Final Fantasy 12’s combat is a neglected masterpiece of game design

polygon.com:

Thinking about Dragon’s Dogma 2’s interestingly scrappy combat recently took me back to another time when a major role-playing game series tried something very different with its combat mechanics. In this case, the designers’ goal was the same as Capcom’s with the first Dragon’s Dogma: a single-player RPG that felt like a massively multiplayer online game to play. But the resulting system couldn’t have been more different, and stands as one of the most fascinating dead ends in game design history.

The game is Final Fantasy 12 — a swan song for PlayStation 2 when it was released in 2006, now available on current platforms in an excellent remaster, The Zodiac Age.(The Zodiac Age is leaving PlayStation Plus’ Game Catalog on May 21, along with several other Final Fantasy titles.) With its hugely flexible Gambit system of party commands, FF12 staged real-time tactical combat you could effectively program to play itself. It’s one of the most elegant and satisfying video game combat systems ever devised — but also one of the least influential and most seldom copied.

Final Fantasy 12 occupies a strange place in the series’ history. At the start of the 2000s, Final Fantasy 10 had launched the series on PlayStation 2 in traditional style — cheesy, opulent gaming with turn-based battles — and was a huge hit. But it was immediately followed by Final Fantasy 11, a thorny, post-EverQuest, pre-World of Warcraft MMORPG that successfully took Square’s flagship series into the online realm. Even for a series that constantly redefines itself, FF11 was a bold change in how players related to these worlds. Here was a Final Fantasy that was less playable storybook, more inhabitable world, where events (and battles) happened in real time.

Square (which merged with Enix in 2003) wanted to capture some of this magic for the offline Final Fantasy games, and employed two of its most gifted designers to do it: Final Fantasy 9 director Hiroyuki Ito and Yasumi Matsuno, creator of the revered