Day 22: Most Disappointing Game Sequel
Final Fantasy XII
I guess I'm going counter to at least what the gaming press said on this (Famitsu really gave it a 40/40??), but I know there are some people out there who are with me on this. It's not really a bad game at all--it's every bit as well produced as any other FF game--but it's a game that I really haven't had any desire to play a second time through since first playing it right at its release in 2007. To me, this is pretty significant, because everyone in a while the thought will pop up in my head that, "Hey, maybe I should go back and replay Final Fantasy VIII," and that was a game with a Junction system that pretty much broke the game, and a major plot point that involved all of the main characters remembering that they all came from the same orphanage which they'd all forgotten before because the summons that they use cause memory loss for some reason. It was a gorgeous game to look at, and I can't say that I didn't get some enjoyment out of exploring some of the environments, but the experience as a whole just didn't leave me with the same satisfaction that I've come to expect from the series.
I'm a big believer in the manta of "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Obviously, you can overdo this. I actually enjoy the Dynasty Warriors series, but I don't think there really needs to be 37 different games that all basically amount to "hit square a lot to cleave this mob of mostly motionless people with your halberd." But when I heard that FF XII was doing away with the series's turn-based battle system in favor of a more MMO style, I was apprehensive about it. At some point I read something--I wanna say it was on Penny Arcade--that kind of talked me off the ledge a bit, making the point that look, you can still pause the game and input commands like you used to, it's just that, for inconsequential battles, the game will just start killin' stuff for you and you don't have to sit there with the X button held down. That actually made a lot of sense. As much as I'm completely willing to put an ungodly number of hours into playing an RPG, I'm hardly adverse to streamlining the more tedious parts of it. Here's the thing, though: the game is still really, really tedious anyway.
The game felt a lot like an MMO, except without any other actual humans around you. The rate at which you got XP was unprecedentedly slow, and so despite the battles all taking less time, you had to fight far, far, more of them to level up. The game had a lot of vast, wide-open areas, which were impressive and all on PS2 hardware, but often took forever to get through, and the game had a lot of extended point A to point B travel in it. Really, the game overall just felt like a completely slog in a way that no previous FFs have, even FF IV with it's battle-every-three-steps encounter rate. The hunting board sidequests sometimes broke of the monotony of the game, but some of them also got annoying as hell, as finding the monster you had to kill meant being in the right area under certain circumstances like, "it has to be raining, you have to come in from the left side of the screen, it has to be a Tuesday when you're playing, and your memory card has to have exactly 3217K of space left." Okay, I made some of that up. But basically, the game felt like much more of a chore than it in any way needed to be.
Even in spite of this, the game would still be a fun experience if the game's pretty graphics were complimented by a memorable story. I can only speak for myself, but I remember absolutely nothing from the story. I'm not really kidding when I say that. It's been a while since I've played, but the cutscene in the above video, for example is completely foreign to me. While I Youtube, I watched the video of the last boss fight as well, and I have some very vague memories of the fight, but I wouldn't have remembered his name was Vayne beforehand, and I remember pretty much nothing about who he was or what his motivations were. The playable characters have perhaps a little bit more staying power for me, but not much. Ashe never had a moment like, say, the Sending that Yuna had and seemed to spend most of the game really confused. Balthier, for his occasional rapier wit, was less interesting than Locke in FF6, who was a 2D sprite. Fran had a cool accent, but again, I remember very little about what she did. I think the biggest problem was that, for the first time, they tried to seep the dialogue in this sort of Tolkein-esque poeticness, except that they completely overdid it, and you don't (or I didn't at least) end up really retaining the crux of the scene. I don't profess to have the biggest vocabulary in the world, (I know for a fact that I recycle a lot of the same words over and over again on this blog), but I don't think I'm an idiot, and I there were a lot of exchanges between characters that were fairly bewildering to me just because of how much fluff was in the dialogue. There was a lot of royal court political drama sort of stuff throughout the story, and the way the script was written made it extremely difficult to follow it all.
The battle system ended up being mostly okay, and having your characters actually actively move around the environment during a fight and having true area of effect spells added an interesting dynamic to the game. The boss fights were usually decently fun to play. My biggest complaint with the gameplay was the confounding license board system, which was a similar concept to FF X's sphere grid, except instead of just giving you stat boosts and new abilities, it included "licenses" for all types of equipment in the game. As VG cats lampooned at the time, FF XII was a game where you had to learn how to wear a hat. The system basically made it so all of your characters kind of wound up the same in the end, which was a problem the sphere grid had too, except that it seemed to happen faster with XII's.
As I said, FF XII is still a very well-made game and I can understand why some people would find enjoyment in it. The world of Ivalice is a pretty cool place, and the fact that they were able to put as much detail into it as they did on PS2 hardware is quite a feat. I just wish it was a bit faster to get around in Ivalice and that I found the people who inhabited it a bit more interesting.
Next: Day 23 -- Game you think had the best graphics or art style.
Best graphics and best art style kind of seem like separate questions to me. I'm going to focus more on art style, I think.
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