Director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3, Naoki Hamaguchi, has expressed his belief that modern gamers want more action elements even in turn-based titles. In an interview with Game Informer, Hamaguchi spoke about the RPG genre and said that “RPGs and JRPGs are increasingly brought up as legacy genres.”
That is not to say that Hamaguchi believes that turn-based games should go away, however. He noted that the genre also has its own strengths. “Games where you evaluate the situation, contemplate your moves, and build upon the decisions you make are deeply universal, closely tied to the very nature of human thought.”
He even went on to bring up other recent games—like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for example—that are able to bring in real-time action elements despite their combat systems being turn-based. “It’s also true that when we look at younger players, they increasingly favor more real-time experiences in games,” he said. “I believe they’re a generation that’s naturally accustomed to receiving instant feedback upon input.”
“With that context in mind, it may have been inevitable for turn-based games that incorporate real-time decision-making through action elements to gain prominence. I think this reflects players’ desire for both the excitement of strategy and the immediacy of response.”
With the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, Hamaguchi said that the development team was concerned about how moving the 1997 original into the world of real-time action combat would “reduce the room for strategic thinking and the momentary tension of choosing commands that were present in the original game.”
Ultimately, however, the studio was able to bring in elements of the original Final Fantasy 7‘s Active-Time Battle system into the Remake trilogy by allowing players to pull off special moves after a certain number of regular attacks filled up an ATB bar.
It is worth noting that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was far from the first game to blend real-time elements with turn-based combat in an RPG. Titles as old as 1996’s Super Mario RPG on SNES featured similar elements. We would also see these elements make their way into other titles like 2008’s Xbox 360 JRPG Lost Odyssey, as well as Nintendo’s Mario & Luigi franchise.
Interestingly, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida had expressed the belief that a modern audience would be more receptive to real-time combat in RPGs rather than turn-based systems. In an interview from 2022, he spoke about growing up with turn-based RPGs, as well as opinions about the combat systems from younger players these days.
“I’m from a generation that grew up with command and turn-based RPGs,” Yoshida said. “I think I understand how interesting and immersive it can be. On the other hand, for the past decade or so, I’ve seen quite a number of opinions saying ‘I don’t understand the attraction of selecting commands in video games.’”
Recently, Hamaguchi had also spoken about the decision to turn the remake of Final Fantasy 7 into a trilogy, and how there was simply no other way to achieve the level of detail and world density that Square Enix wanted.
