PStwo-and-a-half

[kirinn]

So, I'd been thinking I'd probably get a PS3 eventually. Aside from being a sucker for Final Fantasy, I'd at some point need a replacement for my venerable but aging launch-gen PS2. However, I was happy to wait until at *least* next year, because (a) there's not PS3 games I actually want yet, (b) they'll look better on an HDTV which I don't own

Comments

[kurai_seraphim]

Boxes aside, I didn't like the fact that the game was so bloated with nonlinear content that if you tried to actually do everything (a chronic problem of mine) you completely forgot what was going on in the story. This usually happens at the end of the game when you hit the "Damn, better do stuff before I go into the last dungeon", but they managed to spread it out.

If they wanted to have a Final Fantasy Tactics-level story, they needed to take the basic precautions necessary to make it work. Both Final Fantasy Tactics and the Xenosaga series included in-game encyclopedias so you could keep track of the hundreds of characters running around engaging in off-screen politics. You could rewatch entire sequences in the original Final Fantasy Tactics, so there's really no excuse in not letting you do that in FFXII. I stopped playing because I honestly forgot what was going on and trying to get further in the plot to make up for it only made it worse. It didn't help much that the only characters I vaguely cared about were Han Sol-er, I mean Balthier and Basch. Ashe felt too much like Yuna from FFX / Rinoa from FFVIII / Garnet from FFIX. They dressed her up like a radical rebel but all she really did was stand around and hesitate.

Plot aside, I also don't like how poorly coded and in general sloppy the game was. One of the best examples is the bazaar system was. If you give it 99 of an item and it only takes 3 to get the next item and another 2 for the item after that, it takes the 99 items and only gives you the first one. This gets stupidly problematic later on. It isn't crucial to the game (nor is the Zodiac Spear or the fun chocobophobia scene), but it's a general sign of sloppiness and that they've shifted the games in a way that forces you to play through them with a detailed walkthrough. I like just playing a game and finding things on my own, but with completely unwarned item boxes, diamond armlet-only item boxes, bazaars that punish me for not tediously handing over items one at a time, and a number of time-locked events that caused me to miss out on things because I wasn't following an FAQ to the letter, I just don't like where things are going.

Combat was still fun. I enjoyed that greatly and hope they stick to it. Now they just need to refine a system to perfection rather than try to innovate something new, quirky, and ultimately flawed every time they release a game.

[kirinn]

Nonlinear content bloat is a common problem with RPGs these days. The problem is, if you *don't* include metric buttloads of it, all the review articles are like "Wah wah, you might be able to see everything in under 50 hours, the game's to short". This happens pretty reliably so I can hardly blame the developers for shoving stuff in. I actually dug the hunts and stuff, but yeah, this is not a good game to be uber-completionist about. And yes, the way the bazaar works is a tad stupid. It scared me off of giving it any rare items until end-game, when I then went crazy and built some ridiculous uber-weapons.

I didn't think the plot in XII was nearly as complicated as Tactics. (Of course, it helps that the translation was 10000x better.) But it's true that it'd be nice if they gave the cast the same treatment as the relatively awesome monster record.

I actually saw one of the devs claim that all the random and/or hidden stuff was not to get people to buy guides, but to encourage players to "talk to thier friends" about thwta they'd managed to discover. Um, sure, whatever.

So, uh, yeah. I only disagree with a couple of your points, but uh... I still liked it a lot? So there we are.