Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

I'm going to copy some of the posts from this month's PWB to make a thread for this game because I've got some more things to say about it.

I said:

Play: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age. Time to tackle this one, which I played a bit of on the original PS2 release but quickly bounced off. It's a weird outlier in the FF series, with a very unusual MMO-style semi-automated combat system and a storyline that eschews the usual FF road trip in favour of a political saga that (together with the game's irritating adolescent protagonist) means the whole thing unfortunately reminds me a bit of The Phantom Menace. It's quite a functional remaster too - PS2 games are at that awkward stage where they're not quite retro enough to be charming, so the whole thing simply looks old and the little boxy areas don't do it any favours. So first impressions aren't great. But then the first few hours of any Final Fantasy game are typically a little dry, so I'm going to stick with it for a while and see how it holds up. It's certainly got its fans, and I haven't yet found a Final Fantasy game I haven't enjoyed to some extent.

Then I said:

Getting into Final Fantasy XII more now. It's still quite dated in many respects - PS2 games exist in that weird space at the moment where they feel quite modern in terms of production values but the fact they do feel quite modern makes their limitations (in this case it's small boxy areas and simple facial animations) even more apparent - and the remaster is kind of functional in that regard, it's certainly no Shadow of the Colossus in terms of trying to bring the game up to modern standards.

But it really opens up once the combat system fully unlocks, and it's really quite unlike anything else I've ever played: it's more like Final Fantasy Manager in many respects, as once you've set up a good set of Gambits the game effectively plays itself. You spend more time tweaking the rules for your team than you do actually micro-managing anything, and it's a really interesting way of recognising that in these games you often do do the same things in each battle; here you can simply automate that and let your characters do the grinding while you take care of the tactical side of things. A few QoL improvements in this version make a lot of difference, especially being able to increase the game speed to 2x or 4x and happily Benny Hill your way around the landscape levelling up as you go.

I'd really not appreciated what a complete rip-off of Star Wars this is though, it borders on plagiarism in places. You've got an evil empire, a resistance led by a plucky princess, a dashing bounty hunter sky pirate and their sidekick, and the whole thing's viewed from the point of view of two minor characters who mostly just observe what's going on. It's helped by good dialogue and generally excellent voice acting, though the overall storytelling is fairly poor - it introduces characters, doesn't mention them for ten or twelve hours of gameplay, then expects you to remember exactly who they are when they reappear. It feels quite disjointed in that respect and it doesn't help that the graphics engine kind of makes a lot of the characters look quite similar.

It's decent though, the world-building is as good as ever and the cities feel remarkably lively and bustling given the technical limitations. It's a bit more open than 10, has better characters than 13 and is more coherent overall than 15. If I can keep a handle on the overall plot, which keeps threatening to leave me behind, then I'm going to quite enjoy this overall I think.

Then Alastor said:

It's a great game, it's great to play (and shame on any real time party RPG without gambits) and I really fucking enjoy the story, it's so unlike most FF games in some ways (no romance, more politics than magic etc) and as you said, the voice acting is top notch. I think it has a better story than 13 but worse gameplay, better fucking everything than 15 (yes even gameplay, fight me).

So, now I've played it a fair bit more. Well past the point I got to last time I played it - I'm up to the Miriam Stilshrine, about 20 hours in.

I… don't think it's very good.

It's very, very repetitive. Every area is basically the same. Big mazes full of monsters wandering around and you walk about and kill them then you go to the next area. Open areas are like this. Dungeon areas are like this. There are no side-quests apart from "Hunts" which are basically going to one of the big areas and killing a boss that now spawns there. Occasionally you'll get a plot sequence but then you're back to those big areas full of monsters. There's not even any attempt to make the areas particularly believable - OK so this mine might be full of bats and that sounds plausible but oh, what's this? A T Rex. Of course it is.

Yes I get that this is basically a single-player MMO but the problem is it's based on a very specific style of MMO - essentially the original Everquest style of grindy, open MMO - and in fact on a very specific game which is of course Final Fantasy XI. And as a single-player game it's repetitive as hell. The Gambit system is very clever but it also means that for everything other than boss fights (where you might actually need to mix it up a bit) you're barely playing the game, simply walking into enemy after enemy and letting the battles play themselves.

In particular it suffers badly in comparison to Xenoblade Chronicles. Now that's not an entirely fair comparison as there are six years between the games but technically they don't feel a million miles apart (PS2 vs Wii) and they're both based on an MMO style of gameplay so it's impossible not to make that comparison. But Xenoblade is massively more engaging - every area in that game is full of side quests, so you've always got plenty to do, and while your team is also largely automated, you do have full control over one character so you're at least busy in the battles. The characters in Xenoblade are always talking to each other, too, shouting encouragement and generally bantering with each other both in and out of battle, which makes them feel much more real, whereas FFXII's team fight battle after battle in grim silence and only ever actually converse in the very occasional cut scenes (all of which exist for plot reasons, never simply for character-building).

FFXII is just dull. Most of the actual storyline happens elsewhere, to other people, and your team only ever reacts to events; meanwhile you trudge relentlessly through cut-and-paste brown and grey corridors fighting the same creatures with slightly different names and colours, wondering when anything's actually going to happen. The ability to run the game at 2x or 4x normal speed cuts down on the drudgery a little but also kind of shows how the game was so fundamentally flawed in the first place.

