Quick Takes — Playing with Time in The Zodiac Age

By Stefan Greenfield-Casas

When playing a Final Fantasy game, there are a few things that generally remain consistent between games: a character named Cid, a spectacular world with a crystal-centric mythos, and an epic storyline that (depending on players’ agendas) can span anywhere from 10-100+ hours to complete. Final Fantasy XII (Square Enix, 2006; hereafter FFXII), originally released for the PlayStation 2, was no different in this regard. Now eleven years later, the game has been remastered and rereleased for the PlayStation 4 under the title Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age (Square Enix, 2017; hereafter The Zodiac Age).

While many players of The Zodiac Age are likely to focus their attention on the game’s revamped job system and its newly remastered HD graphics, the game also boasts a number of other noteworthy changes from the original release of FFXII.[1] These changes include a reorchestrated and rerecorded version of Hitoshi Sakimoto’s musical score (a selling point since it was first announced at E3 in 2016) and the ability to play the game in “Turbo Mode” (i.e. at either 2x or 4x the game’s normative speed).[2] It is on the (musical) experience of playing the game in this Turbo Mode that I wish to focus on for the duration of this essay.

The decision to add the Turbo Mode feature was made in order to help facilitate traversing the game’s sprawling world of Ivalice, however it is also a useful tool for quick level grinding (the act of continually battling weaker foes in a set area to quickly raise characters’ levels).[3] While all diegetic events (inclusive of footsteps, the sounds of battle, and other sound effects) that players control are sped up in Turbo Mode, the game’s (nondiegetic) score continues at the same speed. In many ways, this makes perfect sense: not only is the music nondiegetic (and thus unaffected by the speed change within the diegesis), but the inclusion of a sped-up score would more than likely create too cheesy and gimmicky a tone for the high fantasy world of the game.

The topic of temporality within ludomusicological discourse has not gone unexplored. Julianne Grasso has discussed the matter of temporality vis-à-vis Final Fantasy IV’s (Square Enix, 1991) Active Time Battle (ATB) system and Nobuo Uematsu’s score, arguing that the music “projects its own affective temporality, steeping the player if not in ‘the flow of time of the game,’ then in some sort of musically mediated experience of it.”[4] Following Grasso’s discussion of this musical flow of time, Jesse Kinne recently extended her analysis to a turn-based game series, Heroes of Might and Magic (various, 1995-present), rooting his analysis in theories of groove to suggest that “the music is comprised of numerous overlapping rhythms, and players will experience any given series of ludic or diegetic events as falling into alignment with the meter and nestling into that dense network of musical rhythms.”[5]

The Zodiac Age, however, employs an Active Dimensional Battle (ADB) system wherein players preemptively prescribe actions characters will carry out under a variety of circumstances (akin to a quasi-“if-then” code; see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Example of The Zodiac Age’s gambit system. Screen capture by author.

While there is no shortage of strategy needed to piece together the correct gambits to take on varying foes, utilizing them essentially removes players’ direct control over characters when in the thick of battle (arguably the main reason it is possible to partake in these battles at 4x speed). In the case of level grinding, this may be a welcome relief—battling dozens (or even hundreds!) of easily-beaten foes is a menial task at best.[6] In contrast to Grasso’s “flow of time” and Kinne’s groove networks—both of which account for players participation in the battle during the battle—then, the game’s ADB system creates a temporal space where players can sit back, relax, and enjoy the game’s soundtrack during battles, listening to the accompanying music in its entirety without worrying about the battle taking place. While this is all well and good whilst grinding or traversing Ivalice, there is one particular scenario that musically suffers in Turbo Mode: boss battles.

