Hype?
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I was rather disappointed with 12 when I played it on PS2.
I thought it had a really good story, but story segments were spaced so far apart that I would frequently forget what happened previously and the gravitas of the story was lost.
Each zone was huge, and it could take hours to explore all of a single map, but there was rarely anything interesting to make such exploration worthwhile.
I didn't like the Gambit system at all, maybe because I was too good at it and thus ended up watching the game play itself most of the time. And the combat itself was really disappointing - overly drawn out fights, damage sponge bosses, and terrible feedback where I had no idea what was going on. Flying monsters were the worst, forcing me to just sit there and watch bars slowly fill so that melee combatants could use their super-slow "I can finally do damage to a flying creature" attack. The final boss fight was a 30 minute encounter with a repeating cycle of 4:30 of just watching the game play itself followed by 30 seconds of mad scrambling to heal everyone up because everyone was suddenly near-death and I had no idea why.
And the dungeon towards the end, with 2-3 hours between save points...? I don't have that kind of free time anymore.
Maybe the upgrades will help with some of those things. I'm glad they're at least using a different upgrade grid for this, as the original upgrade grid was really stupid, and everyone would learn everything and there was practically no point to picking one weapon or armor specialization over another.
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Good thing about zodiac age it's the new ability system (more based on roles instead of one big board for every character. I think there is new gambits too. Anyway, it's the perfect JRPG to make long walks and grind, perfect to relax, altough can be very exhausting and repetitive to the long term, imho.
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Heh, grind is the last thing I look for in games. I barely have time to play, so I want my limited time to be filled with the utmost quality, not boring grind.
I'm a completionist by nature, so I would fully explore every map and kill every creature I encountered. Then I realized that it was taking me 1-2 hours to fully clear a single (small) map location, and there was nothing interesting to find, and the reason my friend was at half my play time was that he was running past all the enemies, and I should start doing the same if I wanted to finish the game before I died of old age.
But if that's what you enjoy, I hope the PC port is amazing! :)
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In all my 20 years of internet-experience, I´ve never seen a post on any topic that captured my own thoughts as perfectly as yours does. Have a whitelist for that 💙
Not much to add here, except that I loved the idea of the gambit system. Simplified AI-scripting as a gamplay-system is pretty awesome, but yeah.. after the first few hours it made the game basicly become a Screensaver-RPG.
For me FF12 is very similar to FF2. In both games the gameplay-mechanics sound great in theory but don´t work so well in practice.. and the storylines aren´t bad, but somehow never managed to evoke any feelings.
I think the strongest aspect of FF12 is the huge open game world that felt much more alive than previous FFs (still none of the places really stuck with me after I finished the game, unlike other FFs).. and there is tons of stuff to do if you enjoy grinding. I wish they´d released it as something like "Final Fantasy Tactics RPG", because my expectations would´ve been different.
I don´t think I would sit through the game again on the "big screen", but with a PC-Release (and the lack of a Vita-version) I might give the remaster a try on the GPD Win.
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Thank you. :)
And I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one that felt that way. :)
I think FF 13's combat was a perfect evolution of 12's Gambit system. At the beginning, the AI automatically puts in default commands, but you can quickly swap in your own commands instead (like changing Attack to Fire) to optimize your battles and finish them faster (and be rewarded for it). But as you progress, and the battles start going faster, you switch from optimizing individual attacks to managing party composition, which roles to use, and when to swap to different ones. Is this a fast fight that you can do with pure offense, or is it a longer fight that you should debuff for, or do you need a tank to soak up the damage? If you're taking damage, how much healing do you need? What's the best way to finish this fight as fast as you can.
Over the course of the game you go from being a worker selecting individual attacks to a general deciding who to send into battle, how to organize them, and what tactic to use, while the AI takes care of the drudge work of selecting attacks and spells. You end up thinking rather than just repeating, and the battles are always fast, frantic, and exciting.
And the boss / optional battles often required changing up tactics, party composition, equipment, etc. I died more in 13 than any other FF game, but the instant respawn mechanic and fast battles kept it from ever feeling frustrating or punishing. The final boss fight in 13 felt epic and exciting, and clocked in under 5 minutes. 12's final battle was 30+ minutes of being boring and wondering why they chose such a poor camera angle for the game.
