ATMOSPHERIC WORLD MAPS

Mmm. I like this topic.



Final Fantasy Tactics is a game about medieval politics, about corruption and conspiracy widespread enough to not only cause massive wars but manipulate their outcomes, and about a religion that is also a lie, founded and run by the very creatures it calls demons so that they could hold sway over humans. It's a game about manipulators.

So you don't have the kind of world map found in most games. There's no color, no life - it's very dry, much like the politics and conspiracies. It's an old map, stained, penned in a lost language, because this entire game is a story being told by Alazlam Durai, a historian who finally learned of the massive coverup four hundred years later. The game is a grim medieval fantasy, where the main characters in the game view these cities as dots on a map to be conquered, not as beautiful landscape or as peoples homes. For the same reason, you can't even get into the cities - you just shop for weapons and armor directly from the world map. The cities are only there to fuel the war, and the people within them are treated as data. Your paths are limited by the story, not by where you can physically get to, because even though the main character isn't affiliated with any government, his actions though the gameplay - and the player's motives - mirror this drive for victory over enemy lands, resulting in Ramza conquering the battlefields in his path and turning them into "his" areas before moving forward and doing the same thing in the next zone. The fact that you can freely backtrack shows that your available zones on the map aren't actually linked to your current task - they're linked to what areas you've conquered. People are tools to be used, and their homes are just dots on a map that you can put yellow flags on after you win the battles.

LockeZ's analysis of Final Fantasy Tactics map also holds true for Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre though - it had the same sort of feeling of a dull medieval world where no one cared anymore. The later Tactics Ogre games start to show that these games are histories as well - they're not being played in the 'present day' of the setting, but by someone looking back (Person of Lordly Caliber really drives this home). Pretty much everything Locke said about the FFT map and world can carry over to the TO map and world.

Of all the Final Fantasy games, I think VI got it the best for a world map (except for perhaps XII, but mostly because it's Ivalice and an extension of the FFT map and style). I didn't really feel the differences between the worlds in V, I'm not sure why, but VI's World of Ruin painted a pretty good picture of a world gone to hell because of Kefka's actions.

Whether they did those things on purpose or not is actually kind of irrelevant to whether those things were what made it work.

I'm trying to think of good non-Squaresoft ones. Illusion of Gaia, maybe? Its world map was just... Earth. But it was also 3D, and on the Super Nintendo, so the 3D drove home the point that Holy Shit This Is REAL.



Oh hey, Wild ARMs 3.



All the Wild ARMs games have a sort of pseudo-Western motif. Wild ARMs 3 dials it up to eleven. Every character on your team uses guns, and one of them is an Indian shaman. In fact, all the magic in the game is Indian shamanism. The entire world is composed of rugged Texas badlands, dying frontier villages, and Indian settlements. Yes, the ocean in that screenshot is made entirely out of sand. Yes, that is true for all the oceans worldwide.


Holy shit the world map music is ukelele and sad whistling

You don't get chocobos or dragons as mounts in this game: you get plain old horses to ride on the world map, because (sometimes) this game knows when fantasy is and isn't appropriate to create the mood it wants. And you can get in horseback combat, against roaming banditos or packs of coyotes that run alongside you while you shoot at them, which by the way is amazing. Throughout the wilderness, some poor souls have somehow built train tracks connecting the villages, so you can also take the train. Eventually, when you need to cross the sea - excuse me, the SANDSEA, which was actually a normal ocean until the villains stole all your world's water - you end up riding in a giant rugged badass sand-tank. In case you were expecting that to somehow protect you, nope, you get to fight giant sandtank battles in the ocean - because if there's one thing that's more important to the game than the western theme, it's the guns. ARMs, they're called, and are important enough to name the game after. They're not just normal guns, they're actually rare artifacts used by the most skilled drifters. And so your two non-horse vehicles - the tank and the eventual inevitable airship, which is to my great dismay not a Wright brothers biplane - are actually giant vehicle-sized ARMs.

It also does a weird gameplay thing on the overworld, which several of the other Wild ARMs games also do - locations on the world map aren't visible or enterable until someone tells you about them, and then you search in the right spot. But it does it in a way that the other Wild ARMs games don't: it doesn't unlock these automatically as part of the story. Instead, they're unlocked by moseying down to the saloon and talking to strangers to hear rumors about trouble that's been stirred up recently. That's not a funny euphemism, that's literally exactly what you do. Someone in the saloon in East Highlands Station will tell you that miners who went into the Gemstone Cave to the south have been disappearing, and that'll unlock it on your map. Many of these locations can be unlocked far before they need to be, too, you just can't do much inside them yet. Often different people in different towns can be used to unlock the same zone, and it'll become easier and more obvious how to unlock it when the zone becomes required, so it's not nearly as obnoxious as it sounds, but it adds some excellent flavor to the game, emphasising the fact that your characters are drifters, free of obligations and yearning to spread their wings, yet limited by the rugged, dying world and reliant on the disconnected settlements.

Also there are space demons, but please ignore them, they accidentally got added to the plot by mistake I think.

author=JosephSeraph

I like the wrinkles in the worldmap, it's a nice touch that I didn't notice playing the game.

author=LockeZ
Illusion of Gaia, maybe? Its world map was just... Earth. But it was also 3D, and on the Super Nintendo, so the 3D drove home the point that Holy Shit This Is REAL.

No it wasn't. Illusion of Gaia used mode 7 transforms native to the console's PPUs, just like F-Zero, FF6, etc, etc. This method of scaling/rotation is still a 2D affair.

Nintendo and Argonaut teamed up to create a series of add-on chips called Super FX and Super FX 2. They were basically programmable CPUs that could be made to do anything from AI to audio to physics, but were used almost exclusively for graphics processing. Most famously it was used for rendering polygons in Star Fox, geometry in Doom, and do fast 2D transforms on data before it's sent to the PPU's sprite layers in Yoshi's Island.

Capcom had its own graphics chip on a few of its cartridges for handling 3D, like Mega Man X2/3 (where it's used like twice, and not even to memorable or impressive effect... waste of money).

Basically, what I'm saying is the SNES is really slow. It can't handle 3D on its native hardware and requires additional chips on the cartridges themselves to be able to that kind of math fast enough for gameplay--chips which Illusion of Gaia did not have.