Final Fantasy XII

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JaySevenZero
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Final Fantasy XII

Post by JaySevenZero »

Here's where you can contribute your memories and opinions of Final Fantasy XII for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.
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Magical_Isopod
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Re: 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Magical_Isopod »

Just a pro tip for folks looking to take on this behemoth of a game, you may want to consider picking up the Zodiac Age version over the PS2 original. It's going to save literally tens of hours of griiiiiiiiiiind.

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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Kez86 »

Final Fantasy 12 was and still is one of my favourite in the series. But, I'm not entirely sure why...

With others in the series (6 onwards) I can clearly pinpoint the elements that made those entries such wonderful games. From 6s villain Kefka, 7s wonderful materia system, 8s heartfelt portrayal of Irvine Kinneas... (joke), 9s everything and 10s vibrant colourful world. Yet, 12 really stood out as something new, unique and interesting in the twists and turns of the series. 12 also is the final game from the series that I truly loved, and really was my 'Final Fantasy'.

It was a dream game that learnt how to utilise the power of the Playstation 2 towards the end of its life cycle. I remember cruising down the A5 towards Milton Keynes with friends to collect our preorders of the game from GameStation and hurtling back at the national speed limit to begin playing. From the moment I started, the game seemed to capture my attention. Noticeably the voice acting had significantly improved from 10. Perhaps more effective localisation? The music and sound design I thought was beautiful and 12 is still my favourite OS from the FF series. The score took on more of a cinematic approach as tracks blended into one another, further reinforcing the flowing narrative from map to battle to town as opposed to separate tracks that are memorable in their own right. Ask me to name a single score and I wont be able to, however a standout for me is the Boss Battle music with its glorious and intense construction.

Vagrant Story was one of my all time favourite RPGs of the PS1 era, and to return to the world of Ivalice in 12 was truly exciting for me. What made this stand out so much was the beautiful graphics and design of the world. Every area felt grand and expansive yet still holding onto the 'linearity' seen in 10 making exploration slightly more engaging.

I don't want to make this a long post but quite easily do so. So am going to sum up as I have work to be getting on with...

Everything in 12 was fantastic to me. The Gambit system was average though. Loved the grid system, purchasing licenses, levelling up, etc. This is fully realised in the Zodiac release. In my original play-through I managed to 100% every character with no repercussions. Made no sense to the narrative though. They ALL became sword and shield wielding killing machines. Magic was fully exploited on certain characters. I remember in my first play through being able to cast reflect on all party members, then casting high level magics on all party members to return magic to the enemy as a triple cast. Exploited and fully OP.

It's a game I completed 100%. All grids unlocked, all characters maxed, ultimate weapons collected (even the stupid Zodiak Spear) all Hunts completed, Yiazmat defeated, Badges and achievements collected. I cant do any more in this game. I loved it then, I really enjoyed it on my last play-through with Zodiac collection.

Bring on the Switch version.

3WR:

Ivalice Home Coming
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Combine Hunter
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Combine Hunter »

As someone who has played both, I'd like to reinforce what magical_isopod said above. The Zodiac Age makes the whole thing zip along at a much more even pace. There is still challenge, especially with the latter day bosses, it just removes the hours of back and forth grinding.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Mr Ixolite »

FFXII was a game which I beat while literally taking a shower, and singlehandedly killed my investment in the series. I will elaborate later, and am curious to hear the eventual discussion on this one in particular.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by NiaiMitch »

Back in the day Final Fantasy XII was the first of the Playstation titles I failed to finish (although I’ve since completed the Zodiac Age).

Its gambit system and non-random encounters were great innovations of the series for the time, and Ivalice is a wonderful setting (it was fascinating to see a Final Fantasy story contained with a relatively complex political setting). But for me unfortunately what should be the beating heart of any Final Fantasy - its characters – don’t really hold up to scrutiny here.

Part of the problem is XII’s protaganist. It’s well-documented that Square’s initial intention was to go against the grain and have Basch as the main character before they were pressured into a more generic male JRPG hero – and unfortunately Vaan (the wettest of blankets) feels both shoehorned and arbitrary as our hero; Ashe, Basch and Baltheir offer infinitely more to the plot, giving the gameplay and plot a weird ludonarrative dissonance that jars throughout.

