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Final Fantasy III
- This is the first game that introduced the feature that if an enemy dies before a party member has a chance to act on it, they target another enemy instead of wasting a turn. This feature was included in remakes of Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, but had the option of turning it off if the player wanted the original experience.
- In the Pixel Remaster, two major changes overhaul the game's mechanics and difficulty altogether. The first is the removal of Capacity Points, which means players can change Jobs in-between battles with impunity like Final Fantasy V, and without the Job Adjustment Phase or "Job Sickness" from the Video Game Remake for III. The second was the auto-save per room and a singular manual save system for anywhere, any time. This plus other small tweaks means players can finally save, pause and try again within one of the most infamous final dungeons of the franchise that even the developers apologized for creating.
Final Fantasy V
- When Krile replaces Galuf in your party, she inherits all his job skills, his experience, and his level (though has different base stats: higher agility and magic but lower strength and stamina), which was done to preserve all the work you likely did Level Grinding and customizing Galuf's classes.
Final Fantasy VI
- You retain all EXP earned since your last save (but not stat point increases from Espers) if you are defeated in battle; in all the other Final Fantasy games, you just get kicked back to the title screen. This is actually somewhat necessary in this game to avoid an Unwinnable situation; some saves are in one-way locations, particularly the save before the Mag Roaders. The characters must hop on an unstoppable cart and kill six random encounters plus a boss in a row, with no way to save in between, and no random encounters to level up on in the save area. Low-level characters could be put in an unwinnable state if not for this situation which allows them to gain EXP on one of the cart enemies, die, then repeat.
Final Fantasy VII
- When you're infiltrating the Shinra Headquarters, you have to try and sneak past several patrols of armed soldiers. If they see you, you're forced into a fight. However, if you botch it four times, you'll have ended up killing all the guards and you can just continue on.
- When you're first let onto The Overworld, Barret tells you to head to Kalm, which is where the next leg of the plot happens. If you somehow get completely lost and carry on ignoring it, you'll encounter the Marsh, which requires a Chocobo to pass. In the normal course of events, a Chocobo will run off after you dismount, stranding you on the opposite side of the Marsh by the Mythril Mine; but if you have skipped Kalm, Cloud will tell the Chocobo he feels like he's forgotten something and ask it to wait for him. This means it will still be standing there when your party members prevent you from going through the Mythril Mine, meaning you can hop back on the Chocobo and pass back over the Marsh (and ride it all the way to Kalm if you want).
- If you initiate the Wutai sidequest, an event occurs where your materia gets stolen and you have to chase the thief into Wutai to get them back. Without materia, you have no magic, skills, or summons and your stats are also affected. To compensate for this, all the enemies outside of Wutai will always drop X-Potions (full heal) and elemental attack items that hits all enemies. However, you'll also retain whatever mastered materia you have on hand.
Final Fantasy XII
- You can go after the Elite Mark Yiazmat, who has fifty million HP. The battle can take hours. But don't despair! Unlike every other battle, you can use a nearby Crystal to save your game. In addition, as long as it didn't cast Regen before you left (which would basically reset its health to max - unfortunate if you dropped it so far it Turns Red), you could grind your heart out elsewhere and it would remain at the same HP it did as when you left. An easier boss Hell Wyrm works in the same way.
Final Fantasy XIII Trilogy
- Final Fantasy XIII. The whole combat system is designed with a lot of these in mind
- Despite it being derided as a "Press X/A to win", the Auto-Battle command was designed to select the best possible combination of attacks for a given situation. Considering that in the end you can have up to 6 ATB segments, pressing a button twice over seven times does add up over time.
- If you lose a battle, you're given the option to retry the battle
- Because magic uses the ATB bar instead of MP and that characters can shift what actions they have on the fly, rather than deal with either letting healing be a free action outside of battle or put an unnecesary strain on item usage, your characters are given a complete HP refill after each battle.
- Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII
- The whole game is essentially a Timed Mission. Because of this, the game will automatically pause itself if Lightning is idle for long enough (around one in-game hour), to avoid the player wasting too much time if they leave the game for whatever reason and forget to pause it.
