The Final Fantasy Battle Engine: A Dissection of Physical Attacks - Behind the Code

This is the RPG Dungeons & Dragons. [music] Not exactly the best edition of the game, but here it is. It's a game that demands adventure and chance. We need numbers and we need random numbers. This established a heritage that was passed on to computers and video game consoles. Eventually, we saw the release of Final Fantasy for the Famicom NES platform and it was anything but final. Not only because the title would turn into a series and evolve far beyond the original entry, but also because it it well, probably needed a few code revisions before that code was considered final. The battle system is buggy, but unlike your traditional platform games where glitches are seen, most of the bugs remain behind the scenes, contained within [music] the hidden math that will eventually produce the numbers we see during a fight. The logic and code behind all of this was picked apart long ago in facts, strategy guides, and code disassembly have been available ever since. I want to get into how the battle system works with a focus on physical attacks. Why just physical attacks? Well, this is the code executed for a single physical attack. It consists of 781 total bytes, not including the contents of the various subroutines it calls. It is responsible for animation, damage calculation, and reporting the results on the battle screen.