These plot-advancing battles that occur in the narrative, what Mikhail Bakhtin might identify as the “then suddenly” encounter chronotope, have their own epic battle music.[7]

Yet in turbo-time the music associated with these encounters is lost amidst the sounds of battle within the diegesis. While grinding, players will intermittently hear the battle cries of their party and the sounds of various attacks connecting with foes. Because these battles against weaker adversaries pass by as quickly as they do when in Turbo Mode, the game’s score remains relatively unaffected—at least in the grand scheme of things.[8] However, because bosses are considerably stronger and have more stamina than normal foes, the battle cries that normally take only a second or two are instead littered across the entirety of the sound track, obscuring the marked boss battle music.[9]

If we as players or scholars (or both) are to assume that the music for boss battles should have a similar level of importance to the game as these narrative encounters, then toying with the game’s temporal landscape seems disingenuous to the previously prescribed phenomenological and narrative experience of the game as set by the original FFXII—even if Turbo Mode is a perfectly valid ludic option in The Zodiac Age. Especially with the remaster’s attention to the musical score (going so far as to offer a copy of the soundtrack as incentive for players to buy the collector’s edition of the game), diminishing the importance of the epic boss battle music by way of a newly added feature to The Zodiac Age seems counterintuitive at best and counterproductive at worst: counterintuitive in that this advertised soundtrack is potentially glossed over in the context of the game itself; counterproductive in that, without the the epic music to elevate these crucial battles, the experience of the boss battle is reduced down to nothing more than the sounds of battle. This latter point is troubling in that it musico-narratively prioritizes unmarked battles over marked ones.

As I hope to have shown, meddling with time in The Zodiac Age (the Time Battlemage job class aside) has unusual and perhaps unexpected consequences for the game’s musical soundtrack. While unaffected in terms of tempi, playing the game in Turbo Mode reduces the prominence of what should be the marked “then suddenly” music (such as the Boss Battle music) in favor of the diegetic sounds of battle. In direct contrast to this, unmarked “normal” battles over the course of the game pass by quickly enough that the accompanying music is comparatively uninterrupted by the party’s battle cries. This is particularly true when players are grinding in a set area with its own distinct musical territory. While the entirety of the game was not necessarily intended to be played in Turbo Mode, accounting for the musical consequences that do occur when playing in it offers an interesting musico-narrative reasoning as to why players should avoid abusing their newfound mastery over time in The Zodiac Age.

Stefan Greenfield-Casas recently completed his MM in music theory at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the relationship between music and epics, ludomusicology, and critical theory. He has presented on these topics and others at a number of conferences, including meetings of the Texas Society for Music Theory, Music and the Moving Image, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. Stefan will begin his PhD in music theory and cognition at Northwestern this fall.

[1] “Jobs” in ludic discourse refer to a class a character belongs to, as well as the abilities and equipment that are associated with this class (e.g., an archer would be able to use a bow and arrow and might have an ability to raise their accuracy while a mage might instead equip robes and use various magics).
[2] See Kate Mancey’s frequency analysis of FFXII’s original score versus The Zodiac Age’s remastered version of the score in her forthcoming contribution to this series.
[3] See Ryan Thompson’s recent take on why Ivalice is as large as it is in his post and Lee Hartman’s extended discussion of grinding in his forthcoming essay.
[4] Julianne Grasso, “Music in the Time of Video Games,” (paper presented at the annual meeting for the Society for Music Theory, St. Louis, Missouri, October, 2015).
[5] Jesse Kinne, “Groove Mediates Ludo and Diegetic Temporalities in Heroes of Might,” (paper presented at the twelfth Music and the Moving Image Conference, New York University, New York, May, 2017).
[6] For instance, in my own playthrough I spent one two-hour (plus) gaming session level grinding in a region called the Dalmasca Westersand.
[7] Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 92.
[8] Other sounds, such as items being picked up-post battle, may further (briefly) distract from the game’s score, however I maintain that because each area’s music is looped, players that spend any extended period in an area will hear the track in its entirety.
[9] For reference, most of the boss battles I have played through in Turbo Mode were over in less than 30 seconds; normal battles are generally completed within 1-5 seconds depending on the number of foes the party is engaging. It should also be noted that one strategy for defeating bosses relies on “Quickening Chains,” a series of special attacks that can be linked together to deal massive amounts of damage to enemies (and thus particularly conductive to boss battles). While these Quickenings are not performed in turbo-time, they are driven by players’ reaction times to selecting a series of onscreen prompts within a four-second timespan (thus still forcing players’ attention away from the score). Furthermore, with each successive Quickening there is a corresponding explosion that further obscures the score, thus still redirecting players’ attention away from the music.