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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.
I remember much the same thing was said about FF9 on the first Playstation. And indeed, that game was visually stunning. But to be honest, I was a little disappointed in the gameplay. Still a worthwhile game, mind you, but apart from the graphics, it was not the best in the series, IMHO. Now if FFXII can pull off amazing graphics and good gameplay, then not only will I be impressed, I will be overjoyed.
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The battle system is like playing a MMORPG, but you are by yourself.
Battles are horribly boring. Auto attack, who in the world decided upon that? Hey, you there, attack those guys! I'll just sit back and heal...
If they had included auto healing as well, the only thing the player would need to do is walk around between way points!
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I was looking forward to the game, being a long time Final Fantasy fan. Unfortunately it looks awful on my TV. I have an HDTV and playing the game I keep thinking that this sure is last generation. It's jaggy, and frankly looks bad enough that my roomie's non gaming eyes can even tell it looks kinda bad. I long to be able to slide it into the Xbox360 sitting next to the PS2 and see the game the way it should be displayed. Maybe when I break down and get the PS3 in the next year or so (resold, as I'm not buying a new one from Sony) it will look better.
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...
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I recently got a 360 about 6 monthes ago. FFXII came out last month. The only thing I can say about FFXII's graphics is "this is last gen". It really does push the FFXII to a limit, but there's better graphics. By which I mean less jaggies, better looking, or more fluid. It's true FFXII is impressive in it's graphics, but it still suffers from FMV lag. If you watch the FMV and then jump back into the game the game's graphics look poor. FFX had slightly better ways of dealing with this.
Overall FFXII is visually impressive but coming out when it did it's showing just how weak the PS2 is to the next gen systems, and totally invalidating Sony's claim that it could have lasted 10 years. It could only have lasted that if people didn't care about graphics and they do. Early Gamecube games looked on par with some of FFXII's graphics and even first gen 360 games easily smoked it.
That all being said FFXII is an incredible game, and that's coming from a guy who really hasn't liked a Final Fantasy game since FFVI. It breathes new life into the game while retaining the same style setting it always had. If it wasn't for Gears of War, FFXII would be the only thing I'm playing. Both Gears of war and Final Fantasy XII are worthy of all the praise they have gotten as one is the final "great" game. And Gears is one of the first of the new generation.
Gabe from Penny-Arcade has a review of his first 20 hours with the game that I think is spot on.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/show/21973
This game does for Final Fantasy what Resident Evil 4 did for Resident Evil - it reinvents itself and succeeds in surpassing its predecessors in nearly every way.
and I don't see slashdot posting articles about them.
I hope the envelopes are full of cash, and they're being pushed my way. I have a feeling though that they're full of souls, and they are being pushed to sony.
I'm a fan of JRPGs in general, and the FF series has generally been solid, though not always great. (Ignoring FFXI because the concept never appealed to me so I can't judge).
I've been playing FFXII a while and am underwhelmed, a few points
-Graphically, beautiful, no complaints really. Well, except no progressive scan support.
-The cities, admittedly, feel like realistic cities, well, except for the MMORPG-style icons popping up everywhere, which are actually kinda annoying. I am never bothered by the notoriously sparse cities in JRPGs, but I do have to concede they could be judged weird (a huge metropolis with maybe 13-17 people you can see is not atypical in JRPGs).
-The battle system is really uninspired. Doing it manually is just not made remotely feasible in the game, and distilling your strategy into fairly hard and fast rules makes for very boring fights. Now admittedly, high rates of random encounters in previous games were monotonous as hell, but the difficult fights were more interesting, and you had the opportunity to contemplate at most any given context the risk of damage and whether heal or attack is good. In XII, the decisions are either done in advance (i.e. if health 50%, heal will happen, no thinking), or else not given a good opportunity to recognize your situation if trying the manual approach. I really liked Chrono Trigger, no random encounters, no separate battle screen, yet a traditional JRPG battle system
-The story. I'm fairly far in, and it remains one of the most boring FF stories ever. Basically there is little depth and it's a fairly cookie cutter high-fantasy story with some Squareisms tossed in (Moogles, Chocobos). It's not the first fairly boring story (FFV was very much along the same lines, and FFVIII was boring to me, but maybe a little more interesting, VI, VII, and X are fairly strong IMO).
-The characters. The characters are all very very flat and lacking depth, similar to the story
-The music. The music is also very ho-hum. FF has a tradition of memorable music, even among other games in the series I wasn't crazy about. FFXII consists of fairly generic background music with some hints of remixes of some of their staple music from the past. I have some FF tracks play on occasion in my car, but nothing from XII appeals.
All in all it feels like they wanted to make a generic western RPG with little story and heavy inspiration from the popular MMORPGs, but done very well graphically.
This is the first single-player FF series title in a long time I think I'll pass on buying.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The only envelope I can see being pushed is how effeminate they can make the male characters and not have them mistaken for females.
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."
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.
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.
-- jchenx
Unfortunately the article really doesn't say how they pushed the PS2 architecture. Before clicking I was looking forward to an article like this amazing presentation by the SOTC dev team that really goes in depth to how they implemented the amazing effects on the PS2. Instead, we get this about the development, in its entirety: "The graphics were created using the power of the PlayStation 2 fully," Akihiko Yoshida, character designer for Final Fantasy XII, told us. "We believe that this is probably the limit of how beautiful the graphics can get on the PlayStation 2 console.". Is there anything more in depth than this miniscule blurb?
Speaking of which, does this game look better than Shadow of the Colossus? Or does it look about as good but actually has a decent frame rate?
I have more affection for some of my non-plot characters in Disgaea ("Noooo, don't hit Margaret with the fireball, she only has 250 hp and is weak against OH YOU BASTARD YOU WILL PAY FOR THAT") than I do for any of the characters in FFXII. Not a single one of which I can name at the moment, incidentally. Vann or something? Vash? Whatever, whinny effeminate boy who is dating forgettable Japanese girl (who wears both the pants and the shirt in that relationship) and fated to rescue princess in distress, who currently hates his guts but we all know that will change. Throw in bunny-rabbit-who-looks-like-Storm, tank-straight-out-of-WoW-raid, and Air Pirate to round out the cast. They're trying to save the dutchy of whocares from the empire of whatever, which they can only do by gathering... what was it, I forget. Probably crystals. Thats generally a safe bet for a FF game, isn't it? I remember they spent some time in a mine. Was I trying to find a crystal? Or was I just trying to find the next cutscene? I don't know.
I notice one of TFAs says there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a brief period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.