The Stack

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.