FFXII... why the hate?
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Now now, the story was not bad, it was actually a refreshing change on the "stereotypical" FF plot-line. Rather than 6 teens SAVING THE WORLD! It was more about local resistance, and fighting back against a conquering empire... That is until the magicite comes into play >.>crazyjay321 said:
I can appreciate that, I guess I just prefer to be more involved in the story.Spot1990 said:
He is a complete and utter moron, you're not wrong. I just didn't mention it because it's one of those things that's accepted; sun's hot, ground's hard, Vaan's a twat.Spot1990 said:
I hated Final Fantasy XII for a number of reasons. The story wasn't very good, then again none of the Ivalice games were. The combat was modeled after Final Fantasy XI and they forgot to compensate for it properly because the partner AI is stupid. My biggest peevs are the fact that the characters were unrelatable and annoying, plus the main character is only the main character for a few hours before he gets pushed into the background for the other characters. The story wasn't interesting to me because it seemed to political and uninteresting and the characters were just as unintersting as well.
Did I repeat myself in this somewhere?
Did I repeat myself in this somewhere?
What does everybody hate about Vaan? The terrible voice? Well, yeah, I can deal with that, I suppose. The outfit? A bit distracting and fruity, yeah. But ultimately, what was so bad about him? He wanted to become a sky pirate because that's all he had to hold on to. He needed to have some sense of fantasy within him because he'd been exposed to cruel reality when his family was taken from him. That's why he got so pissed at Basch when he met him, because he was a representative of everything that he hated. After learning the truth about his brother and meeting Larsa, Vaan is able to mature beyond his need for revenge. He still hates Gabranth and blames him for all of his troubles, but he knows that widescale destruction isn't the right thing to do (which is why he refuses to let Ashe use the Sun-cryst to craft Nethicite). In fact, one could argue that he isn't a terrible character in his own right!
This was actually the first Final Fantasy I liked since Seven. I don't know why exactly, but the battle system really needed that slight change, and the fact that I wasn't exactly the main character in the story was quite interesting. Some people say you were just there for the ride, but I kind of liked it. The hunt's were just outstanding as well. I've never had so much fun grinding in order to kill something. I know alot of people hated it, but that's because some Final Fantasy fans are like Republicans. They're afraid of change. -F
The funny thing is, I've heard he was originally meant to be, but the Japanese bosses thought it was too much of a risk not to include a blank teenage male protagonist. If you excise Vaan and the first section of the game in Rabanastre, replacing it with Basch's guilt about having to kill, the game makes far more sense and is far more compelling. Personally, like many others I got irritated whenever Vaan appeared because from a narrative perspective, he served no purpose. I understand what another escapist has posted about him being the viewpoint, but that's unnecessary justification for sloppy writing and conservative game design. Balthier has an interesting narrative development, I cared about what happened to him, same with Fran and Basch. Penelo was hanging on to be Vaan's love interest so even though she's a slightly more interesting charater than he is, she's still a bit of a blank slate and gets even less character development. Ashe's story is the key to the game though and it was very interesting to watch the dynamic between her and Larsa as two potential rulers who could solve part of the war if they were allowed to, but are prevented by politics.SnootyEnglishman said:The story was okay but mostly what got the ire of the fans was this guy
He was the person you played as yet he had no essential part in the main story Basch should have been the main person you controlled.
I think the real problem with XII is it doesn't know what it's meant to be. On one level it's a politically sophisticated game based on who gets affected by war and I don't think you can play it without feeling that. On another level, it's a story of sky piracy where a young man's dreams of adventure are fulfilled and that's fine too. Then we have the series of revenge and remorse plots which aren't dealt with as effectively as they could be. We have a blank protagonist with a blank potential love interest who are along for the ride with four solid characters and a need to balance the fate of the world with personal issues. It's a solid concept, but because FF choices are on rails, we never get to make a decision which could cause one of these flawed characters to be changed on our own. There are sequences which do change them and these are mostly excellent, but they're too infrequent for the number of areas the game has to explore. Japanese game design, I guess.
As for the combat, I really can't see how it's too different to older FF games in its fundamentals, it's still a turn based battle system with the ability to use different attacks, only now you can actually move around your opponent and avoid attacks in a more active sense. Gambits are a polarising issue because they automate things to the point where they can be used to avoid work, but the game is difficult enough especially when hunting marks you could argue some of this work needs to be able to be taken away for less experienced players to be able to get through content of an appropriate level and it doesn't negate strategy. You'll find yourself switching gambits on and off for various bosses and sometimes during a fight if you want to micromanage. Yes, you can just run around the landscape while levelling and let your characters do things automatically for you and frankly, I enjoyed that, it increased my feeling of exploration rather than a relentless parade of things jumping out of nowhere. It also meant I could run away if I found something I wasn't ready for and that pursuit was an interesting part of the game allowing me to challenge on my terms. As always, it didn't suit everyone, but I felt it was a good step.
