Final Fantasy XII Combat Info

1up.com has a few precious details on the combat system to be used in Final Fantasy XII. From the article: "The semi-realtime, semi-ATB battle system of FFXII is finally sounding like it's got some real depth now as these new features are coming to light. First of all, a "Chain" system has been revealed. Basically when you keep attacking enemies of the same race without killing enemies of a different race in between, your Chain counter increase. Increasing the counter will lead to getting better and even rare items from the enemies as they fall."

Comments

"Precious"?

[IorDMUX]

I think "precious" is a bit far to go in describing the tidbits of information offered us by this post.

The 6-hit-combo thingie the article mentions seems to be just their tried-and-true "critical hit" system with some extra graphics... The hit combos were in FF1, by the way. I believe one could, with luck and a good weapon, get anywhere between one and six hits.

The new shield-guarding ability? They've had an "eva" (evade) stat since FF1 and introduced the shield as the primary blocker in FF6.

The enemy-fighting-enemy flair could add quite a bit to the game, though. After gamers erupted with joy in response to scenes of Covenant and Flood battling it out before their eyes in Halo, we've seen a new resurgence of this "I'm not the only one doing all the fighting" addition to games.
[Not to say that Halo invented the idea, of course. They were just the first, IMHO, to do it breathtakingly in these latest graphical environments.]

Sounds like FFXI

[oGMo]

This sounds like a modified version of various FFXI mechanics (which isn't much suprise). In FFXI, you can get "Exp chains", which means if you kill things fast with little delay, you get bonus experience on the kill. (This only counts for things at or greater than your level.) The required time between kills goes down the more you kill, making it harder to keep them up, and the amount of exp you get eventually caps at 200-350, but it sounds vaguely similar. Different incentive (items vs exp), but it makes more sense in a 1-player RPG that way.

What would be cool is if they keep Skillchains. This is one thing that makes FFXI battles cool: if you use weapon skills in the right sequence, you do additional damage with neat effects. (You can even toss the right spell on the end for a magic burst for even more damage.) It helps encourage coordination between players, and it really helps. Good parties with the right skillchains do a lot better than those without.

If FFXII has some of these battle mechanics, expect a lot more depth. Since they're doing the .hack-style command-your-allies rather than traditional select-everyone's-action, it has a lot of potential. With the recent NPC-friend feature in FFXI (which apparently is working quite well), they may already be experimenting with these mechanics in production.