Final Fantasy XII U.S. Demo

Tim Butler writes "1UP has posted a massive blowout on the U.S. demo of Final Fantasy XII that ships with Dragon Quest VIII next week. They're definitely impressed, saying 'This is not the old-school Final Fantasy action you've come to expect -- but the trade-off is a fast-paced, combat-intensive game with a vast, contiguous world and danger on all sides.'"

Comments

androgynously delicious

[xenomouse]

Is it just me or are the main characters in each new FF slowing morphing into a single gender?
(maybe with exception to FFIX, which had a conquistador and a rastafarian it it)

Re:androgynously delicious

[Big Sean O]

About a year back, I brought home a copy of Final Fantasy X (my first excursion into the FF series) and described the box to my wife as "the one with Meg Ryan on the cover".

MMORPG-ishness

[Spleener12]

The resemblence of the system to an MMORPG is entirely coincidental- MMORPGs happen to have real-time battles on the same screens that the players explore, that's all.

Remember, the whole reason why RPGs had battle transitions in the first place is because the technology wasn't there for them to make the battles look as pretty as they wanted to on the same screens that the players explored (imagine FF1 if the battles took place on the map screens. Now imagine FF1 if you walked on the map with the same character sprites you had in combat. Get the idea?) It's an abstraction that we don't need anymore, so they got rid of it, since keeping tradition for the sake of tradition is just retarded.

Re:MMORPG-ishness

[jeblucas]

There's a point at which "tradition" becomes branding. Everyone that's played a Final Fantasy game knows there's battle transitions. It was for technical reasons before, no it's for branding. If there wasn't this transition, we'd start to compare Final Fantasy to a zillion other games that let you walk around and collect crap and attack wee beasties...and it might come up short. Final Fantasy's characters and stories have been all over the place, so there's no brand continuity there--all they have is the name, some consistant lingo (gil, etc), and certain play characteristics--like battle transitions.

Re:MMORPG-ishness

[bateleur]

Branding might be the reason for battle transitions, but it definitely isn't this which stops FF being compared to things. ...because FF does get compared to things constantly. The series is the benchmark against which PS2 RPGs are judged. Many of the individual games in the series are flawed in various ways, but still nothing else really comes close. Love it or hate it, FF almost defines a genre of its own.

Stupid Blurb

[Rocketship Underpant]

What the heck is a "massive blowout"? Did 1UP explode? Argh ... let's use words with meaning, Slashdot editors.

Re:From a Dragon Quest fan

[jclast]

Why do these HTML articles have more than one page anyway? We're not reading a magazine with physical pages.

hahaha

[Joe the Lesser]

"In fact, all the skills featured in the demo should be familiar to FF veterans. The one exception is the summon Hasmal's groaningly named skill Roxxor, about which the less said the better."

That's priceless.

Re:Stopped caring

[jchenx]

Wow, Morrowind's openness is exactly why I DIDN'T like the game, and prefer "hold my hand" traditional RPGs (FF-series, Xenosaga, etc.). Those games are supposed to wrap you up in the story so much that you want to see what's next. The choices that you ARE allowed to make are generally restricted to how you want to develop your characters' skills. Granted, if the plot doesn't intrigue you in the first place, then yeah, I definately see it becoming a chore.

With Morrowind, I felt like I was given no direction at all. Not that its a bad design or anything, since obviously a lot of people prefer that type of game.