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UntILLtheEND's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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| [February 20, 2008 10:59:35 PM]
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Gameplay:
For a game that was designed around these sprawling, open environments, and contains these huge areas between towns & cities, I was hoping for a relatively higher level of free-roaming aspects. FFXII is only slightly more linear than its predecessors, with story elements pretty much dictating the game play path. It seems all this time and effort was put into getting every ounce of power out of the PS2 to generate a world that is rife with free-roaming game play opportunities, and yet that aspect of game play is still relegated to a few fairly insignificant side-quests.
And this brings me to the story itself. This could possibly be an issue of me just being picky, but I feel that, at least thus far, it isn't much more than a fairly stale political adventure. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that you could replace some names and places, and it could be Final Fantasy 9 part 2. I'm going to reserve final judgment on this until I get further into the story though.
Design:
As I mentioned before, I am very impressed with the graphics design in this game. The worlds are huge, the FMV's are stunning, and the in-game graphics are very good, especially for a PS2 game.
Another design aspect that is definitely worth mentioning is the musical score. As a musician, this is especially important to me as I often find myself zeroing in on the music during certain situations in order to set the mood. The music in FFXII is very well written and produced, and having that backing symphonic score really is the finishing touch to placing the player in the story.
One very obvious plus to the new combat system is the elimination of random encounters, what I would consider probably the single most annoying aspect of RPG's. Gone are random LSD color interpolations signalling your teleportation into some distant battle arena with some clever scenery to fight monsters. Instead, they wander around the world in front of you, the area of which between cities, is huge. The benefit of this is that it encourages exploration, which I think is a huge step in the direction of encouraging non-linear procedure.
The only problem is that there isn't much out there to explore. The areas are huge, and there are a few 'hidden' dungeons and some decent goodies, but not too much that is actually significant. Clearly, with the shift in the direction of the design towards a more non-linear progression, some additional dungeons, even significant story elements tied towards a style of progression that is left up to the player's decision would cement non-linear progression as a legitimate part of this game, and not just semblance of what could have been possible.
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| [February 20, 2008 09:21:36 PM]
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Summary:
In Final Fantasy XII, the player takes the role of Vaan, your typical rogue, young man with large aspirations. The player follow Vaan as his aspirations cause him to get caught up into a larger plot that concerns the well being of the world. FFXII is a 3rd person adventure/RPG. The game employs a 'MMO' style hack-n-slash battle system. It also employs a grid system for unlocking abilities, weapons, magic, etc.
Gameplay:
After just playing for 1-2 hours, the thing that impresses me the most with this game is the level of interactivity. Cities are actually cities. They are bustling with an incredible amount of NPC's, each of which has some purpose to the overall story or atmosphere of the city. Not only that, but there is an incredible amount of area covered by each city. I could truly believe that Rabanastre is a capital city somewhere. Given the capabilities of the PS2, to have all of this running at a steady clip is quite a feet. As a gamer playing a game of progression, I believe that it is the responsibility of the game to suspend my disbelief in order to better engross me into the story, and this game certainly does that.
I like the license system, but don't like how it is used for equipment. I understand the concept behind it: develop your characters into whatever niche role you want (mage, warrior, archer/shooter, etc). That being said. it becomes incredibly hard to try and level up the abilities that correspond with these 'classes' as WELL as the weapons and equipment nodes. There is already so much on the grid, that I feel equipment could have been left off without sacrificing any game play.
The voice acting is really well done. One small complaint about it is the quality of the audio files containing it. Its obvious that compression was needed to help fit the massive amounts of dialogue and FMV's onto the discs
I can definitely say that even with the change in battle system's, combat is still fairly tedious. The only real difference is that you have make to decisions in real time as opposed to a turn-based system. But the bottom line is combat still seems to be a matter of button mashing. And when its not, the gambits make it even less involved.
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UntILLtheEND's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 20 February, 2008
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