For all the hate that FF 13 gets online, I loved its evolution of the Gambit system. Fast, frantic, and exciting are words I'd never thought I'd use to describe an FF game, and while I normally really like turn-based games, I absolutely loved 13's combat.
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Your description of FF13th battle system fits very well.. most people criticize that you only have to use the A-Button. Thats true for maybe 80%-90% of the battles, but thats also true in all the other FFs, where you only spam "Attack" in most battles(except FF12 where you don´t use any buttons at all..), while FF13 at least does different things with this button and utilizes the skills of your current class.
I guess the problem for most people is, that you "feel" like you have less controll over the characters than classic FFs (like you describe it, it feels more like making descision as a general while other FFs make you feel more like beeing part of the fight).. but in the more interresting battles, the player is actually even more involved. Especially the optional boss battles require lots of strategical planning and preparations and very fast descisions and reactions during the fight.
I think FF13 does a much better job than older FFs in rewarding you for doing great in battles and that to me is the most important ingridient to make grinding fun. You always have to aim for the best (and fastest) outcome to get bigger rewards. I enjoy that much more than battle-systems, where its most benefical to fight bad and drag out the battle (like they did in FF2 and FF10 and kind of in FF8).
IMHO the real flaw was the leveling-system.. and sadly that also destroyed a lot of the potential the battle-system had. Over the course of the game every character only has two classes to choose from and you can level them only in a straight line. No choices, no controll. On top of that there is the level-cap for every part of the main-story, so you kind of get punished for exploring too much and can´t grind if you feel like grinding a little.. it made the whole RPG-part (skills, experience etc) feel more like "fullfilling your quota" instead of getting stronger and took away so much freedom. To make the game really fun, you first have to kill the final boss and watch the ending.. all of a sudden all classes get unlocked, level caps are gone and you can fight the awesome optional bosses that make the battle-system REALLY shine. If all that had unlocked the moment you land on Pulse, the game would´ve been five times as great.
And here is another strange critisism the game gets from fans: The amound of time it takes before the world gets more open. Its been quite similar in FF7-10, especially 7 and 10 take ages until they start opening up (I actually disliked FF7 for this a lot back in the days). FF13 might take even a little longer, but its not that much different from its predecessors. I´m a lot more disappointed by the lack of towns and villages in FF13.
Overall I guess if FF13 would´ve been released as FF11 I might´ve hated it. Coming from the masterpieces that are FF6-FF10, 13 would´ve been a harsh disappointment. But on its own its a very nice JRPG with a descent story, beautiful graphics, great music (at least some of it..) and fun gameplay... but "unforgetable masterpiece" is not an attribute I would give..
But coming from X-2, 11 and 12, FF13 finally was a shining ray of hope for me :)
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Yeah, I agree with most of that.
The leveling system was certainly linear, but the same criticism can be applied to most previous FF games. 10's lovely sphere grid is largely a straight line once you unroll it, and 2-3 classes per character is a lot more diversity than you get in classics such as 4 and 6. Only 5 and 10-2, with their use of the job systems, give you real diversity with how to build your characters.
12's level up grid was my least favorite. It was like stabbing in the dark at inconsequential upgrades, and while I could build one character to use medium armor and another to use heavy, one to use swords and another to use axes, there was no tangible difference. Having it hidden seemed a strange choice, since not knowing what upgrades you're going to get is more frustrating than fun, and everyone just used a guide. Every character learned every spell, armor was a straight HP vs Defense trade-off with no real reason to prefer one or the other, and weapons didn't make any discernible difference aside from melee vs ranged. I ended up giving characters different armor and weapons just because I felt like I should, rather than for a strategic or meaningful reason.
The level cap was odd, but I guess they wanted to keep people from out-leveling content and thus provide a better challenge. It's a tough balancing act. I remember being really frustrated with 10 because I got to Sin without grinding, and would get obliterated by the Behemoth's on-death AoE attack. Sure, I could get around it by summoning an Aeon to deal the killing blow, but one mistake and it was a complete wipe. So I went to get some of the ultimate weapons until I was strong enough to survive the Behemoth attack, but that resulted in removing any possible challenge from the rest of Sin. I still remember how the final boss started shaking 4 turns in, and I was ready for the transformation to the new form, but no, he was merely dead. I had just killed the final boss in 4 turns like it was nothing. Very disappointing.