But the main reason XII leaves me somewhat cold is that the party lacks charisma and warmth as an ensemble. Maybe it’s the result of the story’s tunnel vision on Princess Ashe’s quest to reclaim her Kingdom and the politics of war, but certainly compared to the previous Playstation titles in the series there’s little personal interaction between the characters throughout the plot. It means that even after playing the game for thirty hours they feel like strangers to each other, and by extension to the player. What might Fran and Basche discuss on the road? What does Ashe think of Penelo? I have literally no idea.

I think this is why XII is a game I can appreciate for its many technical and gameplay achievements, but ultimately not love.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Mr Ixolite »

Note: This ramble is based on the vanilla FFXII experience

Right from the start Final Fantasy XII felt off. Cactuars were unrecognizable. The fearsome Malboros were early-game scrubs. Classic summons appeared as random spaceships. Yet I might’ve embraced these tweaks to the iconography, if not for every other facet of the game being hard breaks from what I loved the series for to begin with.

On the narrative front I enjoy Final Fantasy for its pulpy- often ridiculous- stories, worlds, and characters. I’m all about having talking lion-dogs go to the center of the planet to fight off a bioengineered madman. In comparison, FFXII feels very non-fantastical. What fantasy elements are present feel undercooked, and the shift to somber politics left me cold. This is partly because of the characters, which make the cast of FF 8 look like fountains of charisma, and the story feeling thinly spread over a vast playtime. Sometimes it felt like hours passed without the party acknowledging each others existence, and elaborate setpieces were in short supply. Most of your time is effectively spent trekking across the world map, where the now freely roaming monsters have been allotted plenty of elbow room. As a result the world is expansive, impressively rendered, and quite bland. I mostly remember it as being shades of brown. Dungeons in particular are a letdown of samey corridors, and I never felt truly free to explore the world- you only get to see one of the two main countries participating in the plot-defining world war.

A good gameplay might have offset the unengaging world and storyline, but FFXII is easily the most tedious game I have ever played, courtesy of the Gambit System. As far back as Chrono Trigger we’ve seen that random encounters can be avoided, but FFXII jettisons turn based combat along with them in favor of complete automation. To start with, characters operating on autopilot on the far side of a monster where I can’t see them makes me lose the intimate connection I felt I used to have to them, even more so when I don’t even have to control my party leader. But the bigger issue was that even when gambits were switched off, there was an all-purpose strategy that let me to cruise through the entire game:
Attack party leaders target. Heal self/allies. And eventually, Cast Bubble.
That was it. Pure brute force. In prior games I had to factor in positioning, elements, counters, timing, physical attacks vs magic and so on. But this time - to call back to a contributor from earlier in this retrospective- “hitting enemy with sword” did turn out to be the most viable strategy. And if a boss showed resistance to my brute force approach, the quickening chains hit with the force of an tactical nuclear strike. This design is likely completely intentional, as having the game require strategies fine-tuned to individual enemies would have rendered Gambits effectively useless. But they in turn made for an incredibly repetitive experience.

Exacerbating the games monotony is its handling of MP. Resource management was a cornerstone of prior games, ensuring that you couldn’t easily brute force them by limiting in-dungeon recovery potential. FFX had taken steps away from this with healing save points, but FFXII removes the concept entirely. Not only does MP regenerate by walking, passive abilities provide MP recovery through both taking and dealing damage. So even if a brute force strategy result in characters taking a few more licks, you could always heal up later. Using ethers felt like borderline cheating. And to top it all off, the game supercharges an issue from FF VI: Characters will gravitate towards similar loadouts of spells, passive abilities and gear, and eventually be completely homogenized. There is simply no reason not to get everyone the best spells and the best swords.

Playing the game felt like I myself was operating under a gambit system; I wasn’t a party of lovable characters on a fantastical quest to save the world, I was a ruthlessly efficient monster-lawnmower, motivated by the superficial joys of level gains and stat increases.

