The very first JRPG I ever played was Final Fantasy X on the Playstation 2. Originally, I only watched my father play on the rare occasions he was home during the day, but once I was old enough to actually understand how to play (no older than eight, I'd guess) I spent countless hours on that game. I have played and replayed it countless times throughout my life and into adulthood, for a while there I had even memorized Al Bhed. The characters have been permanently etched into my mind as exemplars of their archetypes in the game and story, the world forever set the tone for what I look for in a setting, and the leveling system. The levelng system has been a source of great fascination for as long as I've played games (read: my entire conscious life).

What is the Sphere Grid?

For those who are unaware (and feel free to skip ahead if you are aware), the way leveling works in FFX is one step more complicated than "get XP to make numbers go up." When characters defeat enemies in combat, they are awarded AP (essentially experience points) which in turn grants them Sphere Levels (hereby abbreviated as SL). You can then spend a character's SL to move them along the Sphere Grid. The Sphere Grid is, in essence, a massive interconnected skill tree. Every character occupies a specific node on the Grid, and can spend a particular item (that is generally plentiful and easy to find) to claim an adjacent node, permanently gaining whatever stats or skill it provides. For example, a Strength node will increase a character's Strength score by some number between 1 and 4, and the "Cure" node will teach the character the "Cure" spell. This is the sole way to increase a character's stats, and the primary method of unlocking new abilities. So, in effect, a character's advancement throughout the game can be physically tracked via the path they have taken on the Sphere Grid, rather than by simply reading a number.

An image of a character on the Sphere Grid. The white circle is his current location, the colored nodes have been claimed, and the highlighted blue trail is the path he has already traversed.

Much like a normal skill tree the Sphere Grid is separated into sections, each mostly designed for the character that begins the game within the section; however, the system contrasts with regular skill trees in a few major ways. Firstly, the sections of the Grid are not separated by hard lines. Rather, they are generally separated by Lock nodes, which require a special, rare item to "unlock" it and allow traversal between sections. There are also routes between sections that are unlocked from the start, but these mainly exist at the beginning and end of sections. Additionally, there are no prerequisites to learning new abilities other than to reach them on the Grid. There is nothing stopping a character's first spell from being one of the most powerful ones, and it is entirely possible for a character to pop into another section to grab a specific ability before returning to their own section.

Why I like the Sphere Grid

This system allows for a great deal of versatility with your characters, and allows them to flex into other roles with a level cost based on their physical proximity within the Sphere Grid. There are also many specific, more advanced ways to manipulate the Grid, such as items that allow characters to warp to different locations or transform blank nodes (which offer no advancement) into powerful stat upgrades. But even looking at only the most basic interactions (spend SL to move, then claim adjacent nodes) you have a great deal of options ahead of you. For example, the White Mage (read: healer) in the party also has the ability to summon creatures to aid in combat, whose power is based on her own stats. But due to her lack of offensive capabilities, she is not generally useful in most normal combats, which in my experience has caused her stats to lag somewhat behind the others without some grinding. However, with a little bit of investment at the start of the game, you can move her from the White Mage section of the Sphere Grid and into the Black Mage (read: combat mage) section which gives her, and by extension her summons, much more staying power in combat without needing to consistently go out of your way to level her up. But the real beauty of the system, in my eyes, is that the example I just gave, while it sounds like an obvious advantage, is not a unilateral upgrade, and only works due to my own playstyle in the game. If you truly wanted, you could instead put that very same healer down the path of the tanky melee hitter, and make the tank the healer instead. Would it be a net positive for the team? Probably not. Could you still beat the game? Absolutely.

