Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is a AAA Proto-Idle Game and I Like it That Way

Okay, hear me out.

The infamous ‘clicker game’, has made a lot of bank over the years. While the genre isn’t exactly exploding in the same way it was back in 2015, it’s still pretty popular, and it’s not hard to see why. These games use a dopamine-drenched formula of incremental power and mild decision making, one that can be reskinned to suit almost any theme. D&D even released their own take on the genre, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms – and we can’t forget the massive influence of the Lovecraftian bakery simulator Cookie Clicker.

I had almost forgotten the sweet siren song of these addiction generators. That was until I booted up Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, a titanic RPG from 2006 that had a mechanical and graphical remaster in 2017. Although it earned solid praise from gaming outlets overall, the gambit system was pretty controversial at the time. It threw off the turn-based shackles of the series for a real-time battle flow with a new mechanic: programming. The Gambit System allowed you to equip your party members with a list of ‘if > then’ statements and a priority order, with hundreds of combinations to experiment with.

I could set Balthier to throw a potion at someone who dropped under 70% HP, or have Penelo hit my opponents with a Firaga if they’re vulnerable to it. This… didn’t always work, to be fair. The game has an ability called Infuse, which sets an ally’s hitpoints to a static value that is ten times the user’s current MP. I set Fran to use this ability on someone if their hit points dropped low, and failed to account for the possibility that she might try this even when her MP is 0.

My setup for Penelo, a White Mage/Black Mage who has become a force of power in my party.

Considering 10 times 0 is still zero, I watched haplessly as a 0-MP Fran, controlled by the idiotic strings of a god who can’t do math (me), delivered an autopilot coup de grâce to a low-HP Vaan by setting his HP to dead.

Regardless, the gambit system allowed you to create an automated ball of death. Granted, you still had to intervene sometimes; some abilities, like the aforementioned Infuse, just don’t jive with the automation. But if you’re just trying to get through an area, you can pretty much push forward on the analog stick and zone out.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, and its ironically-named predecessor Final Fantasy XII: The International Job System (which was only released in Japanese), also added a fast-forward button. This is a band-aid on one of the game’s design flaws, which is the unescapable fact that you run around a lot, and it’s pretty slow. There’s backtracking to solve puzzles, hunt optional monsters and sometimes just to grind. My current playthrough of about fourty hours would be twice as long without it.

As I set up my death-ball of an automated monster-slaying machine and chewed my way through the lovely changes of scenery, my fast-forward button bumped to max, something hit me. A primordial sensation in my reptile brain, the unmistakable feeling of an itch being scratched. It was a feeling that I hadn’t felt for a very long, long time.

Penelo’s fine, this is fine.

I was playing an idle game. Not a pure idle game, for sure - you still need to be present at the console, giving directions and enjoying the game’s lovingly-voiced cutscenes - but it was hitting the same buttons. My input was only needed to make sure Vaan was stealing, to swap out the occasional party member, and to move. Otherwise I could zone out and think of other things, like my favourite fictional husbands Kim Kitsuragi and G’raha Tia.

This wasn’t only down to the game’s gambit system or the speed boost, either – much of the power you earn is incremental, just like the idle games of today. Instead of building Factories in Cookie Clicker, I was dumping my license points – of which you accrue thousands – into minor benefits for my well-oiled machine.

It makes me wonder why we haven’t seen an evolution of the idle system in this vein. While other games offer a little custom autonomy for your adventuring squad, I haven’t seen anything come quite as close to the borderline programming involved with the Gambit system, nor a game that’s ridden the line so thoroughly between genres. While there were idlers back in Final Fantasy XII’s heyday – mostly consigned to flash game websites like Kongregate – they hadn’t quite reached that mid 2010s zeitgeist.

In FFXII, I see the DNA of the dopamine-hijacking clicker games we all love, and quite frankly? I’ve had a blast with it. I’m a total gambit system convert. Why aren’t more games built around this half-idler framework? Not passive enough to tune you out, but not active enough to require much more than steering? Probably because it’s not that fun, except for weirdos like me who would rather optimise a monster-slaying machine than engage with anything demanding. Let me program my squad again, and you’ll have my heart.