Where it falls down is the oversimplification I've heard about in XIII, no ability to create and develop your own gambits, just 6 options and the ability to switch your party leader to give them one of a few instructions. Not particularly compelling gameplay which is apparently combined with running down a linear corridor for 25 hours. Doesn't sound like a great game, no matter how good the story.
That's it really. Either have a 3rd person narrator or a 1st person protagonist, not this weird meld.Spot1990 said:
Arguably FF's have the group as-a-whole being the main force. Off the top of my head:
VII - Cloud & co are trying to stop Shinra for Avalanche and The Planet and Aeris. Cloud only becomes the main dude later when the whole Sephiroth/Jenova/Remnant deal becomes important. Aeris is arguably the main character.
VIII - Squall is the squad leader, but other than that he hasn't got anything over the other characters.
IX - Garnet is the most important character for most of the early game; Zidane only becomes the main fella when we find out his link to Kuja. Until then Zidane is just an operative of Bakus thief group, the name of which escapes me, and is just the leader (not Steiner, don't listen to him) of the downright odd group of people at your command, really only because none of the others could lead though.
by far my least fav ff game that i have played
the plot was indecipherable and hard to keep up with
it was slow paced
it was almost ALL grinding - i didn't enjoy that at all
i thought the difficulty was all over the place - from dead easy to dead hard
it had a good start but by 2/3rds in it was getting old fast and was a slog from there
the plot was indecipherable and hard to keep up with
it was slow paced
it was almost ALL grinding - i didn't enjoy that at all
i thought the difficulty was all over the place - from dead easy to dead hard
it had a good start but by 2/3rds in it was getting old fast and was a slog from there
Hey, finally a thread to express my hate for this game (again).
Anyways, I've got list of things that annoyed me that eventually added up into hate
-The further you got in the game, the more gambits you got, meaning you got to play it less
-Evil Twin was a plot point that was supposed to be taken seriously
-The leveling system was screwed up royally. If that had been implemented in a huge cast with a lot more generic members (sort of like Tactics, the other game the team that made this did) it could have worked. However, I hate to say this but to make a character truely stand out, you have to limit them. They've got to be specialized and forcing the player to do that only to later on have the money and points so that everyone is a jack of all trades doesn't really help make the characters better.
-Most of the characters were forgettable and dull. The main character especially (when he wasn't acting like a sissy), and what's worse is that you're traveling with 3 other characters that could serve as much better main characters than him. The best characters, the mysterious judges, existed only to be killed.
-The political unrest story worked for Tactics, but it was implemented poorly in this one. In Tactics, you were part of that system, and so was your friend. You came to trust the people on your side during the war, and generally believe in your allies, only for several of them to turn on you. In 12, I could tell who exactly was the evil one pretending to be good (hell, his hair style gave it away).
-Another thing they took from the original Tactics that fell flat: The slow introduction to a mystical power behind the scenes that corrupted people. Tactics had it almost halfway through and it explained why people were betraying you. It was unexpected, strange, and unsettling as you just spent so much time in a somewhat normal medieval world. 12 seems to try to build up like that, but ends up waiting to long, making the WTF moment come nearer to the end and not giving you time to have it really sink in. Also, I never really saw the corruption happen to people I had grown to know, only what they were like after it, so I really can't say it had the same effect. The corruption by mystical forces also seems a lot less bizarre given how they decided to choose the Ivalice full of wonder and strangeness rather than the almost normal one.
-The environments that would probably work if it was a tactics game just seemed to bland for me.
-One of the things the fantasy Ivalice has is many races. This is almost never addressed, and while that may sound like nitpicking, it feels like all but the Viera could be removed without much change. They'res not a lot of background given for each of them, and they all seem to act completely like humans (compare to Mass Effect, where you have stuff like Hanar being overly polite, drell with perfect memory, Asari who vary between youthful, wise, and mystical, Turians who are very military focused, volus who are distrusting, elcor who are very calm and relaxed, etc. If you want an example from Final Fantasy, take a look at X: Al Bhed are the scientific race and are hated by everyone, Ronto are arrogant and are tribe like, Guado are mystical, humans are somewhat simplistic but loyal). My point is you have Bangaa who could be more hot headed than humans, but you only really see a few of them act like this. The others you meet are npc's with no real voice over. You could have moogles be more fun loving and somewhat naive (like I remember in IX). They end up trying to depend on appearances to tell about the race, but they don't really make me interact with them enough for me to feel like they're any different than another human.
