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Final Fantasy XII First Mentioned
According to a story over at GamerFeed, Square-Enix has said that Final Fantasy XII will appear at the Tokyo Game Show. No further details are given other than the game will be offline, as opposed to the forthcoming Final Fantasy XI. Apparently this is in response to fan pressure. Sounds good to me, too, since I don't really want to pay a monthly fee to play a Final Fantasy game.
Good news for this dying series. Now I finally have something to look forward to other than the I want to make money let's make an pay per month online version of X game.
I've heard that some of the Final Fantasy Tactics folks will be working on this one. Anyone know who? I liked Final Fantasy X, but it was just a little _too_ movie like for my tastes. Decent story, but I felt more and more detached from it the more I played. I want to actually play the game more than I watch it. Hopefully XII will find a nice balance between the story and the game itself.
Square Insider also mentioned this today as well as the following rumour:
It was announced earlier that FFXII is slated for the second half of this fiscal year, so perhaps the game is farther along than Square Enix is letting on. As soon as we know more, you'll know more.
Good to know that Square isn't abandoning those of us who prefer stand alone to online. When I sit down to play an RPG, the last thing I want to do is deal with real people.
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NSFWAlthough, rpgamer.com says that composer Nobuo Uematsu talks Final Fantasy XII in his online journal - but it's not in a language that I can read. Can anyone translate this?
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Square needs to go back to the tried and true methods they were using for FFVII and of those before. VII had quite a bit of CGI's but they were short and you still had the feeling that it was a game, but in X the scenes took you out of the game, and some times interupted the flow of the game. If they go back to quarky characters and interesting plots like they had in the first 7 games, i think they'll be back on top in the world of RPGs.
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." - Voltaire
Good point. I loved FF7 because it had the quarky plot and the CGI cut scenes only lasted a couple of minutes at most. With that said I'll keep my eyes open on the next installment but I'm not pre-ordering. You here me Square Soft!!?
-Dipster
I can recall hearing this info long before FFXI was released in Japan. Well, shortly after FFIX was released actually.
It seemed when the news hit my nose about FFXI being an MMORPG, they also released news about what they were planning on for FFXII.
Square has always made each of it's games different from eachother in some way, from changing the magic system, to changing the way battles were fought, or the era the game was set in. So, not releaseing another MMORPG under the Final Fantasy label makes (some) sense to me.
Even though, I guess this is a good confirmation. I'm just sadly waiting for another FF3/6j.
And as of this post, Final Fantasy XIII has its first mention as well.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
CG sucks. I wish RPGs didn't have ANY CG. All "cut-scenes" should be rendered with the in-game engine these days. There isn't any excuse.
There's barely any CG in FFX, save the opening, kissyface in the middle, and end. The rest is in little bits and really isn't much more than, say, XVIII.
There's a bit of information already available on FFXII. For one, it will be produced by Yasumi Matsuno, who headed development on FF Tactics and Vagrant Story. Akihiko Yoshida, also a part of the FFT team, will be FFXII's character designer, displacing Tetsuya Nomura (Character designer for VII, VIII, X and Kingdom Hearts). Hideo Minaba (of FFIX and FFT) will be the art director. Nobuo Uematsu is confirmed to be working on music for FFXII, but I wouldn't be surprised if he weren't the only composer on the project. (FFX had 3; the names of the other two elude me at the moment. The guy who composed for the recent SaGa games was one of them.)
There are a few pieces of preliminary artwork available: a simple poster and a profile of a few of the more prominent members of the development team.
Final Fantasy XVIII? I've got to say, mister AC, either you've a very poor grasp of Roman numerals or you need to give me that time machine you've been using.
All but a very small portion of the cutscenes in FFX are rendered using the game engine, not CG.
Additionally, the only reason that there seem to be so many cutscenes in FFX is because of the voiceovers, etc., which cannot be accelerated. I would be willing to wager that if you compared the amount of pure story dialogue in FFX with that of previous FFs, it wouldn't be vastly different. It just seems that way since you can't skip through it as fast as you can read as in older FFs.
That has nothing to do with FFXII. It's off-topic and trolling. What about Crystal Chronicles (sp?) or FF Tactics Advance (I know that the latter is on GBA but if you were playing CC then you would likely have a GBA or SP or GB Player).
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
I wonder when those game will be released. At this rate, they should mention them soon, and FFXV should be mentioned by Square-Enix by 2005 at the current rate. So, that means that Final Fantasy Final will come out the same day Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2 come out.
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
You could hardly say FF is dying at all. That would be like saying that the Zelda or Mario or Dragon Warrior/Quest series are dying.
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
The bad thing was that it wasn't even CG! Half of it was polygon dialogues..
I bet you I'm not the only one that wanted to destroy that TV during that part where Tidus and Yuna were laughing so hard.. so fake..
CG's weren't that bad.. but ya, it's getting to the point where it's barely a game, and mostly a "you can only do this so you can watch a movie"...
Reminds me of those early Sega-CD games..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
"Final Fantasy XI will be the final Final Fantasy game." I clearly remember reading that in more then one magazine, quoted from someone previously trustworthy at Square.
Turns out that FF: Crystal Chronicles was just a way of placating Nintendo so square could get to the money: GBA ports. FF:CC only garnered a 28/40 in Famitsu. Reviewers cited the lack of honest storyline, boring combat, and repetetive overworld actions. Add onto the fact that you need a GBA and a GC-GBA hookup for every other player beyond one, and one four-player game can cost a total of $400.
Square-enix is smart to stick where the money is: the PS2.
'cos Final Fantasy always reminded me of Moorcock's novels about the Eternal Champion. Especially when you consider that a lot of Square's heroes are at least as angsty as John Daker, or the Von Beks, or Dorian Hawkmoon. Square hasn't topped Elric, though.
Though it might be seriously cool to duke it out with Gaynor the Damned using a party made up of Elric, Moonglum, Oona (Elric's daughter), the Rose, and Ulric von Bek.
Of course, that completely buggers the chronology of the original novels, as Elric bites the dust at the end of Stormbringer.
"Square today unveiled the next game in the legendary Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy: The Next One. The main character -- who might be a man or a woman -- is said to gain levels and employ a weapon of some kind. Rumors of an ultimate confrontation with ancient evil remain uncorroborated."
Chris Mattern
Will they ever have a final final fantasy?
maybe they should make the game name "Ongoing Fantasy"
I don't agree that FFXI is even a good MMORPG. If it had been released three years ago. maybe, but it just doesn't bring anything new or compelling to the table. Combat is exactly the same as Everquest, crafting is tedious and useless, questing means you get to roleplay being the UPS guy; the world is lifeless and the story is nonexistent.
I really wanted to like this game, but there's so many other MMORPGs for the PC that have much better gameplay.
It somehow manages to take everything I like about Final Fantasy and everything I like about MMORPGs and throw it out the window. What is left is much less than the sum of its parts.
Err...would you prefer that Xenosaga's story be told without cutscenes then?
http://chrono.posterous.com/
I don't own a PS2 so I don't really care much...