Quickenings: The Worst Thing About FFXII

In the last few weeks I’ve been dabbling in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age for the PS4. I played a good bit of the original back in the PS2 era and I’ve been really happy to return to it. There are a lot of things to praise about this particular game; its Gambit party AI system remains a unique and satisfying mechanic to build a game around; the world and characters are gorgeously detailed, and the story is a fun (though admittedly Star Wars derivative) epic adventure. It’s become a perfect “chill out” type of game for me where I’ll hop in, fuss around with my party’s AI, send them out running around whacking monsters, watch a few numbers go up, and maybe get a flashy cutscene or two while I’m at it. But I’m not here to praise the many things this game gets right, I’m here to whine about one aspect of it.

For anyone who hasn’t played FFXII, Quickenings are its version of a longtime series staple: the Limit Break. Limit Breaks (also known as Trance, Overdrive, Gestalt Mode, Armiger, and probably more) were first introduced in Final Fantasy VII, and returned in some form or another in every main game since. While the details are different, the basic idea is a visually-dynamic high damage attack that must be charged over time. Primarily it is a spectacle. It works as a visual payoff to a long fight, while also providing a lot of utility in the games’ tougher battles. Best of all it conveys a very anime-inspired idea of characters with Special Techniques that define their fighting style – think Goku with his Kamehameha. It feels almost too obvious to say, but as a longtime fan of the Final Fantasy games Limit Breaks have provided some of my favorite moments. I would even go as far as to say in many ways they define the series’ take on JRPG combat, at least in the post-FFVII era. With that being said, why do Quickenings in FFXII fall so flat for me, to the point where they actually drag on the otherwise-enjoyable combat?

What Am I Doing?

The first time a player does a Quickening is almost guaranteed to be a baffling experience. The game throws a lot of visual information at you in a short time frame and with no explanation. As the animation plays out a timer ticks down and the game tells you that you can press R2 to “Shuffle,” but since you likely only have a single Quickening at this point, nothing will happen when you press it. “Time’s Up!” the game informs you before you can even process what just occurred, and the Quickening ends. It’s a pretty bad first impression. While it may elicit a brief moment of “oh, that’s cool,” for me that feeling was quickly replaced by confusion and a vague sense that I’d messed up somehow.

Soon you will have unlocked multiple Quickenings for different characters and you will grow to understand how each Quickening includes a prompt for you to chain Quickenings together. But if you’re like me the actual rules of how they operate will remain vague. The damage numbers only show up at the very end, meaning it’s almost impossible to gauge how much damage any individual attack is doing. Sometimes characters with a full “Mist Charge” (the resource that Quickenings use) may not show up on the chain, causing you to mash R2 to shuffle the options and hope for another chance to land more attacks. When you add in the ability to Mist Charge during the Quickening, the only limitation to how many Quickenings can be chained together is the game’s RNG, which makes them frustratingly inconsistent. Sometimes I can only land two or three before my luck runs out, other times I lose count, and find myself wishing they would just hurry up and end already. To complicate things even further, after a certain number of Quickenings are chained they will trigger a different kind of attack at the end (the wiki tells me these are called “Concurrences”). These attacks are visually impressive, but they also have elemental qualities that can seriously affect their usefulness in a fight, and the requirements for triggering them are obtuse enough that a guide is probably in your best interests. And even with the knowledge of how to trigger them, the random nature of the chain system makes this a tricky prospect. If I had to guess I would say that these added mechanics were an attempt to make Quickenings more interactive instead of something that a player watches passively. I don’t dislike the idea of using gameplay to break up these little cutscenes, but I find the execution lacking. While all kinds of flashy superheroics happen in the frame, I am usually just watching the bottom right corner of the screen waiting for a chance to chain more attacks together.

Within the larger context of the game’s combat system Quickenings are a powerful tool. In the remake they don’t cost mana to use, and they will pause all incoming damage from enemies for their duration. Basically: It’s free real estate. The player doesn’t need to risk anything to use them except their own patience, and therein lies the problem. They somehow feel both necessary and extraneous at the same time.

Where Am I?

A major innovation that Final Fantasy XII brought in 2006 was the merging of the traditional JRPG “overworld” and the game’s combat. While every previous Final Fantasy game and most of their contemporaries made a distinction between the freedom of walking around the environments and the rigid rules of turn-based combat, FFXII made them one and the same. Instead of invisible random encounters that suddenly whisk the party into a neat faceoff with the enemy, those enemies now wander around the same world your characters inhabit. While this sounds par-for-the-course when it comes to modern Final Fantasy games of the past decade, that just goes to show you how successful this experiment really was.

In contrast to the grounded combat system, the Quickening occurs in a strange, void-like space with the characters floating in a dark starry sky. I don’t necessarily dislike the idea that a Quickening could transport the characters to some kind of mindscape, but once again the execution feels lacking here. The need to account for different sized enemies means that the framing of the scene can be quite odd, with the enemy often dwarfed or even obscured completely by the flashy attack. All perspective of where characters are in relation to each other is lost, which feels especially odd considering the lengths the rest of the game went to create a more grounded and less abstract combat system.

How Much Longer Now?