And so it eventually was that as my boring party members fought a boring villain for reasons I didn’t care about, I put down the controller and took a shower. I returned to find the villains first phase defeated, nudged the analog stick to advance the plot, and proceeded to get dressed and do minor chores. I switched off the gambits exactly once when the boss turned invulnerable, and proceeded to run around in circles for a bit. Eventually the boss lay defeated, unable to cope with my brute-force strategy of “heal self, attack same enemy with sword”, the same strategy that had carried me through the rest of the game. No ultimate weapons or summons had been collected, no stats maxed out, levels had barely been ground. And after countless hours of playing I turned off the game with a weary sigh, and turned my back on the series as well. This turned out to be my Final fantasy.

Though I thoroughly disliked the game, It is also one of the most important ones I’ve played. It was an antidote to my rampant completionism, teaching me that I didn’t need to consume every product in a franchise, and that I didn’t need to complete everything I consumed– especially if I didn’t even like it! Plus, playing FFXII introduced me to podcasts to counter the tedium, and for that I am thankful.




3 word review: Efficiently Automated Boredom
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by aidopotato »

Ooof. Scathing stuff Ixolite. All valid criticisms, as were the others mentioned above, but nevertheless, I found a lot to like about FFXII.
I've never been a huge fan of the series, or even the genre really, but something about the buzz around XII attracted me and I decided to give it a go.
First of all, I really got a lot of fun out of the gambit system. Sure, one could find a simple, effective strategy and stick with it (like Ixolite's above), but the real appeal for me was experimentation and flexibility. One favourite style was loading one character up with the best weapon, Berserk, Bravery and Haste while the rest of the team stood back, healed them and robbed the enemies blind. Obviously this move away from tactical play and towards strategic management didn't appeal to everyone, but for me it was a welcome change.
Likewise, ditching the random encounters and establishing a pseudo-open world felt like a real step forward for the series, making the experience of exploration and discovery feel exciting and tactile, instead of just window dressing over an arbitrary algorithm.
Finally, while I agree that the story and characters were uninspiring, I found much of the visual design to be very inspiring indeed. The costumes, the monsters, the cities, the animations, the cut-scenes; all wonderfully detailed for the hardware at the time (I played the original PS2 version).
A flawed gem, methinks.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by ashman86 »

I have purchased Final Fantasy XII four times. I literally just sat down to write this after having unwrapped a new copy of the Switch port of the game and booting it up for the first time. As excited as I was to start a new adventure in Ivalice, I was moved to write down my thoughts about why I love this game here immediately after watching the opening cinematic. I expect this one to be polarizing for my fellow Cane and Rinse listeners, and, looking at the posts here, it would appear my expectations are founded.

Final Fantasy XII may just be my favorite game in the series. (It may also be my favorite Star Wars game of all time, too, because it wears its influences on its sleeve, and that's part of what I love about it.)

I have played nearly every mainline Final Fantasy game, and I have loved many of them. I've talked about several here on the forum (including on the equally polarizing FF8), but one I haven't talked about yet is Final Fantasy Tactic. It's a point of reference that's important here because it was in Tactics that players were first introduced to Ivalice, a world that is as much a part of Final Fantasy as chocobos, Uematsu, and middle-aged dudes named Cid.

Final Fantasy Tactics was one of my favorite games in the series leading up to the release of Final Fantasy XII, and I was both fascinated and exhilarated to learn that Square was setting a new game in its world (worth noting that they'd already brought Ivalice back for Vagrant Story, but I'd not played it). I was equally excited that Hitoshi Sakimoto would be returning to score the game and that other developers, including the game's directors, had worked on Tactics.

Before it launched, early screenshots were already causing quite a stir among fans and gaming news outlets. We learned early on that the game would be single-player, unlike its immediate predecessor, but that it would be heavily inspired by MMORPGs of the day, particularly in its combat system. Many of my friends swore the game off almost immediately, and for them, I guess the series ended at X.

But I put my money down on a pre-order as soon as I was able. GameStop had secured some exclusivity deal, and pre-ordering through them granted buyers a free upgrade to a "collector's edition" of the game that came in a lovely steelbook case that I still cherish to this day and alongside a bonus DVD.

