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MarsDragon's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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| [January 31, 2007 05:37:41 PM]
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All right, another entry. Since I finished with the lighthouse, I decided to catch up on my Hunts and not advance the plot for awhile. (I still had to finish a few Rank III hunts. So behind) So I went to take care of the Gil Snapper and Roblon.
Since I'm doing Hunts, it seems a fine time to talk about the gameplay and how it differs from the numeric FFs from VI to X. (IV as well, I suppose)
One of the things about FFXII is that it's not really about the characters, or the plot. It's about the gameplay, and breaking it right open to do whatever you want it to. This is another common feature in Matsuno games, having to spend a lot of times in menus and tweaking things to get the best results. In this way it shares more with FFI, II, III, and V (plus Tactics and Vagrant Story, obviously) than the post-VI world that most players are familiar with. The main point of FFXII isn't to advance the plot as much as it is to kill enemies and make your characters to be powerhouses. The main game is about running through dungeons and getting those LP to get that next level of magic or weapon, figuring out how to best set up your Gambits to take advantages of enemies weaknesses, and in general playing the game to break it in half. It's not nearly as exploitable as FFV or FFT, but the idea is the same. It's the first numerical mechanics-based FF since FIVE, which is a pretty big break from what most people see as FF nowadays. But it's not that FFXII isn't a Final Fantasty, it quite clearly is, even if it's more of a stepchild than pureblooded. It's a bit of a throwback, though, and even worse, it's a throwback to games which never came to America except recently. I mean, be honest. How many people who got into FF with VII went back and played the SNES ones? And poor Tactics never got a good reception, even if it was the best PSX FF.
Now, one of the problems with this that FFXII runs into is that the earlier mechanics-based FFs have all been incredibly exploitable. Maybe not FFIII, because that was an NES game and they were made to hurt, but between FFVs Blue Magic and Chemists and FFTs Ninja and Calculators, they could EASILY be broken in half once you knew how. FFXII tries to get around this by giving the bosses tons of HP, so even with Quickenings and exploiting weaknesses, it still takes time and effort to bring them down. They also add things like Palings and Magic Walls to add some strategy (know when to attack and when it's not doing any good), but it mostly comes down to lots and lots of HP. This comes with it's own set of problems, namely that long fights, such as mine against the Roblon, just come down to keeping half an eye on the fight to make sure everything's going like it should, and letting Gambits take on the rest. While it is nice to not have to mash attack constantly like in the older FFs, it would've been nice to have some variety in fights. I'm not sure if adding a hidden exploit would be the best way to do this, and they did their best with Palings to keep you on your toes, it still feels a trifle boring. Just not as bad as some of the super boss fights in previous FFs.
One nifty thing that only tangentially relates to the gameplay, but adds a lot of value to the game for me, is the Bestiary. This is easily the best Bestiary I've ever seen, and what it lacks in cold stats about the enemies it makes up for in world-building flavour. Due to it FFXII probably has the best and most fleshed out world in any FF, and best of all, it adds tons of references back to older games, especially FFT and Vagrant Story. This adds a good deal of hidden continuity, which is really nice to see. It gives the sense of a larger world than you can usually do in the FF series, which reboots the entire universe every game; and lends a more Phantasy Star feel of finding things you remember seeing previously. One thing that I really got a kick out of was in an entry for a particular Rare Game, the Tower in the lighthouse. It says that the Tower is: "Babil considered the most sacred of its kind."
Not too exciting, huh? At first glance it seems to be a mistranslated reference to Babel, which isn't too surprising, given the Japanese pop culture tendency to appropriate Western religious symbolism. And it essentially is. But that particular spelling is also a reference to the US version of FFIV, where the plot points of the Tower and Giant of Babel were censored by Nintendo at the time to Bab-il. (later fixed in FFIV Advance) That little sentence contains not just an overdone religious reference, but a reference back to a previous game in the series, making the older fans smile. References like this abound in FFXII, from the Red Wings (another FFIV reference) to hunts straight out of FFVI, magic and weapons we haven't seen since Tactics, and dungeons and churches lifted from Vagrant Story. FFXII not just has its own deep and engaging world, it connects other worlds in the series. Not enough to drag them together, but enough to make the fans smile. It's an underlooked at aspect which really gives the game some extra appeal to me.
