Originally Posted by
Elly
if you read "An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII" (amongst many other articles), they mention there that they came to the conclusion that action was what they wanted as far back as FF IV... the technology just wasn't there to do what they wanted so they went with the closest approximation which was what came to be the ATB, ditching the Turn-based system of prior games... later as technology progressed they came closer to what they wanted with KH, FF XIII, & FF XV... really, find those articles with the battle designer/programmer, i forget his name at the moment, but he talks about it in several articles... they were planning to go action as far back as IV, now that's forward thinking...