Now, back to that opening cinematic. I think it's one of the finest Square's ever done. It still breaks my heart to this day after having watched it countless times. It begins with a celebration--one directly referencing the concluding scene of The Phantom Menace--a parade and a wedding and a prayer ending with the word "Faram." From the get-go, Final Fantasy XII is committed to its setting. But over the course of just a few minutes, joy turns to tragedy. From a wedding to a funeral in mere moments, and another prayer: "Faram." The rain falls on a corpse-strewn battlefield as choco-crows feast on the dead, and the stage is set.

It's effective and it's lovely, and it sets the tone for the rest of the game's story, which is less bombastic than the stories of its predecessors and filled more with political intrigue. Vaan and Penelo aside, I fell in love with the game's characters in ways I didn't expect to. How could Basch live up to Steiner or Ashe to Yuna? As it turns out, I love them because they feel like the kinds of characters I'd read in a book rather than ones I'd see in an anime (and I don't mean this at all to be disparaging to anime, I simply mean that I found them appealing in a different way).

In fact, I found that FFXII felt very western in its approach. For the U.S. release of the game, the license board was wide open--there were no jobs or classes to speak of--which seemed like something I'd expect to see in a cRPG but not a Final Fantasy game. Combat played out like it would in Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate, and the gambit system, which allowed you to create your own AI scripts for your party members, wasn't altogether unlike the systems BioWare had incorporated into those games.

I delighted in crafting clever gambits for my party and for speeding through the game's requisite grind on auto-pilot. At one point, I wondered why I found that style of "play" appealing, and then I realized that what I was doing was hardly any different than what I'd done in past FF games. The difference was that the transition from exploration to combat was immediate and seamless. And just when you think you're getting comfortable, FFXII likes to throw a boss or ultra-rare random enemy at you just to shake things up a bit. It's at those moments where you have to really buckle down and get tactical, and I love those encounters most of all.

I could go on forever, really, but I'll stop here. I love Final Fantasy XII, and although I respect that it doesn't quite do it for many of the series' more traditional fans, I can't help but feel like that may be exactly what makes this entry so special to me. It's a mainline game that was completely unafraid to try something new with the series. In many ways, FFXIII felt like a major step backward for the franchise to me. Where XII gave us subtle characters, a wide open world, a seemingly infinitude of weapons and treasures to discover, and so much more, XIII seemed to fall back a little too hard on the series tropes.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by duskvstweak »

Final Fantasy XII is an interesting game. A single player RPG with many MMORPG elements. A story more akin to the early, 2D Final Fantasys, except there's no true main character.

And, like a lot of the series, it's influenced by Star Wars, now to the point of almost theft. I swear there were cities that looked like Naboo, on purpose, and there was the whole final battle against the Death Star.

The story has a relaxed pace...until it's the endgame and now it's a huge battle and the final boss and then the final boss again and then the final boss again...

The job board is a lot of fun, until the late game, where I was just taking boosts because I hadn't taken them yet.

I liked Final Fantasy XII a lot, getting to it only recently when the PC version of Zodiac Age was released. Being the first Final Fantasy I had played since 2002, it felt like coming home, even though a lot had changed. I still love the Final Fantasy melodrama that seems so specific to the series and the zen that comes from level grinding. And my journey through the Great Crystal, completely under-leveled, but determined to get the Hastega spell, was so arduous and constantly near death that it will always stick with me alongside my other "I'm making this harder then it has to be" Final Fantasy memories.

https://www.twitch.tv/duskvstweak/clip/ ... wordUnSane
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by MHninjabear »

I am sure that when it was announced the team would be tackling the phenomenon that is the Final Fantasy series many were thinking immediately of FF7, however, my first thought was to what everyone would think of the best game in the series Final Fantasy XII. My first encounter with the game was in 2007, at the time my twin and I were 12 ourselves and we were on vacation with our family at Virginia Beach. The time spent on the east coast was very relaxing and seeing the ocean for the first time was a sight to behold, but when our mother took us to a nearby GameStop to pick up a game for the summer my brother and I became ecstatic. We had recently discovered jrpgs and knew enough to know that they are large games and can have crazy stories. When my brother pointed out final fantasy 12 my first thought was whether or not I needed to play the first 11 games to understand what was going on. With that question unanswered we decided to buy it anyway and see what this game from a faraway country could have in store for us.

