Epic Game Design: How the Incomparable Final Fantasy is Built

I’ve recently been playing through a classic RPG, Final Fantasy VI (Final Fantasy III when it came out in the U.S. for the Super Nintendo).  Some readers may remember this game fondly from their childhood, while others may have never played it but would recognize some Base Mechanics as ancestors of their current day favorite games.

Many things could be said about FFVI; it was iconic for the SNES generation and revolutionary in terms of its use of cutscenes and beautiful 2D graphics.  In many ways, the game, and many other Square RPG’s of the time, is the inspiration of many indie titles today like Independent Games Festival finalist Owlboy, which models its graphical style after games that were released around 1994-1996.  That period of time was the height of big-budget 2D games; before then the resources weren’t available to make large, massive, epic titles, and afterwards those resources were spent on 3D titles on the Nintendo 64 and original Playstation.  Truly this was an unusual window in time that resulted in some stunning games.

Final Fantasy VI is a great game to dissect and analyze, especially in terms of a useful game design concept that we haven’t discussed before on The Game Prodigy: Gameplay Clusters.

Defining Gameplay Clusters

Image: karakola

One useful tool that many designers often use to understand a game’s overall design is to break it up into what I like to call Gameplay Clusters.  A Gameplay Cluster is a game within a game; each Cluster contains all of the parts of the Game Design Canvas, its own Base Mechanics, P&R System, and so on.  All games, especially big budget console games, can be broken up in this way, which is a useful process for both developers and students looking to understand the game’s underlying structure.

Clusters are pulled together by Hooks, which are the connecting points that make each of the Clusters matter to one another.  If a Cluster didn’t have any Hooks into other Clusters, then it would be a completely isolated game that could be played or ignored with no effect on the rest of the game.  In most modern game titles, you want each of the Clusters to be connected with Hooks so that the entire experience feels like a coherent whole, as opposed to a collection of mini-games that have nothing to do with one another.

Final Fantasy VI is a great game to talk about from a design analysis perspective because it is an epic tale, yet the Gameplay Clusters, when broken up, seem relatively simple and almost incapable of delivering on the experience that they manage.  There are just a few Gameplay Clusters that make up the entirety of the game, and each of these Clusters are quite small in themselves.  Each of them have gameplay Hooks that connect them, but mostly they are completely separate games.  To understand the game as a whole, it’s useful to understand each of these Clusters and their Hooks.  This is an exercise that can be used on any game to analyze how the game was built from the ground up.

Defining Final Fantasy VI’s Gameplay Clusters

Final Fantasy VI has four main Gameplay Clusters, the totality of which describe the entire gameplay experience.

1) Battling. RPG’s as a genre are defined by their battle systems, usually spiritual successors of earlier tabletop role playing games.  You have attacks, magic, items, and special moves, and you use your party members to attack until the enemy’s health is depleted to zero (or yours is, which results in defeat).  This is the most obvious Cluster in Final Fantasy, so I won’t go into much detail here.  Needless to say it is a significant part of the game.

2) Exploring. Much of the gameplay in Final Fantasy VI is actually just…walking around.  Walking through towns, walking through the wilderness, walking through caves, walking through castles, and walking through forests.  The player can also interact with other characters or items in the game world, such as having dialog with a townsperson or looking inside a box tucked away in the basement (conveyed through a text box saying something like, “You found a Potion in the box!”).  There are also some interesting puzzles that happen within the Exploring Gameplay Cluster, such as a lever puzzle that requires the player find an instruction booklet tucked away on a table before flipping the right levels to move on.  But whatever the Aesthetic Layout, the gameplay is made up of walking around, pressing A, and seeing a dialog-box type result.

3) In-Game Cutscenes. One of the biggest ways thatFinal Fantasy VI sets itself apart from earlier Final Fantasy games is because of its robust cutscene system, or being able to show movie-like moments at any point of the story.  The game has many memorable scenes where characters are talking, moving around, and gesturing to get across plot points.  The screen may have an old-film overlay, sounds play, or the music changes depending on what is occurring in the cutscene.  These cutscenes have the simple gameplay of pressing the A button to continue through, or making a choice as to what to do (“Stay here, or leave?”), which when affect the movement of the plot.

