Rationale/Inspiration

Stagger mechanics are commonplace in action games, from the humble "hitstun" present in nearly everything, to games where it is the focal point, like Nioh, recent entries of Final Fantasy, and Armored Core 6.

I want to go back to the relatively untread ground of its focal usage in turn-based combat, and experiment with the potential explored in very few games. Mobius Final Fantasy was one of these projects, building from the foundations of Final Fantasy 13 to create a strategic gameplay experience that's never been fully replicated, branching towards a fully turn-based focus of the "break meter" that modern gaming has forgone. In the aftermath of its service termination in 2020, I fear its gameplay style will go forgotten.

Mobius FF should be remembered for more than an admittedly hilarious controversy, and it should also be unshackled from the gacha hellscape that killed it. It took brave steps into terra incognita, and it was killed before its time. I will follow in its footsteps and show the world the potential that the stagger mechanic has outside of the real-time action landscape.

That's the pitch - so let's get into specifics. 

Why turn-based, what makes it different from now contemporary real-time action? 

When I was talking about this to one of my professors, he put it this way: "There's a difference between speed chess and regular chess." Same game, technically, but two completely different environments because of the limitation of time. If you make a really outlandish move in speed chess, you have the benefit of shock and awe. Your opponent has to spend precious time thinking about what you've done. When you get more time, you have all the time in the world to think about that move. You could even call for a recess and think about it with your friends overnight. That's not a flaw, that's a feature of a different style of play.

The most direct effect of pure turn-based combat is giving you time to think without penalizing you for it. You can absorb all the information on the field before you make a move, plot out what could be possible actions for everything to take. Because of your increased access to processing and information, the game is able to throw much tougher puzzles at you to figure out. 

It also lowers the barrier for execution as well. There's no dropping your combo because you hit "attack" too fast or slow when your combo is "attack, attack, wait, attack"; there's no missing your window to cast a spell when the UI gets mad at you over double-tapping the spell radial button. Even out of the context of action games: I have had party members drop because I had to fumble through the menu in an ATB-based Final Fantasy.

Often, stagger is a focal feature in real time action as a way to incentivize risky or aggressive play. If someone's turtled up just push them harder and they'll fall over vulnerable. Often these stagger bars will replenish to entice you to keep pushing, don't let it fill back up. 

But as iterations went on and on, in some games you may find that aggressive play is really the only option. When I was playing through Final Fantasy 7 Remake I found enemies in their "normal" state were too fast and resilient for defensive or attritional play to work, and enemy stagger refilled so quickly that taking a step back to recover from a mistake may as well have been wasting a full minute of pressure. Aggressive play wasn't even risky anymore - it was optimal, it was required. (Even more strangely, if you wanted to actually hear all the dialogue in a boss fight you had to play in a really weird way where you're throwing the fight a little bit so you don't skip lines by doing the intended amount of damage during a stagger window.) 

And above all - in real time, often learning comes after failure. You just don't have enough time to think in the fight. Sometimes a blind guess pays off (oh they really hate fire. oh you can parry that.) But when you get a big curveball thrown at you - let's be real, you're gonna have to get hit in the face by that curveball a few more times before you figure out how to deal with it. As someone who's done blind progression raids in a few MMOs, we've often knowingly done runs in a very particular way that we knew would fail the encounter just to figure out how it worked.

This isn't to say that real time action, input execution, aggressive play, or discovery/improvement is bad. I mean... I play these games on purpose. But sometimes I just don't wanna deal with it you know? Again - I'm literally just making a different game. 

In the turn-based context of Mobius FF, the stagger bar becomes a resource to be managed. The plan isn't to burn it down as soon as you can, but to burn it down when you're fully ready to. The stagger phase is all about you - it mostly only decrements on your actions, only decrementing by one action by your turn rolling around. 

Do you have the MP to defeat the enemy within its stagger window? Will you have to accumulate more? Can you get enough within that window? Are your defenses strong enough to survive staggering the enemy? Is it worth it to start a stagger without the resources to beat them, if the stagger will make you survive the next turn? Do you even need a stagger phase or can you beat them without it? 

These would all be mental calculations you're already making split-second real time, but in a turn-based setting you can come up with solutions for these problems in the moment. Not just guesses you're going to ignore or never come to because you're just gonna do something that has worked for everything else, and "the moment" ends in less than a second.

What does "unshackling Mobius from gacha" mean?

Being a live service gacha game killed Mobius Final Fantasy, one of my favourite games. I think it was close to reach the end of its main storyline, on the JP servers a few months ahead of us, but even there was killed pretty much just before the finish line. They unlocked every single collaboration event for a few months in case we missed them, and made a new event for us to say goodbye to all the characters and the developers behind the game. 

One of the few modern turn-based games that also play with similar mechanics - Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia (DFFOO for short) - has recently announced that it will be shut down in late January of 2024. It's also a mobile gacha game, and my suspicion for both games' closures was that neither were oppressive enough about their monetization to make money, while being too oppressive or confusing to retain players. 

The only similar games left in the current year that I've heard of are Library of Ruina (which I thought was gacha, but I was confusing it with Limbus Company) and Honkai Star Rail. Past that, you have to either deep dive into TVTropes for niche games on the PSP, or start doing the kind of mental gymnastics that makes people call Hades a roguelike. Honkai Star Rail, like Genshin Impact, does every single standard oppressive gacha thing they've found out they can do, having seperate gachas for characters and equipment, having elements, and while I haven't played it, probably having the main content be moderate in difficulty until you start exploring, doing side content that's actually fun and/or rewarding, but it's designed for whatever the newest character was at the time so it's kind of a difficulty cliff. 

