Final Fantasy Retrospective: Mobius Final Fantasy, June 17-June 23

 

As I continue to write retrospective articles, it should eventually become apparent that there are specific ways in which Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy differ. For one thing, Dragon Quest, at its core, remains the same game throughout the series. It is this strict adherence to the familiar that causes its fans to flip out whenever something slightly out of the ordinary is proposed for a main series entry, like the originally intended action-oriented battle system for Dragon Quest IX. After a surprising amount of backlash, the game instead adopted the same battle system the series had been known for. Dragon Quest XI has stuck with this type of battle system and even the MMO, Dragon Quest X, doesn’t dare to offer anything other than a turn-based system, even if it pushes things a little by making those battles closer to the real time system used by the Final Fantasy series on the SNES.

Similarly, the series has not dropped any of its classic stats and has gradually added to them with each new game. Relatively recently, the series has begun to calculate magical might and magical mending, both of which actually have something to do with the strength of spells now, as opposed to the Intelligence stat, which began as a way to determine how much MP a character has and whether they learn their spells relatively on time, and wasn’t intended to have anything to do with the strength of these spells.

The Dragon Quest series has never overloaded itself, and even though stats like Style and Deftness have been added over the years, there’s never been a need to “trim the fat” so to speak. Everything has its use and not every character is going to make full use of every stat. That’s okay. Characters who don’t have the ability to steal won’t need Deftness outside of the slight boost they receive to their critical hit rate, characters who don’t cast spells won’t need the boost Wisdom gives to MP, and so on.

These same stats make their way into the spin-off titles, too. Deep down, if you check under the hood, games like the two Dragon Quest Heroes games and all of the Dragon Quest Monsters games all work the same way.

Final Fantasy has this weird need to reinvent itself over and over again, even in the main series. Systems like elemental strengths and weaknesses will change from one game to the next, with elements being added and dropped seemingly at the whims of different development teams. Stats will come and go as well, as if everyone has a much different idea of what sort of game they want to make. It feels like the series was already headed this way in the beginning of the PlayStation era, but the most drastic changes didn’t happen until Final Fantasy XIII.

Throughout the series, various development teams have experimented with different ways to do magic, from the magic charge system of the first and third games as well as the system in Final Fantasy VIII which drew magic from enemies and treated it like a consumable item and a piece of equipment at the exact same time. Final Fantasy XIII did away with MP completely, as well as other mainstay stats like Defense. There are still a lot of things going on under the hood of Final Fantasy XIII, but players are only really allowed to play around with their HP, Strength and Magic. The philosophy behind this is that Defense isn’t needed as long as a character has a high enough cushion of HP to withstand an attack.

Mobius seems to derive its relevant stats from Final Fantasy XIII‘s model. The relevant stats that can be influenced are generally HP, Attack, Break Power and Magic, and I wish I had more time to experiment and see whether any of these stats have an upper limit. I do know that HP can accumulate above 10000, like most recent Final Fantasy games have allowed, and that Magic, Break Power and Attack can accumulate above 1000. Can HP accumulate to six figures? Can the other stats go to five? That’s the sort of experiment that would require a massive time investment to figure out.

Attack is your basic attack, and Magic is your basic magic power, just like in Lightning’s adventure. Break Power refers to the ability of a player to deplete the second HP bar that all enemies have, which acts like a kind of defensive buff. Once it’s empty, enemies are broken for a set period of hits and your basic attack does more damage. Spells do more damage to broken enemies, too. This is also inspired by Final Fantasy XIII.

The Break gauge turns red as you attack it with spells and depletes as you hit it with physical attacks. In this manner, the game tries to resemble Final Fantasy XIII. Attacking solely with spells will never deplete the gauge (outside of a few special cases and overpowered abilities) and attacking solely with physical attacks will deplete the gauge slowly, the optimal way in which to attack enemies is to cast a spell that does significant Break damage and ideally is of an element the enemy is weak to and then attack physically, for a red gauge depletes faster than an orange gauge. Then, once the Break gauge is empty, players can chip away at the enemy’s green HP gauge a lot faster, or use their spells more effectively against the enemy.

Break seems to be a thing going forward, since there’s a breakage system in Final Fantasy XV as well which temporarily reduces an enemy’s defense as you’re attacking them.

The Decks screen also lists three other stats, but these stats cannot be augmented by leveling up. Crit Chance, Speed and Defense also aren’t measured by a visible number, they are instead measured by stars. For all intents and purposes, it’s like the game is following Final Fantasy XIII‘s lead by not really having Defense be a part of anything for the player and reducing the number of stats that can be directly controlled.

Through experimenting with the Sphere Grid in the Final Fantasy X crossover, it can be inferred that stars represent five stat points, but whether that’s entirely accurate or not isn’t something I’m able to determine at this time. Fortunately, these stats can also be improved over time.

This is where the game’s weapon improvement system comes in. I mentioned this system last week, but really concentrated on focusing on it this week, with the aim to at least try to finish the Warrior of Light storyline. You see, after improving a weapon’s main stats six times, you can ask the game to improve one of the sub-stats by one star. This costs Crystals, which are awarded much more sparingly than anything else in the game, and at the end, one stat which I’m assuming is chosen at random is improved. I won’t be able to go back into chapter seven with a full compliment of Defense stars, there simply won’t be enough time, but hopefully a couple stars are better than none.

One thing which I discovered on the Boost Weapon screen is that the game does explain how a one day augmentation can sometimes take only an hour or two. It turns out that using up Stamina speeds up the improvement of your weapon by 6 minutes per point. As a result, chapter three is a good place to grind for weapon boosts, since any 20-Stamina node shaves two hours off of your time.