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| [January 31, 2007 02:44:17 PM]
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Well, I didn't really want to do FFXII for my Gamelog...I'm already well into the game and am not doing anything really interesting right now, much like everyone /else/ who does FFXII Gamelogs, and I have some pretty vicious feelings to people who don't get that this isn't just another FFVI/VII rip-off like they were expecting and is something a lot better. On the other hand, I found out through Gradius once again that I just all out SUCK at horizontal shooters, and there isn't much worth in a Gamelog where the player can't get past the first half of the first stage either. (Not kidding. Guardian Legend is a classic too, you know! And a vertical shooter! Go get some carts for it!)
So. FFXII. As I said, I'm well into this game, since I've been playing it since it came out. (since I'm a very slow gamer, though, I'm still only about 65 hours into it) I recently got back to it after taking a long break and finished up the damn lighthouse. While I greatly enjoy most of the game, the last bit of the lighthouse with the coloured waypoints and nasty punishment for screwing up the order is pretty mean, and fighting Hashamal without a save point is pretty vicious too. My current party was out of mana and at half health from fighting their way up from the last save point, so I switched to my other party, leaving myself without backup if they should fail. Luckily, Hashamal took lots of damage very quickly and I soon Floated my way to victory. Go go Earth Dragon tactics.
Luckily, that was the worst of the lighthouse dungeon. It was interesting from a puzzle-based dungeon standpoint, and most of the ideas worked pretty well. Dark Stones were easy enough to collect, since you'd be committing wholesale slaughter anyway, and even the green/red bridges weren't that bad, even if my Gambit set-ups tended to require lots of fleeing. The Sacrifice...was less-well done. There's no reason to choose anything BUT the mini-map to give up, especially after the Great Crystal, which made both maps useless, as opposed to just having to hit Select all the time. Taking away the main map as well would've been better, but even then Items and Map are a lot better to give up than Magic or Weapons. On the other hand, Matsuno games do tend to lend themselves well to people doing stupidly hard challenges for the hell of it, which would make the other two very useful.
The waypoints, on the other hand, are just kind of there and punishing. When did I use red again? And the already-mentioned Hashamal. The boss at the top was also interesting (hey! enemies don't get summons!), even if I did have to keep manually telling my characters to attack the right guy. But that's my fault for not wanting to go mess around with Gambits as opposed to a flaw in the game itself.
Winning the lighthouse got me quite a bit of plot, so I suppose here I'll defend FFXII's story-telling style. I've seen some complaints around about how you just fight through a dungeon, get some story, repeat. First off, isn't this how every RPG works? Unless you want a pure movie or a pure dungeon-crawler, that's how it works. What I think they're getting at is that the story bits are too short and infrequent, to which I reply that A) it's a game. Don't buy it if you don't want to actually play it, and B) go play Vagrant Story or FF Tactics. All these games are pretty much done by the same guy (FFXII has a bit more drama associated with it, but that's mostly the way), and they all display the same tendency of making you actually PLAY the game to get to the story bits, in which you have to actually infer what the bad guys are doing, since a lot of times the main character(s) are on the side-lines, trying to do their thing and learn the "truth". It's a valid technique, just not one often used in the main FF games, which appears to be where the problem is, people who expected another rehash of FFVI and got the bastard son of Vagrant Story and FF11 instead. Personally, I think the story sequences are well done, the plot is actually interesting for once, and I rather like having to actually do something to get to the next bit of plot instead of just letting the game take me along.
Hmm. From looking the above entry...yeah, I wish I was better at horizontal shooters too.
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MarsDragon's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 31 January, 2007
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