General Gaming Final Fantasy XII is quietly one of the best FF games

[Paperclyp]

I'm not far enough in yet to see if I understand the story this time (first time I played it it was absolute total nonsense up its own ass, but maybe I was dumber back then). The voice acting is uneven. The puzzles aren't great.

 

But they nailed that gambit system. It reminds me of a Supergiant system but when combined with the licsense board and abilities that you unlock and whatnot, it just all fits together so freaking well. I also think they really hit it out of the park with the look of the game, the way the attacks feel when they connect, the little things like the arcs that show what each character is targeting. But the gambit system itself is so fun to work with - you're literally programming your characters and then you get to watch it play out on the battlefield. Ugh, so good. 

 

I really feel like the game was ahead of its time, and they learned all the wrong lessons from it going into FF XIII. 

 

[Jason]

"quietly"

 

eye twitches

[dualhunter]

I'm still not a big fan of the story but it did make more sense the second time. The first time I only made minimal use of the gambit system but the second time I used it a lot. It would be nice to have one or more pages for alternate gambit setup preferably with an easy toggle (I hated having to turn my steal gambit on for each character and then go back and turn it off for each character once I got the item). One set is fine for most of the time but there are some enemies where you need to make lots of adjustments but then you want to go back to how it was before such as when you need to turn off your healing gambits (or at least adjust the target) and turn on reverse which usually means also turning on lure and bubble gambits.

 

It was nice being able to adjust the game speed (4x speed plus 3 characters with a steal gambit made steeling much faster, though most of the time I'd stick with 2x). The license board is kind of annoying, especially having to carefully plan unlocking quickenings and espers to get the best licenses out of those that are stuck behind a quickening or esper.

 

For really high level enemies their level is meaningless. For most of the game you know to avoid enemies above your level and enemies below your level tend to be easy but for many of the higher level enemies you might be 10-20 levels higher and they can still wipe your party (having 2 parties is nice since the backup party can try to revive everybody as long as it's not one of those annoying hunts where it starts doing OHKOs faster than even gambits can revive everybody, I really hated those and for some of them I had to resort to abusing area boundaries though I suppose reverse might have worked too) at which point they might as well be displaying a random number since it doesn't help you gauge how difficult the enemy is.

 

Overall I have a better opinion of the game from my recent play through of Zodiac Age than I do of the original at launch but I still don't consider it one of the best. It's too bad the remaster still left the characters' faces looking bad.

[CastlevaniaNut18]

It just never looked all that appealing to me. My husband recently finished it and while he liked it, he didn't just fall in love with it and said the story was underwhelming. 

 

For me, FF died after IX, at least the main series did. They've released some competent spinoffs since then.

[Paperclyp]

3 hours ago, Jason said:

"quietly"

 

eye twitches

I'm sorry, but I don't follow. 

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Paperclyp said:

I'm sorry, but I don't follow. 

 

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/tech-news-sites-quietly-rely-word-create-drama-headlines-analysis-reveals/

[Paperclyp]

9 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

It just never looked all that appealing to me. My husband recently finished it and while he liked it, he didn't just fall in love with it and said the story was underwhelming. 

 

For me, FF died after IX, at least the main series did. They've released some competent spinoffs since then.

It was just such an odd game, because they did X and that game did very well (and seems to be beloved by people about 5 years or so younger than me as like one of the best), and they very easily could have made another one of those. Instead, they made such a drastically different game at a time when a Square RPG had some cache' at release. 

 

It just shouldn't exist the way it does, and it shoulda been like XII (AKA awful), but man I really like it. 

[Paperclyp]

2 minutes ago, Jason said:

 

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/tech-news-sites-quietly-rely-word-create-drama-headlines-analysis-reveals/

That's funny. I almost used secretly, which I'm sure is often used as well. I guess I'm so inundated with click bait that it seeped into my subconscious. 

[Remarkableriots]

Final Fantasy XIV is easily the best game in the FF series!

 

[CastlevaniaNut18]

6 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

It was just such an odd game, because they did X and that game did very well (and seems to be beloved by people about 5 years or so younger than me as like one of the best), and they very easily could have made another one of those. Instead, they made such a drastically different game at a time when a Square RPG had some cache' at release. 

 

It just shouldn't exist the way it does, and it shoulda been like XII (AKA awful), but man I really like it. 

You high opinion of X means I really can't take your views seriously when it comes to FF.  

[Paperclyp]

12 minutes ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

You high opinion of X means I really can't take your views seriously when it comes to FF.  

Oh I don't really like X all that much though. I'm saying the game did well with people a little younger than me. 

 

I think it's OK, but it was a big disappointment to me as a fan of the PS1 games primarily. I like the battle system and some of the design, but overall it's not a top FF by any means for me. 

[CastlevaniaNut18]

3 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Oh I don't really like X all that much though. I'm saying the game did well with people a little younger than me. 

 

I think it's OK, but it was a big disappointment to me as a fan of the PS1 games primarily. I like the battle system and some of the design, but overall it's not a top FF by any means for me. 