I can’t remember what my first impressions of the game where, but it would be a couple years and I would decide to revisit it. At that time, I was still too young to drive, but not too young to take my bike and ride a couple miles away from the home, with this freedom I would grab the playstation and a backpack and go visit my grandma, playing the game as I sat and visited with her. I would spend hours scouring the Giza plains and hunting marks. When I learned their where summons in the game I made it my goal to collect them all only to be sidetracked by the fun monotony of level and license point farming. I continued to explore the story with my grandma watching. She seemed concerned that the poor boy ran everywhere without taking a break. I was quick to explain that he was ok with running. Sometime after this I lost interest in the game set it down, I don’t know if it was due to its length or the passing of my grandma and thus someone to enjoy the game with, but I decided to check out other games.

Fast forward to 2016 and I saw news that the games composer had been working on music for a remastered version. When the game came out towards the end of the Summer of 2017 I picked it up so that I could relive the time spent in Dalmasca and the happy memories I had made exploring Ivalice. I quickly realized the game is much larger than the Giza plains and that the tomb of Raithwall isn’t that far in the game. I quickly picked up the gambit system, and using the fast forward feature found in the Zodiac Age remaster I was able to quickly work my way through the game. It struck me, that the game played a lot like a single player mmo, the characters and story seemed like a desert fantasy take on Star Wars, a parody that outshines its source in my eyes. It didn’t take me long to decide I would do everything and get the Platinum trophy and by September I had caned and rinsed the game.

While playing the other Final Fantasy games I am able to think about the battle systems, the music, and the many small details that make them the games they are, but for the 12th entry in the series I am unable to separate the game from the memories I made both with my twin and with my grandma. If it weren’t for my brother convincing me that the game did not require 11 other games worth of homework then I would have never picked up this fantastic series and I may not have spent the precious time with my grandma in her final years the way I did. I hope that those listening and yourselves enjoyed this game as much as I have.

3WR: Sky Pirates Adventure
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Young Steev
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They should have called it the Nightcrawler system :P

Post by Young Steev »

As an ardent fan of the Final Fantasy series I was quite surprised when FF12 seemed to appear out of nowhere, I hadn't followed the development as religiously as I had the previous entries, and went in more blind than any other game in the series...

Having played Vagrant Story and FFTactics previously I was very surprised to see the name Ivalice, and suddenly see familiar sounding locations and races, "have they finally decided to use a consistent world for these games?" I thought, it seems not to be the case as the core series line has continued.

I feel I broke my experience of FF12, I found an enemy in the first desert area that offered a decent amount of License points (which one it was escapes me, possibly a cactuar?), and every time I got a new character I would return to farm them out and fill out the license board waaay before I was meant to, meaning the idea of gunning towards specific licenses for equipment and techniques was stripped out, and a lot of the endpoint techniques I unlocked far too early, making fights trivial. Being overpowered I also never delved too far into the Gambit system, which I initially saw as lazy - Square want us to program their AI for them now? I usually played by laboriously pausing the game, setting commands, unpausing, rinse, repeat. When I finally did dabble with the system I'd unlocked so many parameters that it was simply too daunting to utilise properly. Eventually I decided to simply push through to the end of the game, I had no idea who anybody was, what the stakes were, or why I was fighting a giant metal angel, and then suddenly the credits were rolling. The overall experience left a sour taste in my mouth.

In recent years I've been tempted to go back and give this game another shot - It seems that by breaking the system early and the knockon effect it had I missed a lot of the challenge, and it seems that there's a lot of content and dungeons that are hidden away from the main quest line. Part of me has to blame the designers for letting such an oversight exist that you can break their meticulous systems at the first or second area outside of the starting town. It isn't my least favourite Final Fantasy game, that accolade goes to the next one in the series, but it's definitely down there, and marks a point where the series really started to fall from grace with me.
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Re: Our next Final Fantasy podcast recording (10.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by DomsBeard »

I'M CAPTAIN BASCH DON'T LISTEN TO ONDORE'S LIES

Final Fantasy XII is a weird one for me as it is my second favourite after VII however I do not remember much about it at all even though I finished it.