4) Shopping. Some players may not even recognize this as a game, but the shopping aspect of any RPG is certainly its own Gameplay Cluster.  In each town (and also at special tradesman points in the game), the player can open up a Shop menu and select items to buy.  Some of them are consumables, which can be used once and have some effect like recovering health, or they are equipment, relics, or something that changes attributes of a character.  The game here is essentially to find the best deal that you can get for your money based on the stats that you think are important.  So if you have 1000 gold, and you can pay 800 to buy a super-duper sword, 800 to buy super-duper armor, or 500 for a middle-class version of each, then the player has an interesting decision to make.  Additionally, they’ll need to look through and weed out the items that aren’t useful to them at all.

To get an understanding of how each of these Clusters are actually their own separate games, you can imagine them as games alone on their own.  For example, imagine a simple online Flash game that was just Battling, or just Exploring.  While these Clusters on their own wouldn’t have nearly the length of Final Fantasy VI (which clocks in at well over 10 hours), they would be enough to be considered games by themselves.  Making the larger game, then, is just a matter of finding the the Hooks to tie these separate Clusters together.

Final Fantasy VI’s Hooks

Now that we’ve looked at each of the Gameplay Clusters individually, what did Square Enix do to pull them all together?  A good Hook is one that goes both ways: gameplay in Cluster A affects the gameplay in Cluster B, and vice versa.  This will help the Clusters feel like part of a single game world.

Exploring and walking around in the overworld Hooks into the Battling Cluster by causing a random battle to occur every so often.  After taking a few steps in a damp, dark cave, the player will be greeted by some terrifying monsters to defend against.  Additionally, sometimes interacting with items in the world, such as walking up to a guard and speaking to him, will result in a dialog (“Get out of here you scum!”) followed by handing the fight off to the Battling Cluster.

The movie sequences in the game Hook most easily into the Exploring Cluster.  After walking to a certain point, say, the front of a castle, a cutscene can being where guards jump out to stop your character, and a story point may follow.  Or at points in the game where the player has to perform a certain action in the Exploring Cluster which is triggered by the In-Game Cutscene; for example, at one point in the game the player needs to get past a guard who is blocking the way, and the only way to do so is to Explore underground and enter into a door that causes a Cutscene to move the player across the town.  The result is that the player feels like they have explored the town and found a secret passageway, all because of well connected Hooks.

Shopping at stores connects most easily into the battling system, where purchasing better equipment causes more damage, or buying a store of healing items will make it easier to survive a future battle.  Similarly, the battling system hooks back into shopping by providing money to spend on those items, and what kinds of enemies the player is encountering may influence what they decide to by.

There are many more Hooks that could have been made, and later were made in modern-day big budget RPG’s.  For example, Hooking Shopping in with Exploring by changing what areas are available via special items like rocket boots or hook shots, or changing how the character looks while they’re walking around.

Build Clusters, Make Hooks, Write an Epic

Final Fantasy has always been one of the industry’s landmark franchises, and the memorable storytelling experiences that many players enjoy is evident in the strong Hooks that connect four very different Gameplay Clusters.  Developers have learned from this game for years, and student and indie developers today can also take some good tips from the older games in the franchise.  You can use this technique of breaking a game into Gameplay Clusters to analyze other games (as I’m sure I’ll be doing in future posts) or to break up different challenges in your own games.

Some designers like to begin with the overall game in mind and jump around, while other developers may like to fully define each Cluster, and then create the Hooks to turn them into a complete game.  The idea is to give a better way for the developer to isolate each Cluster and focus on its own Game Design Canvas until it is ready to play, and then step back and look at the broader game.

Submit a Game to be Analyzed!

Readers: Are there any of your favorite games that you would like to have analyzed here on The Game Prodigy?  It can be any kind of digital game, from old-school to modern consoles, to Flash and indie games.  Send an email to editor [at] thegameprodigy.com to suggest a game (if you’re an indie developer, it can be your own)!  Be sure to include:

1. The name you’d like to be referred by if your game is chosen
2. The game you recommend analyzing
3. Why you think learning from this game would be helpful to other indie and student developers