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Cover Art for Fabula Ultima
by Catty Trinh
©2022 Need Games |
Author: Emanuelle Galletto
Publisher: Need Games
Marketplace: DriveThruRPGEngine: Fusion of the
Ryuutama engine &
Forged in the Dark Fabula Ultima is a tabletop role-playing game designed to simulate what is often referred to as the Golden Age of JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games). That is, fantasy console video games such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Phantasy Star, and Earthbound.
If you are not familiar with these types of games, they primarily we're found on the Super Nintendo and Sony PlayStation and were mostly made by the Juggernaut companies Squaresoft and Enix. (Now Square Enix) They featured Dungeons & Dragons-inspired gameplay primarily driven by option menus. While the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior games were very clearly clones of OD&D, the developers found that they needed to adjust the way the games worked mechanically to adapt to the limitations of the medium, which evolved into their own unique tropes and conventions. Some examples include such as creating jobs systems that let characters change what they could do, simplified Magic based on expanding point pools, and having most character classes add one or two menu options.
Obviously, the video games of the time couldn't offer player characters an open or even procedurally generated world. This fundamental difference from Dungeons & Dragons was a glaring flaw in the first couple of games of the genre. The developers discovered that they could compensate for the lack of the player characters' freedom by using the game as a medium for crafting elaborate, interactive fantasy novels with complex plots and large casts of characters.
The cultural back and forth between Dungeons & Dragons and JRPGs, especially the Final Fantasy series, and especially for Generation X is something I've written about here. I would argue that Final Fantasy IV in particular had a massive impact on how Dungeons & Dragons was played among what we now are calling "Trad" style players.
I surmise that a lot of the impulse that led to the story game branch of our hobby evolved from love of the way JRPGs told stories and structured their narratives.
Fabula Ultima (Latin for "Final Fantasy ") is precision-engineered to capture the feel and story structure of those JRPGs in the table -top format. It draws must heavily of the Super Nintendo-era Final Fantasy titles, but echoes of other series such as Ys, Phantasy Star, and Dragon Warrior are also pretty evident. It leans heavily into video game tropes such as boss fights, multiple damage type systems, and readily available healing potions, bombs, and magical implements.
One thing that did surprise me is that they did not move into the idea of death as an easily remedied state. But more on that in a moment.
I want to note that there is a free starter document for Fabula Ultima, Fabula Ultima: Press Start that has the rules necessary for players to learn the game free for download at DrivethruRPG and the Need Games homepage.
The System
Fabula Ultima is based on the Japanese tabletop role-playing game Ryuutama and, aside from the eponymous Dragon-spirit guide and the wellness roll, almost the entirety of that game engine has been carried over. This was an incredibly smart choice, as Ryuutama borrows many of its mechanics from early Final Fantasy games.
