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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.
Santa's suicide mission go!
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.
They did include auto-healing. And a way that allows you to specify when people heal, when people attack, whether or not they do it automatically or not, etc. You don't want them to do something/anything? They don't do it. You want them to cast Cure whenever they can if an Ally is below 50% health? Yeah, they can do that automatically too.
You CAN treat it like the other games, but guess what most of the other games were? Mashing the A/X/whatever button to accept the default menu option of attack, or down, X, down a bunch of times, X, to cast Firaga/Fire3/Whatever. Big deal. Unless there's strategy involved, I don't feel the need to destroy my thumb and my controller's buttons.. But if you want to, go right ahead -- the game isn't stopping you and removing all control over your characters, it's just removing the mind-numbingly boring generic fight scenes that have plagued the series since its inception. Is a random battle on a huge, open plain where a 40 foot tall monster snuck up on you, and now you have to hold down the X button on your turbo controller to 'Attack' it to death so much better than FFXII's system where you get to see them coming, run in a realistic fashion (and draw aggro), and take a hands-off / high-level approach to control the flow of the battle instead of the individual movements of each character?
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.
The only envelope I can see being pushed is how effeminate they can make the male characters and not have them mistaken for females.
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.