The gambit and job system were a revelation at the time and it had one of my favourite gaming memories of all time.
Spoiler: show
The second boss fight with Dr Cid
This battle took me around 30 minutes due to being in a constant cycle of desperately trying to stay alive and chip away at him and the help he had. I was down to just Vaan and about 5HP at one point and turned it around and finished the fight. It was a proper pad down clenched fists moment.

I thought Vaan was a bit of a naff protagonist, it should have been Balthier (though I think that was originally the plan unless I have got that wrong).

I will be going back again as soon as it goes on sale on Switch.

Three word review

IM CAPTAIN BASCH
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Re: Our next podcast recording (11.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Steve Arran »

FF12 holds a special space in the nostalgia wing of my brain; despite never actually completing the original game. I tried my best, chipping away at the campaign and making it as far as Eruyt Village before other more fast paced and, dare I say exciting, games took over my attention. Despite this somewhat lacklustre review, when The Zodiac Age was announced I was excited to go back to and revisit this old title now it had been given a graphical spit and polish. The result was somewhat the same. I really enjoyed what I played and then got bored of it, trailing off this time at Mt. Bur Omisace- just after the Eruyt Village! Either something is up with the pacing of the game or my capacity to see things through to completion is borked (highly likely if I’m honest). So why is this a game that I claim to like and yet can’t bring myself to complete?

To list the positives: the world is amazing. I could happily live in any one of the fantastically realised cities of Ivalice, with its Mughal inspired architecture and bustling multiculturalism. The character designs pop; so detailed and evocative (sometimes PROvocative, Fran!) You can tell a lot about their personalities without them having to utter a word. I personally think the music is the best score since 7- this despite the fact that I couldn’t hum you a single tune. The tracks just suit the locations so well, creating a very rich atmosphere.

Mechanically I have to say I am fond of the gambit system, I find it somewhat satisfying to wind the characters up and let them go. Building a deck of moves that can absolutely trounce an opponent gave me a real sense of achievement, especially after grinding out the licenses. However, the sub par Zelda mechanic of head to dungeon, fight boss, earn maguffin, proceed, left me somewhat cold. And that brings me to negatives, mainly the story.

I’m really not sure how the narrative of Final Fantasy 12 can be both so grandiose and yet so utterly threadbare. The game certainly suffers from not anchoring the macro world events in a micro or personalised story. It certainly tries to- the first protagonists we are introduced to are orphans of war, demonstrating the consequences of the larger world conflict- and it may have succeeded had the game chosen a protagonist and stuck to it. But the constant shifting of the A story, the swapping of protagonist for Vaan to Basch to Ashe results in a narrative experience in which one never truly feels that they know who the characters are, or who’s story we are telling. Ultimately I suppose the story is Ashe’s and her quest to reclaim the kingdom- but if so why waste several hours of gameplay setting up Vaan and Penelo only to sideline them as the game progresses? Basch and Ashe would have made for much more satisfying primary characters, with the Dawn Shard heist being seen from their perspective, then running into the plucky young thieves and their more experienced sky pirate counterparts and all proceeding on a quest together. Alas, that is not the case, but I’ll still stick with it to see how the story pans out for all in the end. If nothing else, I do like the world, and my propensity for hoovering up trophies means that this will be my ‘podcast game’ of choice for a while at least.
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Re: Our next podcast recording (11.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Will »

Final Fantasy XII is the game that brought me back to video games. I grew up loving the series but drifted away after VIII, with only a quick sugar rush through X in the years between between 1999 and 2007 - an eternity for someone in their teens and early twenties. I found much of this era uninviting, narratively driven by too many gruff space marines and nihilistic antiheroes, be they Grand Automotive Thieves or Gods of War. But here was a rich, inviting world to explore filled with vibrant colors, enticing secrets, and a diverse ecosystem of characters, civilizations, and cultures. Vaan’s anime Aladdin vibe isn’t always great (although I think the connection he and Ashe share through reflected grief is pretty compelling), but it felt so much more engaging than the floating-guns-as-protagonists that seemed to dominate the industry in the 2000s.

