Final Fantasy VI: Time Limits

I’m progressing slowly, but I’m progressing. The latest roadblock is a scene with a time limit, recuing a child from a house that’s about to collapse. I don’t particularly like time limits at the best of times, and it seems to me that the Final Fantasy games have aspects that make them particularly annoying. Random encounters are delays, and they’re delays that crop up unpredicatably and uncontrollably while you’re trying to do something else. It makes me impatient, and once I’m impatient, I start bristling at little things like the seconds spent on uninterruptible UI actions like bringing up the combat interface and shutting it down again.

It follows pretty close on the heels of another timed sequence, too: the escape from the Floating Continent. There have been time limits in other Final Fantasy games, but not with this density. That escape wasn’t so bad, though, because the fights were winnable quickly: there was usually only one foe, so everyone dogpiled on and wiped him out without having to wait for their ATB timers to fill up a second time. In the new one, I only have one character to use, and she has to take on multiple foes at once. The closest thing I have to a power that can wipe out an entire group at once is the Esper summons, and if I use those, I have to sit through an impatience-aggravating summon animation. It may actually be worthwhile to run away from battles for once.

2 Comments so far

  1. malkav11 on 12 Mar 2009

    That sort of thing – not the time limits, which I never got to, but simply the random encounter frequency interrupting things I was trying to do way too often – is why I never came close to finishing FFVI. Pity, but there it is.

  2. paul on 13 Mar 2009

    There are definitely time limits in 7 that are similarly annoying – your clock ticks down while Cloud is waving his stupid sword, and during the loading time between battles. I think 9 has one or two time limits too. One is during a minigame, so you can opt out if you want, but it’s still annoying when you change screens and you lose two or three seconds while the game is loading a new area.

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