In the first three Final Fantasy games, a battle waited for you. You chose a command for each character, the round played out, and the monsters stood politely still while you thought about the next one. Square’s Final Fantasy IV put the fight on a clock. Each character has a gauge that fills in real time and may act only when it is full, and the enemies have gauges too: if you dither in the menu, they hit you anyway. Square called it the Active Time Battle, took out patents on it in the United States, and used it in every main Final Fantasy for the rest of the 1990s.
Fast facts
- Introduced: Final Fantasy IV (Super Famicom, 1991), released in America as Final Fantasy II.
- Patent: US 5,390,937, naming Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiroyuki Itou as inventors, with a Japanese priority date of 16 July 1991; granted in 1995, with a divisional patent, 5,649,862, in 1997.
- The rule: “a time gauge for each character indicates whether they are busy or can be assigned new orders. The enemy will continue to attack in realtime whether you act or not” (Edge, 1996).
- Variants: Charge Time Battle in Final Fantasy Tactics; Parasite Eve and Xenogears.
- Replaced: by the turn-order Count Time Battle in Final Fantasy X (2001); its gauges returned in Final Fantasy XIII.
How it works
Edge gave the clearest short account when it previewed Final Fantasy VII in October 1996:
FFVII retains the ‘Active Time Battle’ concept. All combat is menu-driven but a time gauge for each character indicates whether they are busy or can be assigned new orders. The enemy will continue to attack in realtime whether you act or not, so quick decision-making is rewarded.
Computer and Video Games added the detail that makes the system tick. Both sides “have to wait until they have recovered enough stamina to make a move”, and the speed at which each character’s time bar recovers “is governed by the experience level of the character, or any number of effects caused by enemy magic”. A fast character acts more often than a slow one, and a spell that speeds up or slows down a gauge changes the shape of the whole fight.
Square’s patent describes the same machinery as a programmer would build it. A time “stipulated for each character” is counted “from the end of a previous action”; when it runs out, a player character may be given a command, and an enemy may attack “even while the player character is in the process of inputting a command”. In code terms each combatant carries a timer that fills at its own rate, the game loop keeps advancing all of them while the menus are open, and a full timer either opens a menu or lets the computer choose.
The clock could be tuned. Nintendo Power’s 1991 feature on the American release listed a configuration screen where players could “customize screen colors, battle speed and message speed”, a setting that only makes sense when battles run in time. By Final Fantasy VII the range was wide: “While it’s possible for beginners to restrict fights to a simple taking-turns structure,” Edge wrote in its review, “at its realtime fastest … battles can elevate to almost action-game status.”
A patented idea
Edge called it “Square’s patented Active Time Battle system”, and the patent was real. US patent 5,390,937, “Video game apparatus, method and device for controlling same”, was filed in March 1992 on the strength of a Japanese application of 16 July 1991, and granted in February 1995. It names Square’s Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiroyuki Itou as the inventors. A second patent, 5,649,862, split off from the first and was granted in 1997. Square printed both numbers in the legal line of its 1999 advertisement for Final Fantasy Anthology, the American reissue of Final Fantasy V and VI.
The 1990s
Chrono Trigger (1995) took the gauges out of the separate battle screen. Nintendo Power explained that its fights were “menu driven like traditional RPGs”, but took place “in the world in which you move around, not on separate battle screens”, and that “the action can take place in real-time or in turns”. Super Play’s feature on the game that June ran a boxout on Active Time Battle beside a chronology of Square’s games.
On the PlayStation, Square’s other role-playing games were measured against it. Edge described Final Fantasy Tactics’ Charge Time Battle in April 1998 as giving “characters of both sides a 100-unit Charge Time gauge, restricting movement and action (known as Active Time) until the gauge is full”, with fill rates that meant “different characters become active at different times”, “minimising the board-game feel of taking turns”. Parasite Eve‘s combat that November was “derived from the usual Final Fantasy-style Active Time Battle, where attacks can only be made once a character’s AT gauge has filled”, but let both sides “move anywhere within the combat area”. Xenogears’ “fighting game-style combat cleverly disguises what is essentially a variation on Square’s well-worn Active Time Battle system”.
After the PlayStation
Final Fantasy X (2001) dropped it. IGN Unplugged reported that the game “replaced the Active Time Battle system that has been in use since FFIV with the Count Time Battle (CTB) system”, in which turns come round one at a time in an order set by each character’s Speed and shown in a window on screen. It was a turn-based system again, and the player could see who would act next.
The gauges came back. Reviewing Final Fantasy XIII in 2010, Edge found it “remarkable” that “those Active Time Battle gauges still anchor” a much faster combat system, and in 2013 it described the series’ “trademark Active Time Battles” in a preview of Lightning Returns. Developers who grew up with the 1990s games kept citing it: in 2021 Edd Parris, the sole developer of Jack Move, told Wireframe that Final Fantasy VII was the first role-playing game he played and that he “fell in love with that turn-based ‘Active Time Battle’ system”.
Sources
- US Patent 5,390,937, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Hiroyuki Itou, “Video game apparatus, method and device for controlling same”, assigned to Square Co., Ltd.; Japanese priority 16 July 1991, filed 16 March 1992, granted 21 February 1995 (web, Google Patents): abstract and first claim. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5390937A/en
- US Patent 5,649,862, Sakaguchi and Itou, a division of 5,390,937, granted 22 July 1997 (web, Google Patents). https://patents.google.com/patent/US5649862A/en
- Total Control issue 5, January 2000: Final Fantasy series overview (Final Fantasy IV, 1991, and Active Time Battle).
- Hyper issue 117, July 2002: Final Fantasy IV as the first game in the series with Active Time Battle.
- Nintendo Power issue 30, November 1991: Final Fantasy II feature (the configuration screen and battle speed). Issue 74, July 1995: Chrono Trigger.
- Super Play issue 32, June 1995: Chrono Trigger feature, with an Active Time Battle boxout and Squaresoft chronology.
- Edge issue 37, October 1996: Final Fantasy VII prescreen. Issue 51, November 1997: Final Fantasy VII review. Issue 57, April 1998: Final Fantasy Tactics review. Issue 64, November 1998: Parasite Eve review. Issue 67, January 1999: Xenogears review.
- Computer and Video Games issue 185, April 1997: Final Fantasy VII feature (the time bar and its recovery rate).
- Official US PlayStation Magazine vol. 3 no. 2, November 1999: Final Fantasy Anthology advertisement (the patent numbers).
- IGN Unplugged issue 5, August 2001: Final Fantasy X import review (Count Time Battle replacing Active Time Battle).
- Edge issue 213, April 2010: Final Fantasy XIII review. Issue 251, March 2013: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII preview.
- Wireframe issue 52, June 2021: Jack Move feature, Edd Parris on Active Time Battle.