Friday 25 January, 2008

Gameplay:

I have played another 4 hours and have come across two new party members, Balthier and Fran. When I finally got these characters, the game introduced what were called Gambits. Gambits are like battle commands you give your party, except they are defined by you and the party member automatically executes them within battle. Gambits have different parts to them, such as whether to perform this action on a enemy or party member, whether to attack, use techniques, or use magic, and finally a certain condition to perform this action. So for example, I gave Fran two gambits. The first one was to use the cure spell to heal Vaan whenever his health fell below 70% and the other was to attack all enemies the Vaan had targeted. This allowed me to fight battles without having to stop and give battle commands to my other party members while in the middle of a battle.

Another cool aspect of the game that I have come across is the usage of what are called Licenses. Licenses in FFXII are what the name entails. Whenever you receive a new weapon, armor, spell, or accessory, you need to have the correct license for it. Now some people might not like this new element in the game, but I find it quite fascinating. First off, you change your license through the use of License Points. You obtain License Points by defeating enemies, and you always have a enemy to fight, so upgrading your license isn't that demanding or limiting in the usage of certain equipment. One reason I love the license feature is that you can customize your party to focus on certain weapons, such as Vaan using more swords and Balthier using more sword guns.

Design:

One thing that makes FFXII's design so rich and interesting is the vast amount of detailed artwork and animation that you come across while playing the game. The detail in the levels you walk through is amazing and allows you to feel like you are actually in the royal city of Rabanastre. The game is full of magnificent cut scenes that look like they come from an animated motion picture. The cut scenes are also amazing because they take a very important part of the story and give it that little extra touch to make it quite exciting to watch. One of my favorite cut scenes so far is when I come into the castle and the resistance is trying to take over the castle during a royal banquet. They invade on a hover ship and well the entire scene is quite awesome to watch.

Another element in the game that I also found innovative was the use of these dashed blue lines to split a large area into a much smaller area. Whenever you entered say the sewers, you would every so often come across a blue dashed line. This would take you to a new area but you are still in the same sewers you were when you entered. I found this interesting because you could focus more on discovering hidden items and not be worried about becoming lost in the area. Did I say that the level design was something to fascinate over? Overall the game uses magnificent artwork to really bring this imaginary world to life and it pays off because as a gamer I am drawn into the world and am curious to see what the next game session on this has to offer. I'm off to save Ivalice!!!

You mention the gambit system, but I would have liked to hear your thoughts about it in the design section. It's one of the more innovative things that FFXII offered and there are some design implications because of this.

Otherwise, nice gamelog!

-Anne (TA)