Game Review: FFXII

[asterroc]

Nearly 2 years and more than 132 hours later, I've beaten Final Fantasy XII. I did *not* complete all the side quests; I got quite far in them, but I was getting bored of doing them so decided to advance the plot and next thing I knew, I was done. Well, not really - what I thought was going to be the last quest turned out to not be, it was the second-to-last, strangely. I think I'd lost track a little of the plot, or I might've known. It was refreshing that the male and female leads did not fall in love and marry and live happily ever after.

I'd say the story is a little less intriguing than my favorite, FF8, and I miss the Junctioning and GF system, but I like the Gambits a lot, takes away a lot of the micromanaging that I am not a fan of. The License system is intriguing, but it becomes moot after you've done a bunch of leveling towards the end of the game. I'm glad I didn't have to dick around with any stupid card games; the Hunts are a nice set of sidequests that net you good items and experience. There were a few Magics I never found in the whole game, and should I play it through again I will attempt to find them. Or I might just pick up from the last save I had and get the remaining Hunts and look for those Magics - the structure of the Hunts makes it so that (as far as I can tell) none of them ever become unavailable, so I don't think I "missed" any Hunts. I kept expecting some sort of mini-game of flying the Strahl, but there wasn't one. I found in the end that the best combination of character roles was a tank who also did stealing, a defensive spellcaster, and an offensive spellcaster who also did some other technics in boss battles. Losing the encounter system and being able to change weapons mid-fight was great.

If you have a short attention span, do NOT play this game. If you like RPGs where you get soooooooo many hours of gameplay for your buck, then do.

Comments

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I've only played through a few of the FF's; I tried 7 but didn't complete it. The games are not actually related to each other in terms of storylines, so it doesn't matter which you start with. Gameplay is similar in all of them, but not identical, and it teaches you throughout the game how to play it so don't worry about never having played one before.

As for the graphics, all of them have cutscenes with AMAZING graphics. FF12 appears to be the first where the in-game graphics are nearly as good as the cutscenes.

And regarding leveling, I personally like to do a moderate amount of it - in FF12 the Hunts are a built-in mechanism that lets you level while doing sidequests. In many of the other games, as you level the creeps in encounters also level, so you can only get so much advantage from it. Bosses do not level as far as I can tell though, so leveling does help with that. There exist guides to beating the various FF's at as low a level as possible though, sometimes even w/o leveling at all.

If you get stuck, GameFAQs has good walkthroughs and other guides.