Another major aspect of the game that I’d been glossing over until now are the Titles, and I really should’ve been trying to accumulate them, for the more of them you have, the better your character is. You can gain extra HP for using a bunch of Elixir. The title of Elixir User is earned after drinking thirty of them and upgrades the Elixir Quaffer title (ten Elixir swallowed) and awards an extra 50 HP to the player, for a total of 150HP. There’s a title awarded approximately every twenty levels or so, which awards 20 more HP and two more points each in Attack, Break Power and Magic. It’s also not enough to finish the main story of each chapter. Every single node must be explored and all side quests also taken care of, for this awards an extra 50 HP and five points each in Attack, Break Power and Magic per chapter, with the final chapter awarding 100 HP and ten points in each of those stats. This extends to the Warrior of Despair storyline, too; over a thousand HP and over a hundred points in Attack, Break Power and Magic are available this way.

The thing about trying to beat the game and all of its challenges in a compressed time period, especially five years in, is that the game was not built to be played like this. In beating the prologue and the first five chapters, then skipping the sixth chapter and going right to the seventh, I played in two weeks what took two years to release. Players at the beginning of the game’s life would’ve had two years to build up their characters for chapter seven and here I was expecting I would be able to just power my way through.

The only reason I even got as far as I did was because I was using cards that didn’t even exist at the time, and weren’t introduced until this past year or so, cards that were so overpowered that they were likely added to the game as one final gift to players, knowing that the game was going to be shut down anyway.

Realistically, I should’ve spent several months building up my character and his weapons so that he could deal with chapter seven, but it’s my fault for taking so long to get back to Mobius since my initial attempt to download the game failed due to the sudden and extreme server load that came from players hearing the game was going to end and wanting to try it for themselves. Even one extra month might’ve helped, but at this point, it can’t really be helped how events played out.

When you get right down to it, Mobius is not a game that can be rushed through, not without spending money. This functionality is no longer available to the game, so the only way players can make it through now is by investing time, and time in the game is now finite. With less than a week left before the game goes away forever, there simply isn’t enough time to make a character powerful enough to breeze through the rest of the game and experience the entire story, nor most of the sidequests, and that’s a tragedy. It really looked like the game was trying to honour the Final Fantasy series in its own way.

Many events were held over the course of the game’s life. The Sleeping Lion followed Squall as he finds himself in a weird, alternate version of the events of Final Fantasy VIII. He still is expected to take his SeeD exams and just like the main game, these include going and fighting Ifrit and taking on the Dollet mission, complete with disabling Omega and running away from it. However, instead of dreaming he’s a moron, he gets visions of the Warrior of Light from Palamecia and characters like Quistis, Selphie and Siefer are replaced by characters from the Warrior of Despair storyline. In fact, none of the characters from Final Fantasy VIII aside from Squall appear and this makes him highly suspicious. (Also in this storyline, Squall is a playable character.)

Dream Within a Dream brought Tidus into Palamecia where he experienced an original story outside of Spira. Lightning’s dimension hopping adventures extended to Palamecia where she was the focus of Lightning Resurrection, and even Final Fantasy VII was represented in two separate chapters which, according to their naming convention, seem to be a part of the Compilation.

The “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII” presently consists of both the base game as well as three other games and a movie which follow a specific naming convention (and an anime episode that does not). The movie’s name is Advent Children and the games are Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus. Although the games did not come out in that order, the naming convention seems to fit a pattern, they can be shortened to AC, BC, CC and DC. In Mobius, the two Final Fantasy VII events were called Eclipse Contact (EC) and took place in Midgar, and Fatal Calling (FC) and took place in the Northern Crater.

Something interesting about all of these events is that there are points in the narratives of their games where the status of the main character is that they’re dead or somehow not accounted for in some other manner. Tidus actually fades away at the end of Final Fantasy X, and it’s suggested here that he’s passed from Spira to Palamecia as his soul continues its journey. The status of Palamecia as the entire series’ Farplane is intriguing, and seems supported by the other crossover events. The ending video of Final Fantasy VIII is an acid trip through what Squaresoft figured time compression must be like as Ultimecia’s meddling with time unraveled itself, and the fandom has always speculated that Squall might’ve died during these scenes. The Sleeping Lion appears to take place during this ending sequence to Final Fantasy VIII, right down to him seemingly remembering that Balamb Garden is a real place but having doubts about whether Graff and Sophie really are his friends. Lightning was removed from the universe right after the ending of Final Fantasy XIII as the sequel shows, and her crossover events in Mobius and Final Fantasy XIV strongly suggest that after being removed from her home universe, she is stuck traveling the dimensions. Even Final Fantasy VII has the scene in the Lifestream where Cloud faces Sephiroth and there’s enough wiggle room here to stage an entire Mobius event or two.

Palamecia as Farplane is a theory that seems supported by events in the early chapters of Mobius, too. At the end of chapter three, some of the Blanks remember their actual names right before they throw themselves at Chaos and die, and as they remember, they also remember that they came from kingdoms that were devastated in their respective games. Whether Mobius was meant to be the afterlife or not is something which I have not discovered yet (and there’s one week left before the game disappears and I finally allow myself to spoil everything), but even if it does, there seems to be some kind of special circumstance where heroes from past games are allowed to come to Palamecia, experience an adventure and then go back home. Even Tidus gets called back to Spira in Final Fantasy X-2.

The Final Fantasy series is likely to continue beyond the death of Mobius, and in some ways the game could be seen as a tribute to the entire series. This tribute, however, is one which a week from now, no one will ever be able to play again…

 

Next week: The End