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jscorca's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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| [February 21, 2008 12:36:50 AM]
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Entry #2
GAMEPLAY:
The combat mechanics have been radically redone in FFXII. Instead of choosing actions for each character each turn, FFXII implements the gambit system, which allows you to predetermine the priority of abilities each of your characters uses in combat. If you want Vaan to use cure when an ally reaches 50% health but you want him to attack in any other case, then you literally place the “heal ally 50%” gambit on top of the “attack enemy” gambit. The system is useful for allowing your party to free roam as they fight as well as making combat much faster paced.
However, I think the main flaw in the gambit system is that it lowers the players interactivity. I could literally move into combat, go make a sandwich, come back, and my gambits would have done all the work for me. I won’t minimize the system so much to say that you could do this for any battle, boss battles tend to require you to change some gambits around and perhaps use some clutch items whose gambits you never bothered to purchase (you have to buy or randomly find your gambits).
DESIGN:
Final Fantasy XXII tries to be innovative by having a detailed storyline but fails to entice the player into the fantasy world. The story itself is shallow and cliché, you play as the fool of the game who by chance gets involved with the fate of his hometown. This storyline has been done in many other RPGs and even in other Final Fantasy titles, but FFXII just doesn’t deliver the drama well enough.
The way FFXII keeps the player interested in the game is by having a wide range of abilities to choose from. The game has a very well mapped ability tree that you can manipulate in any way you want with each character. The abilities you can get are very interesting and worth playing the game longer to unlock, but the fact that the characters aren’t unique means that there is no benefit for going a certain direction in the ability tree. This is a god example of how if you don’t limit the player then they may lose interest in the game.
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| [February 21, 2008 12:36:27 AM]
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Entry #1
SUMMARY:
In Final Fantasy XII you play as Vaan, a spirited young citizen of the kingdom of Dalmasca, who finds himself apart of a quest to restore peace to his city during troubled times.
GAMEPLAY:
When I first started playing Final Fantasy XII I was excited because of the reputation of the Final Fantasy titles. By the time I got through the tutorial portion of the game, it had me thinking, “Ok, now when is the Midgar bomb going to go off? When is Kefka going to poison the river? Is the city going to be consumed by Sin?” I was waiting for the ultimate drama found so commonly in prior Final Fantasy games. I’ve played 90% of the game so far and despite there being beautiful cut scenes and spoken dialogue, these story-telling mechanics are wasted on an empty storyline. At this point I don’t care to end the game, because the game hasn’t yet begun.
FFXII offers virtually no playable characters that you can be emotionally attached too. Furthermore, there are only 6 characters to choose from, which would have been fine if they were deep characters that the player could connect with like in FFX but FFXII characters are just plain flat. Also, on a more mechanical note, the characters aren’t very unique. All characters can choose from the same map of abilities and none of them have character specific abilities.
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jscorca's Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 21 February, 2008
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