BTS: The Nostalgia of Final Fantasy
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You can see the entire recording in YouTube over here, or read on for details!
Now to start off, I grew up in the silver age of video games, where we saw a peak in 2D pixel art games and the transition towards 3D games. Like Tina and Will, I was an avid gamer and I played so many games of different genres. My favorites however, were always Japanese Role-Playing Games or JRPG in short. Simply because of the rich storyline and characters that transports you away into a world of fantasy, heroes and villains. And that’s what made it fun wasn’t it? So I thought really hard about my fondest memory, and while there were many tiebreakers – I had to go with Final Fantasy Tactics, because it was one that had so much team building flexibility in the game.
The main draw of it was that you can recruit story-related characters or mercenaries who would have access to a job system, each building upon one another. Want to bring a whole team of mages into a battle, not a problem. How about swashbuckling knights and samurais, you can do that too! Or if you prefer the subtle approach with ninjas, thieves and archers. The world was your oyster.
There were so many permutations to get to where you want, and I wanted to put that as the focus of my visualization. I mapped out the entire system in Figma and started to brainstorm how would I visualize this in Tableau. I knew if I wanted a quick way for anyone to understand the path to a particular job and what were the strengths and weaknesses of that job – I had to show the entirety, the relationship and build interactivity somehow.
And if you think about it fundamentally, all visualizations are just dots or points on axes, and I could potentially plot the jobs as points in the chart, and the paths as connecting lines between each dot.
Unfortunately for such a niche idea, there’s hardly any readily available datasets so I had to make my own. Now this isn’t the best the way to do this, but it was how my mind visualized the end goal. I created the X and Y axis and plotted out the jobs with abbreviations and marked the rest of the empty as “X”. Looking back at hindsight, I could have just left them as blank.
After I was done with that, I had to transpose the data into a tabular format, using OFFSET and XLOOKUP formulas in Microsoft. I created the Job table first and then the Job Path table. The Path table require a bit more finesse because I needed to create multiple rows for each class, if they had multiple paths leading to it. For example, a Samurai would require Knight, Monk and Dragoon, The X and Y coordinates from the Job table would then be mapped accordingly to either the Origin (in this case Samurai) or the Destination (Knight, Monk and Dragoon). And there you have it, we have a working dataset to get started in Tableau.
There are some spatial functions in Tableau which you can use to manually plot stuff and the one I’m using specifically is MAKEPOINT. It requires a X and Y value (which was what we were doing in the previous steps). The path would require a MAKELINE, which takes the value of the origin and destination X and Ys.
You can then drop the jobs as the first layer. So the idea is once you have those coordinates, Tableau automatically generates those longitude and latitude values for you, creating something like this.
You can add a many additional map layers you would like to create a nested visualization stacked on top on one another. Here we see the job dots plotted together with the job paths. Again, Tableau automatically generates those longitude and latitude values for you, creating something like this.
To add additional aesthetics to it, I changed the job layer to shapes so I could assign distinct shapes to each of them.
After setting the background map to None, and assigning images (which you can do by dropping image files into the Repository folder) and we finally have something like this. This is easily the most time consuming part because I had to adjust sizes, images and parameters to get to a presentable format. But with that, the biggest pieces are done.
From there, it was all about adding more context to enhance the story I was trying to tell. What did the Samurai game stats look like, descriptions, path information – things like this could be easily searched for in Wikis, Kaggle or even the official websites.
I went one step more to prove my point, by gathering information on the sales figures and how long it takes to complete the game from different websites like VGCharts and HowLongToBeat, which both are great resources for those participating in IronViz this year.
The final chef’s kiss was basically putting all them all together and creating a thematic design. And that.. was how the entire project came to fruition.
Hope you found this insightful or interesting... if not you know what you have to do 😉
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