Ooops, I just realized I misread your post. I read it as "They did X very well."

 

I'm a little sleepy about about to work my third night in a row and 4th out of the last 5.  

[TheLeon]

I've never finished a main FF game, but XII is the closest I've come to doing so.

I think I left off fairly close to the end, but I just completely lost interest in the combat system (and I had lost interest in the story 20+ hours before that). 

[Xbob42]

I really like 12. Certainly more than 10 or 13.

[Mr.Vic20]

Final Fantasy XII is a great game and the last truly good main entry in the series. I hear good things about XIV but I can't endure another  MMO in my life. 

[Remarkableriots]

32 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Final Fantasy XII is a great game and the last truly good main entry in the series. I hear good things about XIV but I can't endure another  MMO in my life. 

Join the D1P Free company!

 

[dualhunter]

If you have issues with X and XII the remasters might raise your opinion of them. I liked X but the post game filler turned me off a completionist approach to FF games and then XII was even worse. The boosters of the remasters (some of them might be PC only) and new strategies for some of X's more annoying minigames made my second play through much more enjoyable. Still not as good as IV-VII & IX but a better experience than when I played them on PS2. The speed boost is especially great for FFXII.

[SaysWho?]

12 hours ago, dualhunter said:

If you have issues with X and XII the remasters might raise your opinion of them. I liked X but the post game filler turned me off a completionist approach to FF games and then XII was even worse. The boosters of the remasters (some of them might be PC only) and new strategies for some of X's more annoying minigames made my second play through much more enjoyable. Still not as good as IV-VII & IX but a better experience than when I played them on PS2. The speed boost is especially great for FFXII.

 

It was soooo good to go through the Dark Aeons and Penance for the first time. It was weird, before search engines became good, to read about those bosses and not actually see them or have them in my game.

 

Went through the Monster Arena and then the Dark Aeons and Penance and had a blast.

[dualhunter]

I went back to Besaid to revisit the cloister and sudden found myself getting murdered by Dark Valefor. I couldn't see myself bothering with the Dark Aeons and Monster Arena without the boosters. It would have taken way too long to get the necessary gear and spheres to prepare for it without the max gil and max items boosters. That was why I stopped playing the original, I had spent a lot of time leveling up in the Omega Ruins and still had a long way to go but for what? Finishing the game was easy at that point since Yuna had her celestial weapon so 1MP Holy and Doublecasted Ultima with Break Damage Limit destroyed everything in the main game so wasting tens if not 100+ hours on optional stuff wasn't worth it. With the boosters I was able to get equipped and maxed out so that the Dark Aeons and Monster Arena took a reasonable amount of time to finish and then I Yojimbo'd Penance.

 

FFX-2 is weird, Yuna and Rikku forget how to do 99,999 damage and the Dark Aeons are wimps compared to FFX (except that it's harder to do high damage and you don't have the better armor that you can create in X).

[SaysWho?]

23 hours ago, dualhunter said:

I went back to Besaid to revisit the cloister and sudden found myself getting murdered by Dark Valefor. I couldn't see myself bothering with the Dark Aeons and Monster Arena without the boosters. It would have taken way too long to get the necessary gear and spheres to prepare for it without the max gil and max items boosters. That was why I stopped playing the original, I had spent a lot of time leveling up in the Omega Ruins and still had a long way to go but for what? Finishing the game was easy at that point since Yuna had her celestial weapon so 1MP Holy and Doublecasted Ultima with Break Damage Limit destroyed everything in the main game so wasting tens if not 100+ hours on optional stuff wasn't worth it. With the boosters I was able to get equipped and maxed out so that the Dark Aeons and Monster Arena took a reasonable amount of time to finish and then I Yojimbo'd Penance.

 

FFX-2 is weird, Yuna and Rikku forget how to do 99,999 damage and the Dark Aeons are wimps compared to FFX (except that it's harder to do high damage and you don't have the better armor that you can create in X).

 

Fortunately, that's why it's optional.  Me, I love going after those mega-bosses and becoming more powerful than my aeons and seeing Rikku become a far superior character than everyone but Wakka and Tidus. But some people are like, "Nah, I'll just do the story and some of the other quests like the Omega Ruins," and I gotta say, that's a really fun quest and challenging in its own right earlier on.

 

I thought discovering Lulu's past, which led to getting the Yojimbo aeon, was a good quest as well since it delved more into her dark past, along with her underrated theme.

[Dodger]

I played XII for all of a couple of hours when it first came out and couldn't stand the battle system, and to me the battle system is the most important part of an RPG. I'll have to check out the remaster and see if the improvements click with me. 

 

X gets a lot of hate for the story and rightfully so, but I loved the combat. Hopefully once the remaster hits Xbox I'll be able to do that damn chocobo race to get Tidus ultimate weapon, because while I did it on the PS2, for some reason I couldn't beat the time on the PS4 remaster. 

 

I'm enjoying the battle system of XIII as well, but goddamn it really is wait 20+ hours for the game to get good.