And while 13 is clearly linear, I would argue that FF games have been pretty linear since FF 1; which gated you at every point - on foot, ship, canoe, airship - and had a straight linear progression through the fiends to the finale. Sure, some give you an the appearance of freedom from the start, but gate where you can go by putting much higher level enemies on everything outside the main path. FF games have always been about going from A to B to C, they just made the path meander and gave you vague directions so you might get lost, possibly adding an optional cave along the way. I had to give up on 7 part way through because I couldn't, for the life of me, find the location that I was supposed to go to next to move the game along.
The lack of towns and villages didn't bother me, as those are just quest / equipment hubs and not the main point of interest for me, but I can see being disappointed in that if you enjoy that aspect. One review I read criticized the lack of mini-games, and I couldn't care less about mini-games. The only mini-game I really enjoyed was Blitzball - which was surprisingly awesome!
Anyway, I've really enjoyed these delves into FF games. Have a blue heart. :)
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I´d say 10´s sphere grid was pretty perfect (at least the advanced one we got in the european version). Of course its kept rather simple and there where more and less usefull things for the characters and many clear ways you HAD to follow to get skill X, but you still had to make many choices and could prefer to get some skills earlier than others, move a character into another class-direction or strategize about the way to get skill X, Y and Z without wasting too much points. Its still my favourite Level-System in the series and yeah, X-2s was awesome too.. hate to admit that becaus I hate almost everything else the game..
The boss in FF10 was a great disappointment to me too.. I´d say the last sections on the way to the final battle where among the hardest in FFs after 4, but like you say the boss goes down in a few blows and when I thought the final battle beginns, you get some strange short battle where all your characters are invincible and stand back up automaticly if you manage to get one killed.
FF6´s level system had a bit more freedom than FF13s (pre-final-boss). While characters only had one fixed jobclass, you had a lot of freedom in building your party and the Stat-Boni from the espers gave you some choice about how to level a character. Of course by todays standards and expectations it would be too simple and the game was too easy anyway to have your choices make much of a difference. That didn´t bother me too much back then, but if you´d a new FF with the same system today, I´d be disappointed for sure.
Final Fantasy is of course rather linear at its core, but it hides and sells this very well. You always get smaller or bigger areas to freely explore with a goal you have to reach to advance the main story. And advancing the story makes the world open up more and more, wich feels different from just walking through the next corridor. You could argue that its mostly illusion, but in games as in movies illusion is half the battle. So I get why some people might dislike FF13 for its linear beginnings, but most of the later entries in the series did this and 7 and 10 where almost the same as FF13 in this regard.. I read a lot of opinions critizising this fact as "untypical for Final Fantasy" while its actually very traditional.
Thanks a lot for the whitelisting and the nice talk :D
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49.99$ it seems, so I'll pass for a while, I bought it on PS2 the first day at 60€ back in the days, like most of the Final Fantasy and other Square Enix games (Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Dragon Quest, etc).
I think it's okay for me to wait for a better price, now :/
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Yes! Hell yes! Hell fucking yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am so fucking hype for this I LOVE FF12. I know it took about two years for FF10's remaster to come to PC, but I am SO GLAD FF12 is showing up here sooner!
Yesssssssss
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Time for another terrible SquareEnix port with no post launch support.
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Yay! Currently playing FFX and loving it! First FF I've ever played :D
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Good choice to get you hooked up to FF, but it'll be hard to play lower than 9 later if you prefer graphics (7 is being remade though) xD nevertheless 6 and 4 are very good (especially 6), 7 is a cult classic, 8 is great in its own way, 9 is fan favorite, 5 is prefect for those who wanna have a complex job system. 11 is going android, 14 ARR is extremely fun. 12 and 15 are coming to PC and 13 is either direct hit or total miss. 1 2 3 is rather old, I recommend playing them for nostalgia purpose. Don't bother with spin offs except Chrono Trigger and FFTactics xD
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how weird, some days ago i woke up with the main theme music in my mind
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http://www.pcgamer.com/final-fantasy-12-the-zodiac-age-is-coming-to-pc-next-month-with-new-features
Take my money, Square!
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