racketboy.com

In Final Fantasy, you select every party member's actions at once in a turn.
Things then play out in a sequence, with your party members performing their actions and the enemies performing theirs, one at a time.

The game didn't have to be designed this way.

The game can pre-calculate the order of events on a particular turn.

They just as easily could have designed the game where a sequence of events happens, and then you get the change to select an action for one of your party members, kind of like the action gauge in Chrono Trigger.

I believe that this was an intentional design choice. Each turn is supposed to represent a very small window of time, maybe a few seconds, and the action order represents even smaller time slices. I think in table-top D&D a turn is supposed to represent 7 seconds or something. I'm sure one of y'all has friends and knows.

All of this points to party members attacking already-dead enemies as the obvious conclusion. If everyone attacks a single enemy, the guy whose blow lands last runs the risk of beating a good-as-dead horse.

A round in D&D is 6 seconds. A turn is 10 rounds, or a minute.

But the reason I think the FF1 implementation of not redirecting attacks was not necessarily a choice made over redirecting attacks is because the games uses LOTS of mechanical shortcuts and has a number of mistakes, from RNG to sometimes incorrect flags and calculations. Basically, the game came out in a hurry and I’m not sure the idea of redirecting attacks even occurred to the developers. I thing what got implemented was simply design-by-default.