Final Fantasy

Square built its role-playing game around the party. Four characters are picked from the classes before the playthrough begins, and that choice is never reassembled afterwards: you have to go to the end with it, and a poor lineup makes itself felt several hours in. The fight is shown from the side, the party on the right, the enemies on the left, and there are several of them on screen at once, so a turn is the distribution of four actions across several targets.

Commands for a round are given to all four at once and carried out in turn. An attack is assigned to a specific enemy, and if an ally finishes that enemy off first, the action is wasted, so the calculation includes not only damage but also the order of moves. Magic is counted as a number of uses per spell level, and healing in a fight has to share that with combat spells. In the middle of the game the classes receive a promotion and unlock weapons and spells that were previously unavailable. The world opens up through transport: a ship, then an airship, expand the accessible part of the map, and geography turns out to be as much a resource as equipment. From this assembly grew a series that continues to this day.