What If FFXII's Gambits Were a Genre?

TL;DR: I made a little browser game where you program a fantasy party with FFXII-style rules, then try to win 16 fights out of 20. Play Root of All Evil.

2006's Final Fantasy XII was pretty sweet. Anyone play it? FFXII is one of the less popular entries in the series, but the combat was super interesting! It was in this transition stage between full turn-based and more real-time combat, and landed somewhere unusual.

You have your party, and you give them rules like "cast cure on ally with HP less than 30%" or "attack nearest enemy", so you build up the behaviour you want. Then as you go through the environment you unleash this clockwork destruction.

At least that's how it plays out when it works. If your rules are off, your party is doing completely the wrong things and getting stomped, and you have to jump around editing the rules on the fly. It actually feels a lot like being a sysadmin in an incident, trying to patch the system to muddle through just long enough that you can do a proper fix later. Not the easiest emotion to recreate, but they managed it!

I always thought that aspect of FFXII could be a genre, but it never really caught on and there aren't many other examples out there. So I spent the weekend whipping up a little game that plays with the idea.

You've got classic fantasy people (mage, cleric, knight, rogue) and you give them rules. This one is more puzzle game than the live action of FFXII: you program your party to beat a level, then proceed.

The first level at 4× speed. Nobody's steering; the party just follows its rules.

But while iterating on it, I stumbled into the part I'm most excited about. Remember in Avengers: Endgame where Dr Strange looks through all the possible futures to find the one where they win? Fights are random but seeded, so every one can be replayed exactly. That meant I could make you win across 20 universes, not just one: clear a level by winning 16 of 20.

As you adjust the rules, you see the fight play out. In a way you're playing the whole probability distribution, watching the graphs and numbers change, which is oddly compelling. It's fun to see how one seemingly inconsequential tweak shifts your odds from 9/20 to 17/20.

Healing at 20% HP instead of 10%: 8 wins out of 20 becomes 18.

On top of that, there are rewards for winning 16 times without anyone in your party falling, or for winning with the fewest rules. There's even an Endless mode with a fresh set of waves every day, the same for everyone, to see how far your party can get.

For a quick weekend project, it turned out better than I expected, which shows FFXII's 20-year-old combat system still has strong bones.

Give Root of All Evil a shot. See if you can find your 16 universes, and let me know your best win rate with the fewest rules.