Final Fantasy IV: Active Time Battle

Final Fantasy IV brought with it a brilliant innovation in terms of how and when characters got to take actions. In the previous games every player and every enemy got to take one action per round. Your speed stat, if you had one, determined when in the turn order you'd go but it wouldn't ever grant you extra actions. The fast guy gets to stab first and the slow guy gets to stab last but they each get to stab the same number of times. (Unless all the enemies die in the middle of the round I suppose.) The system used in FFIV - Active Time Battle - sought to change that paradigm. In an ATB system each unit on the map has a bar which counts up as time passes. When your bar fills up you get to take an action. This way if one character is much faster than another they get to take more turns. (Ideally this would be balanced by making their actions less powerful but that was rarely the case.) It's a pretty great idea for a system, and quite an improvement on the old one. Unfortunately I've been getting rather annoyed by it in this playthrough of FFIV. It was amazing at the time, don't get me wrong, but as they iterated on the system in future games it got a lot better.

The big problem that's annoying me is that bars keep filling as I'm entering in commands. So while I'm screwing around in the magic menu trying to find the right spell for Tellah to case everyone else's bar fills up. For the guys on my team this isn't terribly useful as they need to wait for me to find the right spell. For the enemies it's pure gold. Their turn comes up, they clock me, and they get right back into having their bar fill up. There is a setting to turn off time flowing while in a menu but that doesn't fix the whole problem. Even just mashing the button to select attack and then an enemy to hit seems to take too much time! I'll get into a first strike battle where ideally all my guys should get to go first. Instead I've found I can typically take 2 actions before the enemies have caught up completely and are all attacking me. These aren't complicated actions either. It's me telling Cecil to attack the first enemy and then me telling Yang to attack the first enemy. I try to tell Cid to attack the first enemy but by then the enemies have started swinging. It's very frustrating and has me longing for Final Fantasy X.

I decided to try to take advantage of the situation by making use of the berserk spell. I was hoping that my berserked characters would just start swinging as soon as their turns would come up even if I was futzing with someone else at the time. It turned out to work for me. Maybe too well. I tried it out on the Magus Sisters and it was by far the easiest go I've ever had with them. They didn't even get around to resurrecting themselves a single time. Yang and Cid just completely obliterated them!