustration or boredom from the players which in turn ends with them shouting the above quote at their television. As someone with a degree in Game Design, some experience on actual game development, and a passion for theory behind game design, I hope I can shed some light on the thought process behind certain aspects of beloved (or unloved) games. Now, let’s get started!
Final Fantasy II
Final Fantasy is an extremely popular series, so you probably don’t need me to tell you about the impact it’s had on RPGs and video games as a whole. One of the first hit RPGs on the NES, Final Fantasy was the genesis to a now almost 35 year series that gave us celebrated games such as Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy IX, Final Fantasy XIV, and {Insert your favorite Final Fantasy here}. The series will soon welcome it’s 16th entry in the main series and while it’s fun to look forward to the future, I’m going to look into the past of the series and one of the games that seems to see little discussion: Final Fantasy II.
Every Final Fantasy game has it’s own unique qualities that makes it stand out. VII was well-known for it’s jump to 3D, IX was known for being a love letter to the earlier games, XII was the first non-MMO game to stray away from the turn-based system, and IV was known for being introducing the ATB system. What is II known for? It’s known most unique and most contentious feature: It’s level-up system. In a majority of Final Fantasy games there’s a comprehensive level-up system in which the player character earn experience from fighting monsters and level up after hitting X amount of exp. Final Fantasy II is different as it strayed away from the level up system of the first game with something I call:
The Proficiency System
The Proficiency System increases a stat when it is used. Simple enough. If a character uses a sword, they can level up their sword skill. If the character uses the Fire spell, their fire spell experience goes up and can level up. This is a very simple system that isn’t unique to Final Fantasy II, but how did it go wrong? In a game like Oblivion, the system works very well. If you’re a player who enjoys using swords and jumping, you can level up those skills as you use them, maybe have the luck of being bale to increase your smithing and lockpicking when it comes up. In Final Fantasy II, however the system is a little wonky. Using swords can level up the sword skill at the end of the fight depending on how much you used it. From my experience, it’s not 100% consistent. If you have a character use the same weapon the whole game they’ll become proficient with it, but it’s a slow build up that may lock yourself into one weapon and discourage you from using other weapons lest you grind it out against weaker enemies that you can usually just instakill. Spells, on the other hand, are much simpler and offer the player a meter in the menu of how far it’s progressed. It’s not terribly hard to jump between different spells as they come in handy throughout the game, though it can still be annoying leveling up a certain spell just to make sure it’s at the proper level. Something of note is that while the basic attack spells (Fire, Thunder, and Blizzard) level up in damage, other support skills also need to level up to increase their effectiveness. This makes sense with spells like revive and cure, but when it comes to spells like esuna and blink, it’s harder to see the end result and a player traditionally only uses these spells early in the fight and not as often or consistently as Fire, Thunder, Blizzard, and Cure. Now the most complex: raw stats. The game measures how much a stat is increased by some odd factors. I’ll copy the table I snatched from ffexodus.com:
The issue with these is that none of them are guaranteed, but instead have a chance of happening if the listed things happen in battle. It’s entirely possible to go through the whole game where you just didn’t take much damage or you didn’t spend enough MP that battle to increase your base stats. While this system isn’t the worst thing, it throws natural progression out of the window and makes grinding very non traditional. Instead of just battling through and leveling up your character, something that is present in almost every single RPG, you have to try to take damage, try to spend mp, try to dodge attacks to raise your individual stats. The best way to grind up your own stats is to battle against yourself, use a bunch of damaging spells on your own team while there’s a single goblin watching waiting to die all just to get one stat increase. Otherwise, it’s not guaranteed you’ll have enough MP to go through a damage or you won’t get insta-killed by a boss attack. Now, what were they thinking?!
When Final Fantasy I came out in Japan, it was already competing with the extremely successful Dragon Quest made by then rival company Enix and after the original Final Fantasy didn’t do as well as the first two Dragon Quests, it’s natural to try to find things to separate Final Fantasy from Dragon Quest to try to get ahead, it the first thing, seemingly was the level up system. This was early enough in the life span of the RPG in which the traditional Level-up system wasn’t set in stone as it is now which allowed for experimentation. If one would move away from the EXP system in a turn-based RPG, there’s very few paths to pursue to increase your characters stats that would allow the player to control how they want to play. The progression system allows players decide which characters get to be proficient in axes, spears, or certain kinds of magic and create their own party while moving away from the classes of Final Fantasy I. In a way, the player chooses what classes the characters have through how they decide to play the individual characters. The developers even show the players different character builds through the characters that occupy the fourth character slot, the first being Minwu who occupies a white mage role. Because all it takes to change a characters build is to grind them a bit, this also allows the player to take a hard right turn or change their build for certain dungeons or bosses. In Final Fantasy I, you’re hard locked into the classes you choose at the beginning and the progression system allows for flexibility by sacrificing the traditional level up system for better or worse. The flexibility of this combines with the class system in Final Fantasy III, that allows the player to switch to different classes with each of the characters and level up their individual stats by keeping them on certain jobs for certain amounts of time. At the end of the day, the moved away from the progression system in later Final Fantasy games and it hasn’t seen a return yet, but it was an interesting, if annoying side venture. In the more action based Final Fantasy games I can see this feature possibly returning and being implemented correctly, but for now it’s remembered as “that weird level up system FFII had.”
Thanks for giving this a read! If you have any suggestions for game design choices that made you say “what were they thinking?!?” you want me to look at, post them in the comments of our facebook post or send us an ask on our website!
Maddox: Heading down the hall, he looked for the suite number Ozy gave him. Was he tired after his rental and cleaning his apartment? Sure. But a famous actor wanted to touch his dick, so that was a little more important than beauty rest, at least for the time being. Finding the suite, he knocked on the door and waited, smoothing out his short-sleeved button up, almost about to tuck it into his jeans when he realized how counter productive that was.