At the time of writing, Poptropica removed the ability to purchase memberships and made all members areas free. This is a death knell. This is the developers saying "come and have fun one last time." (December 15 EDIT: It's been announced that Poptropica will be closing down at the end of 2023.) Poptropica will not live forever; neither will Destiny 2, or World of Warcraft, or certainly not Honkai Star Rail. I do not intend to make this a game that I update until you all get bored and I can't milk you anymore. I want it to be something you can just download and play if you want, and come back whenever you were thinking about it (if it still works with modern hardware whenever you are)

I think I went ahead of myself. Okay, so gacha sucks. I know this because I play a few of them still. Why do they suck, and what about Mobius sucked in particular? I mentioned a lot about Honkai just now (just extrapolation from what I've seen of both it and Genshin, and other gacha that I've actually played):

• Pulling for characters and equipment is out the window, immediately, because I'm just going to structure getting that kind of gear like a normal game would. 
  • This is why release is the best time to play gacha, especially as a free-to-play, and I'm sorry if I'm feeding into the FOMO, but gacha by design drip feeds you story and mechanics for a reason: power creep. The current promoted gacha on release is gonna be really tame and straightforward compared to what's coming in two or three months, especially if it's a major holiday. When you're there for all three months you can gain a baseline understanding of each new thing they want you to buy, even if you don't pull it, because it's gonna be in newer characters too, and older characters once they buff them in a year or two. You're also slowly accumulating currency from dailies and completing content. But if you're hopping in late, you have a big list of stuff to get caught up on, and you get overwhelmed by dudes with Fire Emblem Heroes description boxes, when everyone else has been slowly understanding every mechanic in the box one at a time.
    • In short: Playing the game from the beginning makes it structured more like a videogame that has progression. Showing up late is a bit like being expected to understand how to beat the final boss when you don't even know the controls (and not in a cutesy "this is a flash forward or guaranteed failure tutorial" kind of way)
• Elements. Gacha loves this because it's an obvious sign that says "you should pull for more characters, these ones in particular, to be literally 3 times more effective in this battle." Everything has an element and you want to abuse it to win. It looks like Honkai's stagger system only triggers on an elemental weakness, but I don't actually play it. Mobius got kind of mean about them: they put a description box on each level warning you about what the major threats are, like "many Fire enemies ahead" or "Fire boss spotted." As the game went on, this would always be true, but there'd also be Water enemies that massively resisted if not straight up healed from Water damage one wave before the Fire enemies in question. I pretty much just had to assume I had to bring a counter to my own element in every level.
  • I'm going to be cutting down on elements a lot in my game. I don't think it would add too much. Besides, 90% of enemies in this game are just going to be weak to all the same things anyways.
• Gacha often limit the amount of tools you can bring to each fight to encourage you to bring the current overpowered thing that does too much, and Mobius was no exception. With only four ability slots plus one ability shared by a friend, you have to cover all the important support effects (Haste, Trance, and Faith/Brave depending on job; sometimes Boost, Quicken, Element or Prismatic Force/Shift, Deprotect, and Unguard; and Protect, Wall, Enchant Weapon, and instant orb draw is pretty nice too) while also being able to soften every enemies' stagger bars and deal real damage, which probably means having more than one elemental attack on hand. Hey, that's like 10 or 14 things! The job you pick can maybe handle one or two of them with their passive or ultimate skills, and most normal attacking abilities stagger and damage in equal measure, but that meant a lot of the things you pick will either have to start doing double, triple, I think I've even seen quintuple duty; or be so specialized they remove some things out of the equation entirely. In fact, some things did so much they started adding new effects just to make us sweat more. They eventually realized, "yeah this does suck" and added Job Change, which let you bring a side deck with another job card and 4 more ability cards, which goes on a 3 round cooldown once you use it.
  • I'm just gonna increase the amount of ability slots the player gets to have on hand. It's not a good robot game if you don't have a little buildcrafting. I'm not going to take away the idea of doing several jobs with one thing entirely - sense of progression and all - but I'm not gonna get silly with it like - ugh, the ultra-rare Supreme cards did.
    • Look, even when Cloud Strife and his friends were limited on materia slots in FF7, they still had more than four choices per person, with fewer things to worry about even, and they had the Enemy Skill materia, which was already like 20 in one, and removes the need for Barrier materia by virtue of Mighty Guard existing
• Specific Mobius gripe: RNG for orbs (essentially your MP, which you gain by doing basic attacks) can be aggravating, since every orb is tied to an element: high, but manipulatable chance for each of the three elements tied to your class, and a low chance for a life orb used for support skills. Manipulating that was a chore involving defending using the orbs, which lowered that element's probability of being rolled. This was time consuming and sometimes bypassed by using Element or Prismatic Shift/Force effects; almost always in multiplayer for speed/consistency reasons. But life orbs were consistently rare, and getting really bad luck with them will happen, which makes your buffs go away, which can make your life go away. 
  • Cutting down on elements means I can just make this use generalized AP and TP resources; mostly for consistency for the "life orb" support effects.

Okay, I think that should work for now. Next I'll... leave whatever dev insights I can for my vertical slice... in a week. way to show you care about your thesis gator imagine getting hopelessly distracted and then getting covid and then getting hopelessly distracted again