I do like the voice acting and it does some interesting things with regional accents (the strange European accents of the frankly slightly embarrassing bunny girls is a particular standout) but even then it's oddly inconsistent - why is the entire Rabanastran aristocracy British, apart from Princess Ashe who's American?

I'm perplexed by its enduring popularity.

I just think it plays really solidly and tells a story that's a step up in complexity from the usual FF fare, yeah there's a lot of characters, it's ambitious in it's scope and it doesn't talk slowly so you can keep up but I like that, it's a pretty huge game and does a good job of building a world through a fuck ton of locations and different races and in terms of execution the way things go down they way they do in XII also different to the rest of the series (obviously very Star Wars though, yeah). I think the plotline of Ashe striving to get revenge on the empire (with a power approaching genocide level) alongside the villain's goals that on paper, you might even agree with that I won't post due to spoilers were interesting. Ashe does change over the course of the game for instance, and stuff like a certain boss later on changes based on information you get overt he story.

Gambits can be very OP, but I will always prefer that over no control over real time party AI at all and I've never let the game play itself, personally, I've always taken control of my main. It tickles my MMO glands too, I love that I can make Basch spec into Knight/White Mage (double job not in the PS2 FFXII too) and make him a Paladin, or make Asche a Samurai and a Black Mage since both scale of Magic (sorry, Magick) in some way and even use a strat where my Penelo casts Haste/Brave/Protect/Shell and give Ashe a Berserk glove and watch her destroy things. It's a combat system that rewards stuff like that and unlike FFXV it's actually possible to get killed.

Gar, not to say XII is good because XV is bad but think of the Hunts in that game, how it was literally go here, kill, go back. In XII it became a little more involved than that to the point that you had to do some run arounds for some and even ended up fighting mini bosses like Gilgamesh during them, I actually think the Hunts were were really fun and to this day my save is outside the final hunt, the superboss with 50 million HP.

Not a 'this is why you're wrong' post but that's why I like it at least.

Cheers Alastor - it's always good to hear from someone who genuinely likes a game that isn't quite clicking.

In its defence I do really like the License boards and the new character class system, it's a huge improvement over the original. The music is ace. And the game is at least consistent in its style and tone (even if that style is often best described as "brown") which is more than you can say for XV.

I just wish it had more personality. The cut-scenes are so few and far between, and often don't even feature your main party, so even after 20 hours my team still feels like a collection of abilities and gambits rather than an actual group of people. I'm hoping the plot picks up in the second half.

This is on my "to play" pile after abandoning the PS2 one once we finally got an XBox 360, I'm slowly making my way to the end of Persona 5 then I want something rather different before I pick between this and Ni No Kuni 2.

I'm still playing this, intermittently. I kind of hate it now, to be honest, it's so bloody boring. But I'm about 75% of the way through now and refusing to admit defeat given the amount of time I've sunk into the game. I'm now underlevelled for the area I'm in though so I need to go and do some grinding: this means either walking around an empty field zone for hours walking into monsters and letting my party auto-kill them, or accepting Hunts and walking around empty field zones looking for randomly spawning boss monsters. As you can tell I'm torn between these two enticing options.

To counter Gar I started the other day and have played 20 hours so far which have flown by, admittedly I mostly play it via remote play and that's held up rather well and I put it on 4x speed when I'm out in the field or grinding too.

I think I just kept it on 4x for everything…

Final Fantasy XII: The Benny Hill Age

FFXII is cool. ;;

Just got to Rivendell Eruyt Village, I'm definitely finding it easier going playing via remote play on the Vita, I can put something on TV and grind to get points for the license board and loot to sell to buy gear then just power my way through to the next story section. I'm at a point on the license boards where I can equip any gear or use any magicks or technicks as soon as I buy them. What jobs did people go with?

https://twitter.com/CrispyW0nT0n/status/1048925440080039937?s=19

I'm further than I got on my original attempt at Final Fantasy XII back on the PS2 but I'm at an annoying part of the game where I'm essentially going back in the direction I came to go from Arcadia (?) to one of the southern areas, I know I can use Warp Notes or whatever their called but that also feels like cheating really and I get the sinking feeling that if I took that quick route if regret it due to some tough enemies or something. Can't even tell how far I am in the story as it feels like absolutely nothing of note has happened since I booted it up for the first time.

Hmmm, can't really think of anything too difficult about the game, and you can always 4x speed grind if you think you need to.

Made a good chunk of progress on this today and gotten through The Great Crystal, which is one of those stupid "every area looks the same, and you have to flick switches and use teleports to progress" maze like areas that seemed to be popular on older systems. How anyone got through that without a guide and didn't pull all of their hair out I don't know!

Dude, I had to back there for an Esper and a good weapon, it was horrible.

Right. I've just beatenSpoiler - click to show one of the Judges and Cid and Reddas has died. Al-Cid has mentioned that Cid summoned Bahamut and that Vayne has taken him to Rabenastre. It feels too early to be heading to the endgame but it feels like that's where I'm headed? Is it now time to do a bit of grinding? (Vaan is my highest level character at level 48, I've pretty much filled out all my license boards but can get better equipment and don't have all the Magicks and Technicks yet)

Such a weird game, feels like I've done absolutely nothing and I've no fucking idea what's going on in the story. It's kind of like 15 in that it plays itself and the story is a bunch of nonsensical wank.

That is the final dungeon you're heading to, so yeah.