-You have to buy everything, even magic, and then unlock them? That's a bit too much work (you have to hunt down the skill, you have to get the money for it, you have to get the experience to then use that skill). What happened to the "You've reached level X! Here is your skill for doing so!" or "You've been using this a lot! Have an upgrade!" or even just "You want to be able to use this? Just buy it here and you're good to go" form of equipment and magic?
-Why do you put high level monsters into low level zones early on in the game? I have no problem with them migrating in later on, but that T.Rex was not a pleasent surprise in 8 when I thought it was just going to be a pleasent stroll through a garden, and it's not gotten any better when you put it in the same place one of my first battles takes place in.
-Names: Here's a fun fact, if I can pronounce it by reading it, you're doing it right. If not, than I've got some bad news. Also, I'm sorry but the simpiler the better if I want to remember. I'm not saying you can't have a strange name thrown in there (*cough*Sephiroth*cough*) but you should try to limit yourself to something that actually sounds right. Terra, Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Tidus, Lightning... These are all rather simple (even Zidane, which is interesting while not not needing to for someone to say it before I can pronounce it). When Ffamran mied Bunansa (I'm not making this up) is the real name of one of your main characters, and his nickname is still strange, you may have some problems.
-The game can get boring really fast. Most of my characters ended up being so similar to each other, there was no reason to switch between them. The inevitable grinding was the worst I've done because of the combat. The lack of an interesting lead made me stop caring about the story. Too many deserts and wolves...
-The plot gets VERY predictable at points. As I've mentioned above, the villain is obvious, but also several other points come around. A town gets attacked after pretty much declaring it's safe because of a shire and sends the armed warriors away. We have to stop by a secret Viera village that we know about because of our Viera teammate, the only nonhuman one. Ashe is the Princess. We met Basche again in the prision (I'm not going to mention going to prison because that was expected when I got an RPG). Something goes wrong when the inexperienced character breaks into the palace. It just goes on and on...
Anyways, I've got list of things that annoyed me that eventually added up into hate
-The further you got in the game, the more gambits you got, meaning you got to play it less
-Evil Twin was a plot point that was supposed to be taken seriously
-The leveling system was screwed up royally. If that had been implemented in a huge cast with a lot more generic members (sort of like Tactics, the other game the team that made this did) it could have worked. However, I hate to say this but to make a character truely stand out, you have to limit them. They've got to be specialized and forcing the player to do that only to later on have the money and points so that everyone is a jack of all trades doesn't really help make the characters better.
-Most of the characters were forgettable and dull. The main character especially (when he wasn't acting like a sissy), and what's worse is that you're traveling with 3 other characters that could serve as much better main characters than him. The best characters, the mysterious judges, existed only to be killed.
-The political unrest story worked for Tactics, but it was implemented poorly in this one. In Tactics, you were part of that system, and so was your friend. You came to trust the people on your side during the war, and generally believe in your allies, only for several of them to turn on you. In 12, I could tell who exactly was the evil one pretending to be good (hell, his hair style gave it away).
-Another thing they took from the original Tactics that fell flat: The slow introduction to a mystical power behind the scenes that corrupted people. Tactics had it almost halfway through and it explained why people were betraying you. It was unexpected, strange, and unsettling as you just spent so much time in a somewhat normal medieval world. 12 seems to try to build up like that, but ends up waiting to long, making the WTF moment come nearer to the end and not giving you time to have it really sink in. Also, I never really saw the corruption happen to people I had grown to know, only what they were like after it, so I really can't say it had the same effect. The corruption by mystical forces also seems a lot less bizarre given how they decided to choose the Ivalice full of wonder and strangeness rather than the almost normal one.
-The environments that would probably work if it was a tactics game just seemed to bland for me.
