Final Fantasy XII – QR (Quick Review)

Remembered I actually had a gaming blog. I suppose that’s typical of someone who sucks at multitasking and/or remembering the tasks. How is it that I am making it through college? Anyway, I’ll post what I thought about FFXII that I’ve already posted on a message board. For the most part, I am playing Digital Devil SaGa, Infinite Undiscovery and Lost Odyssey at the moment. Broken updates to ensue. And for the most part, think of my Xenosaga in-depthness dead. I have no interest in reading Zarathustra at the moment more than I am interested in getting rid of my backlog.

Pass: any game that, with its shortcomings, is enjoyable to an unexplained degree. (>.>)
Fail: any game that, with its shortcomings, is excessively mindnumbing. (<.<)

Final Fantasy XII – PS2
Grade: Pass
(7.0)

This is definitely not a game that lives up to the commercialized hype from Square-Enix. It was said to be a game that bridges old-schoolers and new-schoolers together. Yet, Final Fantasy XII appears to fuse together an anti-climatic storyline overshadowed by a lackluster group that frolicks around in massive environments. Regardless of its severe storyline and character downfalls, XII is still playable. Quite frankly, without the expansiveness of its gameplay, Final Fantasy XII would definitely fail.

The storyline is something left to be desired. Initially a story that appeared to be steeped in foreboding and interesting plot-twists, it becomes a story of predictability through spurts of good scenes and boring scenes. Though, I do admit that during the latter part of the game, the good scenes outweighed the boring. Without spoiling anything [though I don't believe I'm saving anyone], perhaps it was the pacing that emphasized the issues. The story’s pacing was slow. Come to think of it, it was difficult to create any “time” of the events in the game. With the increasing apprehensive nature of NPCs concerned with an outbreak of war, what I virtually did through exploration in the game seemed disconnected with the overarching story until reaching areas such as Golmore Jungle. The actual material and writing were beautiful. But the characters were empty. Ashe and Vaan specifically, for reasons of indecisiveness. The only outstanding characters that seemed independent, self-sufficient and perfectly motivated were Lord Larsa, Cid, Judge Gabranth, and Basch. Unfortunately, you’re stuck with characters like Vaan and Penelo who are just tagalongs, yet frequent in main scenes adding nothing but corny or useless lines. They should not be allowed to speak at all. The ending seemed fruitless too, but I suppose it’s perfectly justifiable in terms of the story’s execution.

Gameplay. The battle system is broken. Too frequently did I have to re-arrange my Gambits for my team members to do them in a timely fashion. The star quality to the Gambit system is not just simultaneous gameplay, but the removal of constant menu-ing. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Because you assign the Gambits in a numerical hierarchy, it appears that the percentages or effectiveness of them begins to stagger under certain conditions. For example, I made Penelo my primary mage. For some foggy reason, she would decide to attack a flying enemy with their weakpoint (the gambit was assigned at 6), yet my man Basch has about 650HP and is about to die. What? He dies? And she cancels her attack magic and decides to Arise him? What a waste of a move! It’s also noticeable that team members with Gambits On have quicker attack initiative than the member you’re manualing. The moves are cool, the magic is cool, and Quickenings are a Godsend to the initial 40 hours of trudging through dungeons upon dungeons with peaks and cracks of storyline. Battle is actually a drag then. It takes way too long to kill an enemy, and there’s plenty of times where you may wind up in the wrong area and get clobberd.

But, the system is essentially abuseable. Quickenings drastically increase your magic, and once you get the right Gambits and skills, battles become easy peasy. Boss battles are especially easy if you take interest in the best part of FFXII – its Hunt System. Not only do you get awesome items, great LP, great weapons, and plenty of loot to sell at the Bazaar to only get more awesome items and great weapons, but leveling isn’t much of a concern because it comes about easily. Plus, with the experience gained from the Hunt System, once you finish the Archadia arc, I reckon that you can instantly go through the game and not have to grind in the least, because the bosses are absolutely no challenge. This is especially great, because it increases your exposure to the storyline, rather than a dungeon or exploration taking up too much time. Quickenings sort of become useless. Once I finished my 35th Hunt (that was the last hunt), I never used a Quickening again. They are a waste of MP usage, especially when you need a Gambit to Curaga someone with HP < 40% consistently. Anyway. It’s definitely the Hunts that saved the game. Though I did enjoy going through every territory, I enjoyed it more when I obviously gained many good things from it. The imprint left from the Hunts is sort of odd though – there’s plenty of times where I didn’t even read the Hunt, but found the location, the person to talk to, killed it, got my shit and left.

The music is . . . I’d say the music is unfortunate. Though there are some great pieces I’d recommend to anyone, its implementation in exploring was definitely in the background. I suppose this is because it is atmospheric, though atmospheric =/= bad. The pieces chosen, and the unimportance of the environment if it was transitional, just does not stick to my memory. The music started getting better towards the end of the game; it seems like everything started getting better towards the end of the game and it just ended! Voice acting was grand. Though I didn’t prefer some particular voices, the intonations, speculations and etc expressed through tonal values and the accompanied accents worked very well. After thinking more about this game, I would really sort of fail it, but without ranting about how awesome the freedom was in exploring the environments and mechanisms to the Gambit system that weren’t frustrating, I’ll just leave you with a Pass. Everything was average, besides the story. Defintiely a playable game, but not exactly replayable unless you’re a masochist.