A friend gave me Final Fantasy IV for the DS recently and I’m having trouble with the battle system, specifically the active/wait aspect of it. I like turn-based combat, and I thought choosing the “Wait” mode will allow me to take as long as I need to to attack. However, I saw that my opponents will just keep hitting me if I don’t do anything. What am I missing?
If I remember correctly, “wait” just postpones your choice until later. For example, everybody is at full health, your healer’s turn came up, and you know the enemy is about to unleash a devastating attack. Instead wasting an ineffectual attack or healing spell, you wait until after the attack to heal the party.
Wait also works if more than one person’s turn is up. It allows you to switch between players.
It’s been a long time, but I think there’s a configuration setting between active/wait that is what he’s referring to. And to my recollection it only works on sub-menus, ie, picking out a magic spell or an item. If you leave it on the ‘main’ menu time proceeds normally.
That’s what I interpret him to mean. And your description is pretty accurate.
The active/wait option refers to when the player is accessing menus, the battle will actually pause for the time it takes for you to select the spell/item/etc. you want to use. I always used the wait option because I don’t want my chances in the fight dictated by how well I can move a cursor around a menu.
In the active option, all time bars will keep filling while you access the menus, so the enemy can get multiple attacks in while you’re still figuring out what you want to do.