-One of the things the fantasy Ivalice has is many races. This is almost never addressed, and while that may sound like nitpicking, it feels like all but the Viera could be removed without much change. They'res not a lot of background given for each of them, and they all seem to act completely like humans (compare to Mass Effect, where you have stuff like Hanar being overly polite, drell with perfect memory, Asari who vary between youthful, wise, and mystical, Turians who are very military focused, volus who are distrusting, elcor who are very calm and relaxed, etc. If you want an example from Final Fantasy, take a look at X: Al Bhed are the scientific race and are hated by everyone, Ronto are arrogant and are tribe like, Guado are mystical, humans are somewhat simplistic but loyal). My point is you have Bangaa who could be more hot headed than humans, but you only really see a few of them act like this. The others you meet are npc's with no real voice over. You could have moogles be more fun loving and somewhat naive (like I remember in IX). They end up trying to depend on appearances to tell about the race, but they don't really make me interact with them enough for me to feel like they're any different than another human.
-You have to buy everything, even magic, and then unlock them? That's a bit too much work (you have to hunt down the skill, you have to get the money for it, you have to get the experience to then use that skill). What happened to the "You've reached level X! Here is your skill for doing so!" or "You've been using this a lot! Have an upgrade!" or even just "You want to be able to use this? Just buy it here and you're good to go" form of equipment and magic?
-Why do you put high level monsters into low level zones early on in the game? I have no problem with them migrating in later on, but that T.Rex was not a pleasent surprise in 8 when I thought it was just going to be a pleasent stroll through a garden, and it's not gotten any better when you put it in the same place one of my first battles takes place in.
-Names: Here's a fun fact, if I can pronounce it by reading it, you're doing it right. If not, than I've got some bad news. Also, I'm sorry but the simpiler the better if I want to remember. I'm not saying you can't have a strange name thrown in there (*cough*Sephiroth*cough*) but you should try to limit yourself to something that actually sounds right. Terra, Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Tidus, Lightning... These are all rather simple (even Zidane, which is interesting while not not needing to for someone to say it before I can pronounce it). When Ffamran mied Bunansa (I'm not making this up) is the real name of one of your main characters, and his nickname is still strange, you may have some problems.
-The game can get boring really fast. Most of my characters ended up being so similar to each other, there was no reason to switch between them. The inevitable grinding was the worst I've done because of the combat. The lack of an interesting lead made me stop caring about the story. Too many deserts and wolves...
-The plot gets VERY predictable at points. As I've mentioned above, the villain is obvious, but also several other points come around. A town gets attacked after pretty much declaring it's safe because of a shire and sends the armed warriors away. We have to stop by a secret Viera village that we know about because of our Viera teammate, the only nonhuman one. Ashe is the Princess. We met Basche again in the prision (I'm not going to mention going to prison because that was expected when I got an RPG). Something goes wrong when the inexperienced character breaks into the palace. It just goes on and on...
I was actually very satisfied with the game's mechanics. A lot of the criticism of the gambit system, such as that it allows you to 'just watch' as the game 'plays itself' are entirely untrue and mainly stem from backlash by purists lasting from before the game was even released. The gameplay isn't without its flaws, but as a method of moving away from the 'active-time battle' system that has remained largely unchanged since the genre's roots, the gambit system is a very strong option.
The strong mechanical basis naturally, therefore, lends itself to fun combat, and FFXII has some of the most entertaining fights in my long, long memory of the genre. The main story itself (more on this below) wouldn't have taken much time in itself, but the Hunts were, to me, the meat of the game's fun. Death Gaze, Gilgamesh, and the Shadowseer made for some of the most epic fights I've had since the Super Nintendo, and the Behemoth King is the beast by which I now measure bosses. (Hell Wyrm, Omega Mk XII and Yiazmat? Shallow and BORING. ZZZzzzzz.)
On the other hand, FFXII did a lot wrong on the conceptual level. The game seems to have been designed in spiteful anticipation of players having the Internet constantly at their disposal, and most of the rarest weapons and items and the later marks are predicated not on fighting through tough areas or playing intelligently, but on camping monsters that have a %5 chance of appearing and a %1 chance of dropping one of five items needed to craft one of three items to make a new weapon. And you have no indication that the monster will drop the item or why you would ever need it. Or a certain mark may have extremely obscure, time-consuming spawning condition that no sane player would ever guess to try. And so on.
Most players are intimately aware of the Zodiac Spear, a very powerful weapon that will disappear from the game if the player opens any of four treasures laying at various areas around the gameworld. What's in the special chests? With the exception of an elixir, nothing. What do they have to do with the spear? Nothing. How would a player ever know this? They couldn't, without checking it on the Internet.
In this way, the entire game seems to be designed like an MMO, which is appropriate for a game where the cooperation of thousands or millions of players to make a comprehensive knowledge base and contend with hopelessly low drop or spawn rates is required. But it manages to be entirely inappropriate for FFXII, which is a single-player game, I feel compelled to point out. Getting the Order of Ambrosia clan rank and the Tournesol (both of which I shame-facedly admit to possessing) without extensive reliance on the Internet is simply impossible.
