Final Fantasy XII Pushes Envelopes

The anticipation surrounding Final Fantasy XII has resulted in Square/Enix's largest U.S. rollout for a title. Gamespot reports that 1.5 Million units were shipped to the country to meet demand. From the article: "Even if every last one of those copies has been sold, Square Enix still has a ways to go before the game duplicates the success it experienced overseas earlier this year. Final Fantasy XII has already racked up more than 2.4 million sales in Japan since its release there in March of this year." The game is pushing graphical as well as business envelopes; Kikizo has a feature talking with some of the game developers about the game's use of PS2 architecture. Essentially, the team says, FFXII is the best a game will ever look on the PlayStation 2.

Comments

Re:Also boring

[ogrius]

Actually once you buy Cure you have auto-healing.

Ally:HP Cure

Will automatically heal any hurt party member.

I personally find the battle system fun. Now unless the sh*t hits the fan, I can just let the system handle it. Honestly for non-boss fights, why do you want to be hitting the same instructions over and over?

The other thing they have done is add in nasty high level monsters mixed with the easy ones in some areas. Since the fights aren't random, you can see them coming but if you don't pay attention or just assume you can kill it, Game Over.

Re:Load Times

[illeism]

They are not too bad, a little longer than expected but still in an acceptable range. I've seen longer load times on games like Burnout Revenge... so it's not bad...

Re:What if you hate square-enix?

[jchenx]

1. I understand the battlesystem has been streamlined, which is ok by me. But do the boss battles actually involve some strategy?

So far? Yes. Usually, the strategies that you have setup for normal battles, aren't going to work quite well in boss fights. So there's a lot more micro-managing involved. And that's not so much of a bad thing. One thing I really do like is really being able to swap gambits out on the fly.

So basically, instead of traditional J-RPGs where you're just micro-managing actions, you are managing strategies. Instead of saying, "Oh, character X is hurt, time for me to have character Y heal them", it is now, "Oh, I should have this character do all of the healing, and let my other guys just focus on damage."

2. Is the story engrossing enough so that you actually care what is going on? (for instance, I got bored with oblivion after a few hours, but the story of neverwinter nights 2 is engrossing for me so far).

Can't really answer that for you, since story is obviously subjective. That said, it is FAR more story intensive (albeit linear) than a game like Oblivion. I haven't played NWN2 yet myself, so I can't compare against that game. As some other folks have mentioned, the game and plot are a lot like Square's lesser-known titles, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. And I think that's a very good thing, since it's much more mature than your typical "stop the evil bad guy, save the world" fluff.

3. Is your character completely railroaded? I understand j-rpgs are more linear, but sometimes at least the illusion of choice allows me to become more engaged in the story.

Surprisingly, yes. I can't say enough good things about the License Board system. It's a weird mechanic and not really realistic ("I have to have a license to wear a hat?" is a common complaint), but it allows you to do customize your party very differently than how others may have.

For example, my friend and I are playing through the game, and we've set each character up with a completely different arche-type. Some of the bad ass warriors in my party, are spell-slinging mages in his. And neither of us appear to be punished for doing so, as the difficulty appears to have remained the same. That's amazing.