Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™ Vision Design, Part 2
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Flavor and Themes
Humor
Aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
When you start talking to people about their memories of the FINAL FANTASY franchise, they often reference funny moments that have achieved notoriety among fans. We knew that many players would want to share these with Magic players who were new to FINAL FANTASY.
We saw this in playtests, where fans would delight in explaining jokes to folks who weren't expecting a lesson about how Phoenix Downs kill the undead. I was also aware we didn't want to overburden the set with deeper references. This is what I like to call the "Time Spiral Problem." How do you let people enjoy their nostalgia without alienating everyone else?
FINAL FANTASY VI fans often mentioned performing martial arts on a train. It's just as strange as it sounds, but enough people brought this up that it would feel like a missed opportunity to ignore it. We confidently added Suplex and Phantom Train to the set, and everyone loved when it came up. We decided that this was such a beloved reference that the art for Suplex should reference to it. Still, it was valuable to let the moment come up without explicitly referencing it.
In the United States, some memories of FINAL FANTASY are widely shared. But others, like the moment depicted on Commune with Beavers, are less well known. The second, third, and fifth mainline games weren't released in America until well after their Japanese releases, and FINAL FANTASY XI isn't as widely known among American players. Coming into this project, I was a huge fan of FINAL FANTASY V but had minimal experience with the other three games. I had to learn what was memorable about them and how to communicate it to other FINAL FANTASY fans. I gave the following explanation to my coworkers many times:
"FINAL FANTASY II has beavers. And the beavers are just hanging out in a cave you're traversing, and when you meet them your party member named Guy goes up to one of the beavers and says, "Guy speak beaver." And then the beavers move aside to reveal a secret tunnel. Now, this is the only scene with beavers or with Guy talking to animals, so it's a bit baffling, but you need to understand the game cartridges had so little storage capacity that text space was a big concern back then … Anyway, what was I doing? Oh, right, looking at the top three cards of my library."
Playing a Video Game
One of my main takeaways from watching the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms was that it's worth taking a step back from what's going on inside a set's world to think about the larger experience associated with playing a game. That set embraced this with venture into the dungeon and dice-rolling mechanics. Those mechanics verged on alienating for Magic's core audience, so I was cautious about going quite that bold. But we did end up with a few designs that specifically speak to the experience you have playing the game as opposed to just depicting things inside the world.
Building a Limited Environment
The structure for Draft and Sealed in Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY was based on each color having a major focus. The two-color pairs would emerge out of those individual themes. I was a big fan of how Dominaria United utilized this structure to make a very approachable Limited environment. It seemed very straightforward to make five themes that had a lot of inspirations from many themes across the franchise.
| Color | Flavor | Mechanics |
|---|---|---|
| White | Heroes | Legendary Creatures Matter |
| Blue | Items and Technology | Artifacts Matter |
| Black | Villainy | Discard and Sacrifice |
| Red | Magic | Noncreature Spells |
| Green | Exploration | Landfall and Town Lands |
The Set Design team focused on the typical ten color pairs approach. The white and black themes didn't work out as major Limited themes, but blue's theme, red's theme, and green's theme all evolved to be part of the primary archetypes.
The Challenges
Legendary Color Balance
It's easy to lose sight of things in a world as wide as this one. But if you keep going, you're sure to find what you're looking for—sooner or later.
It was quickly clear that finding enough characters for green legendary creatures would be a challenge. Tifa Lockhart, from the main set, is green and cares about landfall. I believe Tifa could justifiably be in an any color combination within red-green-white. To get enough mono-green characters, we focused on her immense potential to deal physical damage.
Bartz and Sazh are from games where they can have many different jobs. But they both have a chocobo companion, so they should have mono-green cards that synergize with chocobos.
Story Reveals
Emotional stories are a key part of the FINAL FANTASY franchise. Some folks balked at the idea that we needed to worry about story reveals for games that are decades old, but it was an important matter for us to discuss with SQUARE ENIX. We built some general rules, but in the end, it was mostly on a card-by-card, moment-by-moment basis.
I've seen several folks comment that they are interested in starting to play the FINAL FANTASY games but are worried that the set will spoil the story of those games. I want to assure people with that concern that this set was made with that issue in mind. I felt that that experiencing the Magic set first will change your experience of playing the FINAL FANTASY games. However, I feel that this is a benefit. I got to play FINAL FANTASY II and FINAL FANTASY III for the first time while working on this set after having had many of the story details spoiled for me in my initial research. But that knowledge ended up making the experience better for me as I looked forward to experiencing the coolest moments that we included in the set. I believe that if you've never played certain FINAL FANTASY games and try them out because of this set, you'll have a wonderful experience.
Of all the story reveals in FINAL FANTASY, there is one that might be the most notorious. While avoiding this moment felt strange as it is fairly widely known, I'm glad we chose to do so, as I think knowing what lies just off camera makes for a much more affecting card than if we showed the entirety of this moment.
Crying at My Work Desk
Open your eyes! Phoenix Down! Elixir! Anything!
One challenge with having a job that involves remembering your favorite part of a certain video game is that rewatching the ending will make you cry at your desk. This can be uncomfortable in an office environment. It was important work though!