Yes, players are going to use the Internet if they feel frustrated, bored, or if they care more about the ends than the means of playing- that is, more about having the +5 Sword of Meteor Summoning than getting it- and they will inevitably rob the game of surprise and challenge and themselves of fun and fulfillment, but the solution to this is NOT to force EVERY player to play that way by making every little bit of content in the game a hundred times more obscure and time-consuming than it needs to be.
Grinding is any activity that, by power of endless repetition, loses all entertainment value that you force yourself through to get to the bits of the game you'd rather be playing. Going by this definition, FFXII is stuffed to bursting with grinding, and I think a lot of players were put off by this. I have a legendary boredom threshold, and even I found myself languishing during a lot of it. Again, in an MMO, this would have a logical purpose, but in a single-player game, grinding has no purpose but to artificially pad out gameplay and steal the players' time from them.
This mainly applies to the metagame, though- that is, trying to become stronger and have the best stuff and kill all the strongest monsters. Since Final Fantasy V, there has been a slow rift forming between content crafted for fans of this sort of metagaming (legendary weapons, superbosses/WEAPON) and the more traditional character and story-centric players (ie, the ACTUAL GAME). At first, this rift was pretty small. In FFV, either you went out of your way to kill Omega and Shinryu or you avoided them and went on to the boss of the game (who was still damn hard, not that you whippesnappers would know. Why, back in my day the final boss actually- *record scratching*).
But in FFXII, going by the hours needed for it, the metagame is quite a bit larger than what most Final Fantasy players, regardless of which half they actually enjoy more, regard as the actual core of the game. (From what I hear, this went out the window in FFXIII, but I haven't played it and cannot comment). This is pretty illogical in my mind, because, although I can't really speak for anyone else, when I think 'Final Fantasy fan,' I think of someone whose bread and butter is the plot, story, and setting, and for whom all the grindy-grindy and hacky-slashy is at most a subordinate element of gameplay. So we have here in Final Fantasy XII an emphasis on what most series fans would consider something other than the actual point of the game. The best reaction Square could reasonably hope for with this setup is that each half of the fans would ignore the half of the game that wasn't made with them in mind, and a more reasonable expectation would be that each half would leap onto the Internet and heap scorn on the other half.
So how does the 'core' of the game hold up? Not very well, I'm afraid. FFXII took a lot of flak for its cast and story, neither of which amount to much. Vaan bears a great deal of well-deserved dislike, and none of the characters have very much depth or feeling to them. All throughout the game you can see little hooks in their personality or history that could be fleshed out, but nothing ever comes of it; no character is ever developed past their introduction. In this way, the characters don't necessarily feel flat as much as they feel hollow or static. In my opinion, the most developed character of the lot was Basch, who had his personality both tested by and contrasted against his brother's, in a classic sort of 'there but for the grace of God goes he' sort of way. But even that was rendered useless by how contrived and unoriginal (and, if you're feeling particularly uncharitable, plagiarized) his entire situation is.
The story and setting were equally displeasing. The game dumps a chapter's worth of exposition and history, replete with unfamiliar names, places, events and concepts onto the player before they're even halfway ready to deal with any of it, and if you didn't catch any of it that first time around, the game is never going to repeat itself, and you can never go back and flip through it short of starting a new game just see it again. As someone that can read Daedric and recite the Septim lineage from Tiber to Uriel VII off the top of his head, take my word for it when I say it's quite a bit to take in all at once.
So once you get dumped into the game world, you'll constantly run into people, places, and events for which the player likely has no motivation to care about. Not because there aren't reasons out there why it's important, but because the game simply didn't do a good job of making the player care. Imagine that someone you don't know ran up to you in the middle of your shift at work and screamed, "The Barlidans have overrun the Morninghold! If the Frillplane is breached, Morloth will take the Overbrine! We must secure the Grilfian at once or all is lost!" Would you not stand slack-jawed, wondering if maybe there was someone else standing directly behind you that gave half a Goddamn about it? If you didn't know before then now you know what it feels like to play FFXII. Congratulations.
