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Friday 25 January, 2008
SUMMARY:
In Final Fantasy XII the player controls a main character Vahn, a gutter boy who lives in a city Rabanastre recently occupied by a warring nation Archadia. The other nation locked in a losing war with them is Rozarria and the princess of that nation Ashe is slowly building a resistance to fight back. Vahn eventually meets with Ashe and gathers a band of adventurers, a sky pirate, a viera (humanoid rabbit),and an ex-captain and travels the world of Ivalice to find a way to defeat the armies of Archadia.
GAMEPLAY:
As soon as I selected "New Game", I was greeted with a beautiful computer generated video depicting the recent history of Rabanastre, where Lady Ashe gets married to a prince, Rasler, who leads the war against Archadia. As the cutscene unfolds Rasler is killed and the ex-captain I mentioned earlier, Basch, brings his body back to the country of Dalmasca where Rabanastre is. As the cutscene ends, the in-game engine takes over and I control a character named Reks, who is evidently Vaan's older brother. This is where the “tutorial” part of the game begins and the player is then forced to read text on how to operate Reks and how to interact with the environment. This is also the part in the game where it teaches you how the battle mechanic works. This is quite interesting because in previous Final Fantasy games and other RPGs there would be a game world with enemies, but as soon as you make contact with the enemy, the game would change “modes” and the player would be transferred to a battlefield where the main character draws his weapon and fights his enemy in this field. In this game, they completely remove the battlefield and you can fight the enemies in the game world that you are already in.
As I defeat my first boss fight, where the enemy has a larger amount of hit points than ordinary minions and can execute special attacks, the game’s story unfolds during this tutorial with Basch assassinating his king and killing Reks in the process. The game then tells the story of how Dalmasca falls under Archadian rule and Lady Ashe takes her life. The game shifts over to Reks brother Vaan, and I am then tasked with cleaning the sewers of rats using the new battle system I just learned. At this point the game keeps going in and out of cut scenes explaining how Vaan is sick of the gutter boy life he lives and one day wants to become a sky pirate. I basically kept running around town enjoying the scenery and did my first hunt, which is basically like being a bounty hunter where I look for a specific animal, which will turn out to be a boss, and kill it to gain a reward from the person who posted the bounty. I think this is a good point to stop for the first session and next log I will try to get as far into the game as possible.
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