And Ivalice - my goodness! Especially in light of the relatively lackluster characters and a plot that just sort of wanders off midway, I would argue that Ivalice itself is the real star of the game and XII does its best storytelling through place, rather than character or dialogue. In the same way that VII could tell a whole story with a looming Loveless broadside or the aquarium chic of the City of the Ancients, the windmills in Cerobi Steppe and the baroque ornamentation on the rugs in the bazaars of Lowtown suggest a deep history infused with the generations of races and cultures that matter-of-factly share the world. Ivalice also feels interconnected in a way that many open world games do not for me. Some of my most thrilling gameplay moments were finding surprising connections like the Henne Mines outlet in the Feywood or sneaking in the back entrance to Nabudis so I could barter with a Baknamy merchant.

That same craftsmanship and attention to detail suffuses the bustling, polyglot Rabanastre, the iambics of the Occuria’s speech patterns (tetrameter for most, pentameter for the heretic Venat), and the clockwork gameplay, which is built to carry you through this rich world quickly and smoothly. I remain baffled by people who walked away because of the gambit system. It seems like the sort of quality of life improvement whose absence is so often lamented by critics of the series. Also, it’s entirely optional, so if you want to pause and select each time you attack or heal you can turn the system off and mash X to your heart’s content. At worst, it’s neutral, and for me it dramatically reduced the type of tedium that made it hard to revisit some of the earlier titles. Racing down the tracks in Lhusu Mines mowing down skeletons was a pleasure I miss every time I return to random battles in earlier games.

In the end, Final Fantasy XII feels like a transmission from an alternate reality where Square saw the future of open world RPGs and built a flawed but exhilarating foundation for the next iteration of the series as they had done with VII a decade earlier. It calls back to the open worlds and finicky secrets of NES-era RPGs including the original Final Fantasy, as well as the masterful jobs of FF:Tactics, but adds streamlined systems and offers a rich world that serves as the main attraction just like groundbreaking titles released years later such as Skyrim, Xenoblade, or Dragon Age: Inquisition. Unfortunately, Square chose a different path and we haven't really seen another game quite like XII since. Still, I return to Ivalice at least once a year to cane and rinse the game all over again.
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Brendan California
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Re: Our next podcast recording (11.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Brendan California »

Final Fantasy XII is the high point of the 3D Final Fantasy games. The world oozes with style, the story is compelling and I really cared for the characters (perhaps excluding Vaan). The repetition of typical RPG style battles are fixed by the clever battle automation system. This is one of those RPGs that is just plain fun and friendly to the player (as opposed to a SaGa style game for example). Final Fantasy XII is a must play for any fan of JRPGS.
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Mr Ixolite
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Re: Our next podcast recording (11.8.19) - 382: Final Fantasy XII

Post by Mr Ixolite »

Will wrote: August 9th, 2019, 11:06 pm ...the clockwork gameplay, which is built to carry you through this rich world quickly and smoothly. I remain baffled by people who walked away because of the gambit system. It seems like the sort of quality of life improvement whose absence is so often lamented by critics of the series. Also, it’s entirely optional, so if you want to pause and select each time you attack or heal you can turn the system off and mash X to your heart’s content.
Speaking as someone who had severe hangups with the gambit system, I think this perspective sells the prior games in the series rather short. Theres tonnes of enemies that will absolutely destroy parties who just fight/heal, and don't tailor their response to the enemys specific nature. And in most other cases, absent-mindedly fighting and healing can leave you spending more of the limited recovery resources than you would if you pursued a tailored approach. In FFXII though, I almost never felt any pressure to deviate from fighting and healing. Most of the bestiary can be dispatched the exact same way, with no real punishment for the player.
In terms of being a "Quality of life" improvement, I just find it strange that the solution to the supposed problem of "combat is tedious" was "so we've automated it" and not "so we made it more entertaining".
(I fully acknowledge that people want different things from their games, as someone prizing more direct interaction and tests of skill, I'm just trying to articulate why own personal disconnect from the gambit system. I'm sure the Cane And Rinse team appreciates it after their two year FF marathon :-))
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