FFXII: The Zodiac Age doesn’t make many concessions to modern gaming trends, but one major change offered in this updated version is the addition of a fast-forward mode. This hints at one of the original’s major faults: its pacing. The player character’s default walking speed is remarkably slow, and the maps are large and meandering. Meanwhile the combat system is hands-off by design, giving players little to do during the game’s more tedious moments. The addition of fast-forward alleviates both of these problems nicely. You can quickly zip your party around large areas of the map and watch your optimized system of Gambits steamroll any enemies that challenge you.

Of course, I turn this feature off for boss fights or any of the game’s more difficult battles, which are the ones where you will likely need to use Quickening. But this has a knock-on effect of slowing down battles that already feel a bit sluggish. It doesn’t help that each Quickening starts with a fade to white that can seem interminable. The Quickening animations can’t be skipped or sped up, and you will often see the same Quickening play out more than once during the sequence, including the fade to white, and usually followed by the unskippable Concurrence animation sequence at the end. A Quickening chain could be over in less than a minute, or it could take several. As you can probably guess this can have weird effects on the pacing of a tough battle.

What Even Is a Quickening?

This may sound like a dumb question but bear with me. Despite their appearance they’re not quite Magic per-se, because Magic is a thing you can buy in shops while Quickenings are specific to your characters. Similarly, they don’t require any magical skills to use and in the remake they don’t cost any MP. The only other action that uses the “Mist Charge” bar is Summoning, so we can assume this resource represents a different kind of Magic. Sure, why not. However in the game’s story a big fuss is made over the how these super-special crystals called Auracite and Nethicite can control the Mist, and yet no character ever mentions these abilities by name. Were they learned or granted? If the crystals are so important then why does nobody care that my characters can perform Mist-powered super attacks? And while I can stomach the idea that a character such as Basch (a seasoned warrior and general in the Dalmascan army) could perform an attack so strong that it can be best expressed by showing him punching a hole in reality itself… What about Vaan? Seriously?? This guy???

I’m not trying to go all CinemaSins-style and * ding * the game for minor inconsistencies between the narrative and the gameplay. Sometimes a cool attack is just a cool attack. And that’s fine! I really don’t need a better explanation than that. But I would also argue that as far as cool attacks go, Quickenings could be cooler. And it’s not just the confusing gameplay mechanics or the contradictory story implications.

Shouldn’t These Look Cooler?

Of course a disclaimer here: I am not an animator nor a game designer, and I would never presume to tell the artists at Square Enix how to do their job. Even if I did I’d be too late, the game’s done (and hey it’s great, good job). That being said, to my eye there is something distinctly off about a lot of these animations. To pick an easy example, let’s look at one of the Quickenings I’ve just described. This is “Ruin Impendent;” an appropriately named attack wherein a legendary warrior punches a hole in the fabric of space.

Obviously there is a ton of visual flair in this animation, with the lighting and particles and dynamic background. But try to look past that and pay attention to his movements. To me this looks like someone practicing their punches, or perhaps a choreographed performance such as a Kata. Maybe this is because I am a fan of boxing and watch a lot of professional fighters, but what’s missing here is the feeling of weight. Boxers throw their most powerful punches using their entire body’s strength, and this gives the motion an important vertical dimension. Look at how one of my favorite fighters, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, throws his right hand. He dips down as he shifts his weight, then lunges forward using his whole body to propel the punch.

Look again at Basch’s movements and you can easily see how stiff they are by comparison. He shifts his weight ever so slightly by moving his leg before throwing the last punch, but there is no vertical movement. To me it reads more as a stylistic flourish than a real physical action. Ultimately the key frames of this animation fail to convey the feeling of a powerful punch, which leaves the special effects to do all the work “selling” its impact.

For my last example let’s look at one of Vaan’s Quickenings: “White Whorl.”

Once again we have what could be a visually compelling action – in this case winding up your entire body to produce a twister – that is underserved by its animation. Having watched this countless times now I am still not sure if Vaan leaps in the air at the end or if the camera simply drops under him to imply it. But even in the more readable parts of this sequence there isn’t much excitement. The initial pose is meant to give the action anticipation, but it’s just not a very strong pose, and the follow through is more confusing than thrilling. The excessive camera movement and visual clutter don’t feel like a natural consequence of what the character is doing; they feel more like a desperate attempt to add excitement to a bland animation.

Despite all of my complaints I really don’t mean to disparage the work that the devs have done here. Certain Quickenings are very nicely animated and fun to watch (I particularly like Fran’s “Whip Kick,” an updated take on Tifa’s classic “Somersault” Limit Break from FFVII). Frankly none of the problems I’ve listed would count as major issues in isolation. But taken together they undercut the strengths of the game. It’s most disappointing to me because of the missed opportunity to make a great game even better.

The Quickening, like the Limit Break before it, should be triumphant; a cathartic payoff to a grueling battle. Instead I look at Quickenings with boredom and annoyance. When I recall my favorite moments in Final Fantasy VII I think about moments like this, an epic payoff for both the game’s story and your character’s mechanical progression from the flashy “Braver” to the godlike “Omnislash.” When I recall my favorite moments from Final Fantasy XII Quickenings are nowhere to be found.

pocoGRANDES writes occasionally and can be found on the TAY2 Discord. Thanks for reading!