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AramisKale's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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| [January 31, 2007 08:53:14 PM]
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An piece of advice for everyone out there in gameland, remember to stop playing the game in time to submit your log.
I'd like to talk some more about the combat system in FFXII, especially the Espers. Summons are always an interesting part of Square games, and are often an important part (In FFX, playing your Aeons right is like pressing the "I win" button in combat). However, in FFXII, the Espers are frustratingly difficult to get (in the case of Chaos) nearly impossible to beat (Like Zodiark, though he just reflects the annoying near-broken enemy style that exists in most of the optional bosses) and in the end, virtually useless in combat. To use them, you use up one to three thirds of your total mana, and two of your party members go away. This is all to summon an entity over which you have no control, which has less than max hit points, and dies if your character dies (which often happens after summoning espers). This makes an entire element of the game and combat completely useless in boss fights, and frustrates a player who has spent a great deal of time trying to get these optional summons.
An additional weakness in the game is its rewards system. This has two faults that I can see. 1) Often you are required to farm enemies hoping one will randomly drop something, or open random spawn chests, much like an MMO, and 2) And this was very disappointing, the game developers put in things that made it so you obviously had to purchase the strategy guide. For example, to get the ultimate weapon, the Zodiac Spear, there were 4 chests that you had to NOT open throughout the game. No dialogue or other hints are ever given that there are chests you should not open, and in fact many of these occur early in the game where you need ever chest you can get. The only place you could find out about this is in a strategy guide, and you'd have to read about the ultimate weapon *first* because some of these chests are literally less than 2 hours into the game. This is not a good rewards structure because it punishes players who do not want to use a strategy guide or FAQ. Also, to get many good weapons (particularly Excalibur) I had to repeatedly open the same chest. I spent an hour leaving and coming back to the random spawn chest that contained Excalibur until it finally had the sword. This disrupts gameplay and bores the players, making all but the hardcore "collect-em-all" gamers decide that it's just not worth it.
To end on a good note, all the cutscenes were beautiful, as always happens in Final Fantasy games, and the world was rich and detailed. Music, while not being as good as when it was composed by Nobou Uematsu, was still fairly good, and was only bad in a few places (Like the abysmal music in Lowtown. I started muting my TV when I went in there). All in all, it's a good game, but it's not the greatest Final Fantasy.
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| [January 31, 2007 06:53:33 PM]
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I really liked this game overall, and was impressed with some of the narrative progression and writing style. I was very impressed with how the story is not, in fact, about the "main character", Vaan, at all. He is, in fact, a relatively minor character in the whole story, and yet, he is the first character introduced, and the character we see on screen in towns. In truth, however, the story is more about the three people who ended up being my party the whole time: Ashe, Basch, and Balthier. I liked this style of more or less telling the story from the perspective of a (relatively) unimportant bystander.
The story itself is fairly good, but it never reaches the epic proportions of Final Fantasy VIII or X, in which the earthly problems plaguing the world are demonstrated to be relatively minor compared to the catastrophe at hand, in the case of Final Fantasy VIII, or the discovery that the young summoner in Final Fantasy X has not been given the full truth about her line of work and its history, and that the journey is not over when we thought it would be. This game didn't have that, and the immensely powerful Nethecite, being an inanimate object, did not instill some concern or great sense of danger in me, since it was a story object only, and until some time into the game, I didn't realize that it was, in fact, a major story object. I just didn't find that there was the twist in this game that I've come to love in Final Fantasy games. I still liked this game, but if someone's looking at this game or FFX, I'd say go with X.
The combat was an interesting aspect. On one hand, it was fun to have the Active Dimension Battle, which gives the game the combat feel of an MMO and invites more tactics than other RPGs have in the past, such as the ability to keep your casters out of the way of harm while your fighters soak up the damage. However, it gave a significant advantage to regular attacks because no special actions (spells, etc) can be taken while certain spells are being cast. So, if I begin casting Scathe with Ashe, Balthier cannot heal anyone when the boss hits us during the animation. This is, naturally, very frustrating.
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AramisKale's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 31 January, 2007
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