11 Things We Miss From Final Fantasy

11. Random Battles

Nostalgia can do funny things to a person. The passage of time causes us to reflect fondly on things we once greatly disliked. Like school, or Moira Stewart. It's easy to wistfully yearn for those carefree 9am-3pm days with little to worry about besides getting the lurgy from touching a member of the opposite sex. Childhood, eh?

How we forget how much these things actually annoyed us. Going to school was just an impediment to staying home and playing games, and the last thing we wanted to do when we got in was sit and watch the news, with Stewart detailing the latest emergence in the Bosnian War in her authoritative, flat tone.

No, we wanted to rush upstairs, turn our SNES/PlayStation on, and settle in for a night of Final Fantasy. And with only a few hours before bed time, random battles represented nothing but a hindrance to our progress.

So why do we miss them now? Is it merely a function of a longing for the heady days of childhood?

Partly. But random encounters actually had their benefits. The system of enemies roaming the map introduced in Final Fantasy XII completely changed the way the game played; encounters were now on polar ends of the spectrum - either entirely avoidable or annoyingly obligatory. Our entire path through a dungeon was essentially pre-determined, with no possibility of lucking out and bypassing a battle whilst there was a roaming monster at the end of every corridor.

Final Fantasy XIII made the problem even more egregious, as the set pattern of foes rendered grinding an even more tedious chore. It's a strange state of affairs when one longs for that crushing sense of disappointment as the battle sting hits five metres from a save point.