>>4946465
>It's basically made to trick the player into thinking there's urgency like in realtime combat, but since there's no big meaningful decisions to make and the games fucking pause when browsing skills/items, it's entirely meaningless and the games play out pretty much exactly as they would if turnbased.
Wrong. There are decisions to make.
Zeromus, the final boss of FF4, has an attack (Big Bang) that does huge damage + HP Leak. At typical levels, this often more than 90% of the max health of your weakest characters or even just kill them outright. Zeromus buffs his magic power before unleashing big bang, so you have a warning that it's coming.
Your healer's turn is up. If your timing is good, you can cast heal before Big Bing goes off so that it lands immediately after the BB its initial damage and before the HP Leak has time to finish anyone off. If you cast it too soon, you'll heal will land before Big Bang goes off and the spell will be wasted.
In a typical round-based system that dynamic is entirely absent. In a "turn-based ATB" system like FF Tactics or FFX, deciding whether to cast the heal is a simple question of looking at the AT list to see when it will land and requires no timing at all.
And even if you do use wait/pause to think about what to do next, that hesitation may still cost a few ticks which can change the turn order and allow an enemy to move before you do.
Later ATB games dumbed this down somewhat. But in FFIV cast times mattered a lot and you had abilities like Kain's Jump that you could use to evade damage if you timed it well.