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Final Fantasy XII U.S. Demo

Posted by Zonk on from the love-the-last-fantasy dept.

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.'"

4 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. androgynously delicious by xenomouse · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)

    1. Re:androgynously delicious by Big+Sean+O · · Score: 4, Funny

      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".

      --
      My father is a blogger.
  2. MMORPG-ishness by Spleener12 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:MMORPG-ishness by jeblucas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      blarg.