While asking folks for their favorite memories of FINAL FANTASY, it was very common for people to talk about moments that made them bawl their eyes out. Honoring those moments felt crucial to capturing the emotional resonance of the games. However, sad moments were often difficult to depict as they often involved story beats that we were afraid to spoil. Having too many of these moments also risked distracting from the larger focus of depicting action, worldbuilding, and whimsy.
I tried to be mindful of ways we could keep all the exciting moments we wanted to depict while also honoring the most emotionally affecting ones. This viewpoint led me to defend the inclusion of one meld pair in the set. Including meld alongside typical transforming double-faced cards (DFCs) had some challenges, but I felt the need to fight for the version of Fang and Vanille that best captured their story and its impact on me. While Fang and Vanille having two individual cards could have made for cool designs, this meld approach not only makes for an epic design that anyone can appreciate, but it also speaks to the specific moment of their story that had me professionally crying at my desk.
The Handoff
If you can't overcome your past self, the sacred power of Light will not accept you!
Once it was time for Gavin to take over the set, I stayed on the team for a few months to help ensure a smooth transition. Here are some of the major changes we made during that transition between vision and set design.
Flashback and Black Mages
We looked for replacements for the monologue mechanic and black's forced discard and sacrifice theme. At the same time, Gavin had been considering adding tokens to the set to represent the black mages from FINAL FANTASY IX, which features artificially created black mages. These would act similarly to the Magic card Guttersnipe, dealing damage when you cast spells. This matched the game's black mages, which aren't meant to attack directly and deal the most damage with spells. This was an excellent alternative to prowess tokens we've made in the past, which actively use combat and didn't feel quite right.
This focus on casting noncreature spells meant that the set needed more ways to trigger your Wizard tokens. Flashback accomplished this goal while also being something we could theme as actual flashback story moments from the series. I also wanted something villainous for instants and sorceries, and it just so happened that there were flashback sequences featuring Kefka and Sephiroth, two of the villains we were excited to show on multiple cards in the set.
The Limited Archetypes
Using the general outline of the monocolor themes, we started developing the broader two-color archetypes for the set. Here is what we ended up with:
Artifacts Matter – During vision design, the blue artifacts theme evolved into white-blue, combining job select, Equipment, airships, magitek, and the various robotic enemies you might encounter.
Flashback Control – I really enjoyed the pairs within blue-black-red encompassing three different aspects of casting noncreature spells. Blue-black takes the grindy approach using flashback to fuel your schemes as you endlessly thwart any puny heroes who would cause you trouble.
Black Mages – Black-red does a wonderful job of recreating the feeling in FINAL FANTASY of spamming black magic repeatedly. Often direct elemental damage is the surest way to end fights in FINAL FANTASY, and this color pair really sells the black mage dream.
Landfall – Landfall does a great job of encompassing exploration as a core FINAL FANTASY element.
Go-Wide – This archetype came together somewhat naturally. It leverages the fact that many summoners felt green-white in their color identity while many of the lower-rarity summons wanted to make tokens as part of their design.
Sacrifice – I love that this came together as the "villains" archetype. Wanting to sacrifice your own things is a great way of showing the characters who are definitely evil.
Big Noncreatures – Blue-red focuses on the epicness of FINAL FANTASY's magic, specifically about spending four or more mana. As opposed to versions of this mechanic that might care about mana value, this specifically cares about the mana spent, which incentivizes you to play the improved modes of tiered spells.
Graveyard – My favorite color pair is black-green, and I'm never sad for it to be about the graveyard. Black and green include many villains who utilize magic that relates to life and death. Mwah-hahahaha indeed!
Equipment – This color pair represents most of FINAL FANTASY's protagonists and their weapons. This archetype was made functional with job select.
Towns – "Green-blue splash everything" is another one of my favorite Limited archetypes, and getting to flavor it as exploring the towns of FINAL FANTASY was a great fit.
Stepping Aside
Whatever.
After a few months on Gavin's team, I departed to focus more on making Aetherdrift. It was hard to part with my beloved vision, but I knew it was in good hands with Gavin and Daniel.
I did manage to jump back in for some concept-selection meetings when we started producing art. I also eventually made some final contributions to the set when we were testing it in Standard, overlapped with my work on Aetherdrift.
In Conclusion
Thank you, Clive. I know you'll always take care of me.
Magic and FINAL FANTASY have both been huge parts of my life. I learned to read playing Magic with my older brother. I learned proper grammar by playing FINAL FANTASY with my older brother (I was embarrassing him in FINAL FANTASY XI). I was obsessed with my older brother, and he was obsessed with Magic and FINAL FANTASY. I had some understanding of reading and grammar, but when I learned something to play games with my older brother, that's when the learning really stuck. I'm very glad that he shared his obsessions with me, and I'm so fortunate that it led me to be writing this article. The undertaking of creating this set was fueled by people sharing their obsessions and their memories. Wizards of the Coast folks sharing their love of FINAL FANTASY and SQUARE ENIX folks sharing their love of Magic. Which is all to say …
Magic is all about the gathering. FINAL FANTASY is all about your party. Have fun, y'all!
© SQUARE ENIX