|
Sunday 9 March, 2008
(this gamelog is being written LATE)
Gameplay:
The gameplay continues to frustrate with the use of the License board and the awkward battle system. And another issue is beginning to come to light. This issue is more of a story issue, but for me, it greatly affects the gameplay. Final Fantasy games are classically known for having vast, world (and sometimes multiple planet) scoping evil plots. Sephiroth wanted to destroy the planet to return the planet energy to the life stream, Kuja wanted to destroy TWO planets to make sure nobody could be as powerful as him, Seymour wanted to end the cycle of death by simply killing everybody. As of where I am in the game (and through the entire game. I read through a strategy guide to see what was in store) there is no such plot. The plot that comes closest to this is by corrupt officials of Arcadia who want to take over their country and the others. There is no plot to kill everybody, or become supremely powerful, just a political desire to take over the world. While this seems pretty dastardly and evil, it is nothing compared to the usual evil FF plots.
Design:
I have sort of addressed the design problems in the previous entry under the gameplay section. The design of the battle system is far from perfect, either requiring the player to rely on crudely crafted Gambits to control other characters, or interrupt the real time battle feel to control each character individually.
The leveling system is extremely lacking and annoying, making characters pay for use of items both with their hard earned Gil and equally hard earned License Points.
There are some good design elements which I enjoy. The good side of the License Board system is that the character development feels much more like that of the Online Final Fantasy XI. Each character has the ability to use every weapon, and learn every spell. Meaning that You can take every character to the max and learn everything, or, the more prudent choice, take particular characters to specific places on the License Board and making them strong in certain areas, to create a well rounded fighting force. This is hard to do however, since you can only have three characters at once, and there are a total of 6 characters to use, which means some will have to overlap in abilities to be able to switch characters in and out during battle to make sure everybody gets experience points.
|
