Had a random thought while playing Bravely Default tonight. So as you may know, when you're using a Black Mage and cast something like Fire, you can choose to cast it on one enemy or all enemies. The trade-off for casting on all is that the damage is dispersed, but it's a valuable choice. However, the battles are turn-based, so if it gets to the Black Mage and there's only one foe left, the damage is focused back on one as if it had been a single cast. The game is forgiving in that sense; you're not punished for choosing all foes and you're not expected to be that granular with your strategy. And it makes sense "realistically" too. There's no reason for Ringabel to blindly torch a wide area. He would adjust his target as conditions changed. But not all games make this assumption.
It got me thinking about turn-based battles as they relate to a game's "reality" and I realized there's two ways to handle it. Either the turn-based battle is an abstraction of the "real" battle that is ostensibly occurring in the game's world--a dynamic showdown with real-time parries, blows and blocks (think Pokemon battles in game vs. in the show)--or it's representative of the game's reality, either by the designers embracing and acknowledging the 'gamey-ness' or simply by never addressing it explicitly. I suppose embracing it would be a form of Lampshade Hanging and might be more for humorous games that like to rub against the fourth wall. Ignoring it just relies on the usual suspension of disbelief gamers have had to develop over the years. I think a good example of combat that's Representative is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (I sadly have yet to play the original, but it may be the same) where the game sort of embraces AND disregards (narratively) the battle system. The rules are presented to the player in tutorials in a very straightforward way, but it's not really lampshade hanging, because it's not treating it as odd or a threat to the suspension of disbelief. It also seems to take the action in game at face value. That is, the turn-based grid battles are not presented as an abstraction of the action, rather they are the action. The cutscenes don't try to imply that something more exciting just occurred underneath the game you're playing, if that makes any sense.
Back to Bravely Default, it could be a valid design choice to make players more closely consider the relative speeds of party members and disperse the damage of spellcasts whether the conditions under which you chose to do so have changed or not. But it would raise questions about what exactly your battles are, as far as the game is concerned. It's a subtle distinction, but I think the best game worlds will have a solid handle on where they stand.