When you get right down to it, though, the story isn't very compelling even if you are intimately familiar with the setting. The setting introduces a huge number of past and present powers and events, each of which could make for an amazing, epic story, and then picks perhaps the least interesting one and runs with it. In a game with a civil war in the heavens, rogue cosmic powers of earth-shaping proportions, ancient conspiracies by immortal schemers that shaped the face of the earth, and the clash between the unspeakable power that man now harnesses and its opposition with the even more terrifying powers that have always been, the plot of the game is only tangentially related to any of these things and instead amounts to a political power struggle that never gets off the ground: Villain A takes over Country A, threatens war with Country B, is inexplicably killed by Countries C and D instead. There's something about crystals and gods and fate in there somewhere, but if the game doesn't care enough about it to spend any time on it, then neither do I.
Some people have criticized the Final Fantasy series in the past because its plots tend to resemble on another, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a fair criticism. But FFXII defies the typical plot structure in many ways, and really suffered for it.
A typical Final Fantasy is structured like so:
Beginning: Introduce Subplot (Crystals being stolen/destroyed, Vector taking over world, Shinra polluting)
.
%25: Introduce Main Plot (Exdeath breaking free, Golbez starting wars for crystals, Sephiroth resurrected)
.
%50: World is Changed/Destroyed (Two Worlds made one, Goddess Statues foment ruin, Meteor summoned)
.
%75: Subplot Resolved (World unites against Zemus/Fiends, Shinra/Hojo destroyed, SeeD/Galbadian Wars end)
.
Ending: Main Plot Resolved (Zeromus killed, Exdeath Killed, Kefka killed/magic nullified, Sephiroth killed, Ultimecia killed)
Here, however, is how FFXII's plot compares:
Beginning: World is Changed/Destroyed (Nabradia devastated by Nethicite)
.
%25: Introduce Subplot (Vayne takes over Archades, foments war)
.
%50: Mainly just running around
.
%75: Introduce Main Plot (ALL HUMAN HISTORY DETERMINED BY IMMORTAL EXTRADIMENSIONAL CABAL)
.
Ending: Resolve subplot (Nethicite Destroyed, Vayne killed, peace with Archades) Main plot is ignored entirely. Roll credits.
It's never really revealed what the Occurians are or why they're such dicks. Shrugging off their commands elicits no real response from them. They may or may not be the Gods referred to in the game's lore, but neither this nor the existence or history of the Espers is ever explained. It all gives the feeling that there is a different, more important group of protagonists out there who will one day deal with everything interesting and important in the setting, while your exploits will rate as some sort of passing footnote in their journey. Maybe Square should have tried some fresh ingredients rather than throwing out the recipe.
I wouldn't say FFXII is a bad game by any means, but there isn't a single aspect of it that I'd really call great, either. The setting has a lot of potential, which is all squandered. The characters had a lot of room for fleshing out, all of which is ignored. The combat is fun, which is negated by the endless hordes of palette swaps the shallow, nonsensical License Grid its advancement is predicated upon. Mark hunting can be great fun, but for every great mark fight there are five boring nobodies you'll hunt for half an hour and kill in fifteen seconds. The bazaar system is innovative and interesting, which is wholly wasted by the hours of camping, grinding and Internet list-checking that it saw fit to necessitate.
So. FFXII: why the hate? A lot of solid reasons. But I still had fun with it.
Edit: Two walls of text in a row? Ouch. Sorry, Escapist.
The strong mechanical basis naturally, therefore, lends itself to fun combat, and FFXII has some of the most entertaining fights in my long, long memory of the genre. The main story itself (more on this below) wouldn't have taken much time in itself, but the Hunts were, to me, the meat of the game's fun. Death Gaze, Gilgamesh, and the Shadowseer made for some of the most epic fights I've had since the Super Nintendo, and the Behemoth King is the beast by which I now measure bosses. (Hell Wyrm, Omega Mk XII and Yiazmat? Shallow and BORING. ZZZzzzzz.)
On the other hand, FFXII did a lot wrong on the conceptual level. The game seems to have been designed in spiteful anticipation of players having the Internet constantly at their disposal, and most of the rarest weapons and items and the later marks are predicated not on fighting through tough areas or playing intelligently, but on camping monsters that have a %5 chance of appearing and a %1 chance of dropping one of five items needed to craft one of three items to make a new weapon. And you have no indication that the monster will drop the item or why you would ever need it. Or a certain mark may have extremely obscure, time-consuming spawning condition that no sane player would ever guess to try. And so on.
Most players are intimately aware of the Zodiac Spear, a very powerful weapon that will disappear from the game if the player opens any of four treasures laying at various areas around the gameworld. What's in the special chests? With the exception of an elixir, nothing. What do they have to do with the spear? Nothing. How would a player ever know this? They couldn't, without checking it on the Internet.
