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Wednesday 20 February, 2008
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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