- Since enemies in this game don't give EXP, only EP for abilities and items, the random encounters can quickly become an annoyance. However, most enemies (though not all) have a "Last One" form, which appears after a certain number of them is destroyed. Defeating the Last One will result in a message saying all enemies of that type have been defeated, and that enemy will no longer appear as a random encounter. And if you're worried about needing items dropped by enemies, you'll usually have more than enough of them by the time you've fought enough enemies to exterminate them.
- Should the player find the Final Boss to be too difficult to defeat, the battle can be escaped from and Lightning is sent back to the door leading to the Point of No Return, but with an hourglass nearby. Using this hourglass allows the player to start a New Game Plus, carrying over their equipment, garbs, and collected parameters, and having the chance of going through the game again to level up their parameters through (potentially missed) sideqests.
Final Fantasy XV
- Like a lot of Wide-Open Sandbox games, has a Warp Whistle to traverse the world more easily, and the game will take into account how long it would take for you to get there by car. As a result, it's not uncommon for the party to end up returning to an outpost or a town within the dead of night - and the shopkeepers and questgivers are still there, despite it being three in the morning. This is to keep the player from having to waste time since the game usually does not allow you to skip time unless you rest at an inn or campsite.
- When the player decides to track a hunt and the mark only appears at a specific time of the day (usually night), the game will give you an option to skip until the appropriate time.
Final Fantasy XVI
- If Clive is maxed out on a healing item when he finds one in the field, he'll automatically use it so the item isn't wasted and players don't have to worry about coming back for it. Additionally, the player is restricted from leaving dungeon-type areas until they're completed, or else they start over from the beginning, but every level has healing items convenient placed along the way, oftentimes before or after a particularly difficult sequence of enemies or a boss.
- If you get a Game Over fighting certain bosses or story fights, restarting will not only bring you back to the last checkpoint within the fight itself, but automatically restock all your healing items. You're also given the opportunity to open the menu and adjust your gear and abilities before continuing.
- The Active Time Lore is meant to offer such a mechanic for the story content; during any cutscene, pressing the touchpad will call up a menu of characters, places, or events, that are relevant to the current conversation, so players don't get confused trying to follow the narrative and can quickly brush up on subjects that may not have come up in a while.
- When you replay a level, your treasure coffer data carries over both ways, allowing you to search for items you may have missed since you can't revisit these areas in normal gameplay.
- When a crafting component can only be acquired from a Hunt, it is given a special emblem over it in the crafting menu to provide a clue how to acquire it. In turn, if the player acquires such components without being aware of their utility in crafting, the emblem is a warning that the item is unique and necessary to craft gear so they don't sell it willy-nilly.
- The game contains various "Timely Accessories" to simplify gameplay for those who aren't so skilled at Action RPGs. These rings include the ability to slow time just before getting hit to make dodging easier, a ring to make dodging automatic (if possible), one to use healing items automatically when low on HP, one to make combos easier to perform by mashing the same button over and over, and one to make Torgal controlled by an AI instead of having to input commands for him. The game tells you about the rings after the combat tutorial but before life-or-death combat begins against the goblin horde in the playable demo.
- When playing in Final Fantasy Mode, completing the Chronolith trials will unlock all base accessories for purchase at various merchants. As upgrading the accessories requires you to have two of the lower-tier version (and most of them are only acquired once per playthrough), this allows players to finally get their hands on accessories they missed out on if they sold their weaker counterparts.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
- Losing any fight gives you the option to just start the fight over again right then and there. If you were killed in an ambush, it even turns it into a regular encounter for you. Furthermore, every single party member is capable of casting Life, even non-mages Tristam and Reuben.
Dissidia Final Fantasy
- The campaign mode of Dissidia Final Fantasy is set up almost like a board game. You move your character's piece around the various boards, expending one Destiny Point per move, interacting with Mooks, bosses, treasures, and the like. Story Points are the overall score at the end of the board, and are lost when the player loses a match or spends more Destiny Points than they have. The final boards of the game's final story mode have neither Destiny Points nor Story Points, meaning that the player can challenge the Final SNK Boss as many times as they need to without penalty. Nice of them.
Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin
- Due to a significant Difficulty Spike that occurs in the DLC scenarios, the developers added the Extra Mode that gives Jack infinite Chaosbringer gauge, allowing him to perform Job Actions or cast spells without having to worry about MP.