In this way, the entire game seems to be designed like an MMO, which is appropriate for a game where the cooperation of thousands or millions of players to make a comprehensive knowledge base and contend with hopelessly low drop or spawn rates is required. But it manages to be entirely inappropriate for FFXII, which is a single-player game, I feel compelled to point out. Getting the Order of Ambrosia clan rank and the Tournesol (both of which I shame-facedly admit to possessing) without extensive reliance on the Internet is simply impossible.
Yes, players are going to use the Internet if they feel frustrated, bored, or if they care more about the ends than the means of playing- that is, more about having the +5 Sword of Meteor Summoning than getting it- and they will inevitably rob the game of surprise and challenge and themselves of fun and fulfillment, but the solution to this is NOT to force EVERY player to play that way by making every little bit of content in the game a hundred times more obscure and time-consuming than it needs to be.
Grinding is any activity that, by power of endless repetition, loses all entertainment value that you force yourself through to get to the bits of the game you'd rather be playing. Going by this definition, FFXII is stuffed to bursting with grinding, and I think a lot of players were put off by this. I have a legendary boredom threshold, and even I found myself languishing during a lot of it. Again, in an MMO, this would have a logical purpose, but in a single-player game, grinding has no purpose but to artificially pad out gameplay and steal the players' time from them.
This mainly applies to the metagame, though- that is, trying to become stronger and have the best stuff and kill all the strongest monsters. Since Final Fantasy V, there has been a slow rift forming between content crafted for fans of this sort of metagaming (legendary weapons, superbosses/WEAPON) and the more traditional character and story-centric players (ie, the ACTUAL GAME). At first, this rift was pretty small. In FFV, either you went out of your way to kill Omega and Shinryu or you avoided them and went on to the boss of the game (who was still damn hard, not that you whippesnappers would know. Why, back in my day the final boss actually- *record scratching*).
But in FFXII, going by the hours needed for it, the metagame is quite a bit larger than what most Final Fantasy players, regardless of which half they actually enjoy more, regard as the actual core of the game. (From what I hear, this went out the window in FFXIII, but I haven't played it and cannot comment). This is pretty illogical in my mind, because, although I can't really speak for anyone else, when I think 'Final Fantasy fan,' I think of someone whose bread and butter is the plot, story, and setting, and for whom all the grindy-grindy and hacky-slashy is at most a subordinate element of gameplay. So we have here in Final Fantasy XII an emphasis on what most series fans would consider something other than the actual point of the game. The best reaction Square could reasonably hope for with this setup is that each half of the fans would ignore the half of the game that wasn't made with them in mind, and a more reasonable expectation would be that each half would leap onto the Internet and heap scorn on the other half.
So how does the 'core' of the game hold up? Not very well, I'm afraid. FFXII took a lot of flak for its cast and story, neither of which amount to much. Vaan bears a great deal of well-deserved dislike, and none of the characters have very much depth or feeling to them. All throughout the game you can see little hooks in their personality or history that could be fleshed out, but nothing ever comes of it; no character is ever developed past their introduction. In this way, the characters don't necessarily feel flat as much as they feel hollow or static. In my opinion, the most developed character of the lot was Basch, who had his personality both tested by and contrasted against his brother's, in a classic sort of 'there but for the grace of God goes he' sort of way. But even that was rendered useless by how contrived and unoriginal (and, if you're feeling particularly uncharitable, plagiarized) his entire situation is.
The story and setting were equally displeasing. The game dumps a chapter's worth of exposition and history, replete with unfamiliar names, places, events and concepts onto the player before they're even halfway ready to deal with any of it, and if you didn't catch any of it that first time around, the game is never going to repeat itself, and you can never go back and flip through it short of starting a new game just see it again. As someone that can read Daedric and recite the Septim lineage from Tiber to Uriel VII off the top of his head, take my word for it when I say it's quite a bit to take in all at once.
So once you get dumped into the game world, you'll constantly run into people, places, and events for which the player likely has no motivation to care about. Not because there aren't reasons out there why it's important, but because the game simply didn't do a good job of making the player care. Imagine that someone you don't know ran up to you in the middle of your shift at work and screamed, "The Barlidans have overrun the Morninghold! If the Frillplane is breached, Morloth will take the Overbrine! We must secure the Grilfian at once or all is lost!" Would you not stand slack-jawed, wondering if maybe there was someone else standing directly behind you that gave half a Goddamn about it? If you didn't know before then now you know what it feels like to play FFXII. Congratulations.
