- Joined
- Mar 10, 2025
- Messages
- 7
- Level up in
- 18 posts
- Reaction score
- 15
- Points
- 52
Maybe! Actually, I think FF8's ATB system is almost perfect. Animations strictly pause time but can run partially in parallel to keep things fast, and there are a lot of active time minigames that engage the player (skip turn to reroll limit breaks, Selphie's slots, Squall/Zell/Irvine limit breaks, GF summon boost). If you like ATB on Active, FF8 is one of the best. However, if you're more into turn-based combat, FF8's Wait mode isn't great. It doesn't pause time while you're selecting targets, but on the other hand you can roll for flee attempts while camping in a submenu. Even if I can't manage a proper CTB hack for FF8, it'd be worth my time to improve Wait mode.
The other elephant in the room is FF4, which arguably has the worst implementation of ATB owing to it being the first (the problems go way beyond just the lack of an ATB gauge). I have some ideas for how to improve it, though it's only really interesting to me as a technical challenge since I'm not terribly fond of the game.