Some issues with the Sphere Grid

Now with all that said, there are some obvious limitations to the design of the Sphere Grid. The first of which is that the endgame, particularly the optional content, quickly makes the characters' stats level out to more or less the same. When everyone has been across 2/3 of the Grid, the only real difference between them becomes the equipment they carry and whatever in-built special abilities they have, which leads to obviously optimal party compositions. Several characters become either situationally useful or entirely obsolete (RIP Lulu). Another limitation is that in order to really make use of the versatility the Sphere Grid offers, some amount of grinding will be necessary. While it's entirely possible to make it through the game by just fighting any enemies you encounter and being mindful of your characters' levels, if you decide to do anything other than follow the obvious path forward you will have no choice but to invest time simply gathering levels. This compounds on some other systems in the game, namely the equipment system which is arguably even more grindy, to make it so doing anything of interest with your characters will necessarily require a considerable time investment. And while I do acknowledge that grinding is more or less a part of the genre, I am loathe to consider it as anything other than an obstacle to be overcome with clever design.

A point of comparison

I have played many RPG's since my debut into the genre, and while none have ever struck me in the same way as FFX (nostalgia is a hell of a drug), there are several that have similarly fascinated me, and gotten me to thinking about how the Sphere Grid could be improved. Crystal Project is an open-world RPG styled after the old SNES Final Fantasy titles, with little story to speak of and Metroidvania-esque exploration. While I could write an entire post about this game, and just might in the future (the singular dev released mod support just over a week ago, so I will likely have much to say), I will focus on the game's levelling and class system as they pertain to the current topic. In Crystal Project, you start with several classes unlocked, such as Cleric, Warrior, and Rogue, and can freely assign these to your four party members at the start of the game. When a character survives a combat they get XP and LP (I can neither find nor remember what "LP" stands for), when they get enough XP they level up, and their stats increase based on their current equipped class (Warriors get more Strength, Rogues get Dexterity, etc. You can pay gold to respec levels into other classes.). Whereas a character's level is is inherent to them, LP gain is specific to the currently equipped class. Get 100 LP, and you unlock a skill point to invest in the class's specific skill tree. What makes this system interesting, however, is how modular it is. In addition to a character's currently equipped class, they can also equip a "sub-class" which gives them all of the unlocked abilities of a secondary class. And on top of that, any passive abilities they have unlocked can be used regardless of what class/sub-class you have equipped. Add on top of that the game's QoL features where characters get increased LP for their first few skills in a class, and also grant 10% of their class's LP gain to all other characters, and picking up new classes doesn't feel like half as much of a slog as shifting a character into a new part of the Sphere Grid in FFX.

The actual reason for this post

So, my actual point. If the main drawbacks of the Sphere Grid, as I see it, are that it is grindy and removes character identity when followed all the way through, a possible solution would be to incorporate some of the modularity of Crystal Project's levelling system. My current draft of the idea is to take the Sphere Grid and split it up into several distinct "Modules." A character would begin on a particular Module that pertains to their class, for example the Warrior starts on a Module that contains mainly HP, Strength, and Defense nodes with access to a Taunt skill and a few offensive melee skills. On the Module there will be one or more "Access Nodes." Once a character reaches an Access Node, they can use it to warp themself to an Access Node on another Module. There is also the possibility of adding prerequisites to entering certain Modules, for example the "Death Knight" Module might require you to have a certain amount of investment in both melee and magic before granting access, adding an element of forethought and planning to progression.

Of course this idea is still pre-prototype, and I can already detect several possible issues in the design that might be difficult to stamp out. For one, the idea of all access points leading to any other Module raises some concern, as I expect it will be a careful balancing act to make this design work without creating obviously optimal paths. The idea of "warping" to other Modules also brings me some concern, as it will necessarily make a character's progression more difficult to track at a glance than the system in either of the games that inspired it, requiring a player to follow a track across multiple discrete areas to gain an understanding of the whole.

In thinking on this design, I've also arrived at several disparate pieces of design and balance that don't fit nicely into a description, ranging from possible ways of balancing the system to features that would make it more interesting. In no particular order:

Wrapping up

This post was mostly rambling, with a little bit of idea at the end. But it was also my first post, so whatcha gonna do. I plan on expanding on this idea, though I'm caught between implementing this in a JRPG-style game or trying to adapt it for Tabletop, which would require massive amounts of refactoring to keep it from becoming an unintuitive mess. Maybe I'll do both, who's gonna stop me? God?