When you get right down to it, though, the story isn't very compelling even if you are intimately familiar with the setting. The setting introduces a huge number of past and present powers and events, each of which could make for an amazing, epic story, and then picks perhaps the least interesting one and runs with it. In a game with a civil war in the heavens, rogue cosmic powers of earth-shaping proportions, ancient conspiracies by immortal schemers that shaped the face of the earth, and the clash between the unspeakable power that man now harnesses and its opposition with the even more terrifying powers that have always been, the plot of the game is only tangentially related to any of these things and instead amounts to a political power struggle that never gets off the ground: Villain A takes over Country A, threatens war with Country B, is inexplicably killed by Countries C and D instead. There's something about crystals and gods and fate in there somewhere, but if the game doesn't care enough about it to spend any time on it, then neither do I.
Some people have criticized the Final Fantasy series in the past because its plots tend to resemble on another, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a fair criticism. But FFXII defies the typical plot structure in many ways, and really suffered for it.
A typical Final Fantasy is structured like so:
Beginning: Introduce Subplot (Crystals being stolen/destroyed, Vector taking over world, Shinra polluting)
.
%25: Introduce Main Plot (Exdeath breaking free, Golbez starting wars for crystals, Sephiroth resurrected)
.
%50: World is Changed/Destroyed (Two Worlds made one, Goddess Statues foment ruin, Meteor summoned)
.
%75: Subplot Resolved (World unites against Zemus/Fiends, Shinra/Hojo destroyed, SeeD/Galbadian Wars end)
.
Ending: Main Plot Resolved (Zeromus killed, Exdeath Killed, Kefka killed/magic nullified, Sephiroth killed, Ultimecia killed)
Here, however, is how FFXII's plot compares:
Beginning: World is Changed/Destroyed (Nabradia devastated by Nethicite)
.
%25: Introduce Subplot (Vayne takes over Archades, foments war)
.
%50: Mainly just running around
.
%75: Introduce Main Plot (ALL HUMAN HISTORY DETERMINED BY IMMORTAL EXTRADIMENSIONAL CABAL)
.
Ending: Resolve subplot (Nethicite Destroyed, Vayne killed, peace with Archades) Main plot is ignored entirely. Roll credits.
It's never really revealed what the Occurians are or why they're such dicks. Shrugging off their commands elicits no real response from them. They may or may not be the Gods referred to in the game's lore, but neither this nor the existence or history of the Espers is ever explained. It all gives the feeling that there is a different, more important group of protagonists out there who will one day deal with everything interesting and important in the setting, while your exploits will rate as some sort of passing footnote in their journey. Maybe Square should have tried some fresh ingredients rather than throwing out the recipe.
I wouldn't say FFXII is a bad game by any means, but there isn't a single aspect of it that I'd really call great, either. The setting has a lot of potential, which is all squandered. The characters had a lot of room for fleshing out, all of which is ignored. The combat is fun, which is negated by the endless hordes of palette swaps the shallow, nonsensical License Grid its advancement is predicated upon. Mark hunting can be great fun, but for every great mark fight there are five boring nobodies you'll hunt for half an hour and kill in fifteen seconds. The bazaar system is innovative and interesting, which is wholly wasted by the hours of camping, grinding and Internet list-checking that it saw fit to necessitate.
So. FFXII: why the hate? A lot of solid reasons. But I still had fun with it.
Edit: Two walls of text in a row? Ouch. Sorry, Escapist.
Was I the only one who had level issues with hunts? It's like I'd do 2-3 hunt with no problem, and then the immediate hunt would out-level me by like 30. Is that how it was supposed to be?
i put it in the same vein as FFVIII. it was a ton of fun once you put in a couple dozen hours and really got into the upgrade system, but the plot was dull and confusing and none of the characters were interesting in the slightest. i'm glad i played it, but i will never play it again.
I beat the unholy fuck out of FF12. Did every hunt,got every weapon,and did every side quest. I was a mediocre game. The characters were bland with the exception of Baltier and Gabranth. You main character, Vaan (the annoying douchbag) Ratsbane had no input into the story. Ther main villain's (Vayne the most bland villain ever Solidor) ulterior motive was so unoriginal and wasn't thoroughly explained until you almost beat the game. The Licensing System suck horribly. The combat was the only thing I found to be decent. Some people felt that it was too much like an MMO. I found that it was about time that Star Ocean and The "Tales Of" games weren't the only games that said fuck it to turn based and random encounters.
"I wanna be a sky pirate."
A quote from the worst FF protagonist ever.
"I wanna be a sky pirate."
A quote from the worst FF protagonist ever.