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Final Fantasy 12 is turning out to be the longest game in the series ever. As far as I remember, I finished most of the FF games in about sixty hours of gameplay, with a reasonable amount of time devoted to optional side quests rather than just advancing through the plot. But this one is immense - the counter on our save file crept over one hundred hours on Sunday. (Clearly this is far too much, as I then fell asleep and had a confused dream about going on a side quest to gain the ability to undelete content items.) The only game that I ever saw actually claim to have over 100 hours of gameplay was The Granstream Saga, and that was perhaps the most overoptimistic guess ever - I think you could easily play it all the way through four times in that amount of time, including all the optional bits that anyone has ever discovered in it.
Another unique feature of the twelfth of the increasingly inaccurately-titled series is that I do not understand what's going on in the plot at all. Usually the games are about saving the world from certain destruction through a meteor landing, or time compression (whatever that is), or something called Necron that no one had heard of until the last five minutes of the game. But this time they seem to have gone for what almost seems like a fantasy version of a political thriller, with the storyline centering around Nethicite stones and their use as fuel and weapons. There are quite a lot of side quests to distract from that, too - so far, one of the most unusual has been the one to gain the ability to talk to cockatrices. Who, naturally, speak cockney. It's not quite the impenetrable standard stream of gibberish that I use when Americans ask me to say something British ("Cor cup a love, darlin', apples and pears - jellied eels, guv'nor, and it ain't 'alf hot mum") but it's close.
Quite a large amount of our time at the moment is being spent on finding and battering several special "Mark" enemies for bonus items. This is something of an extension of an idea from older Final Fantasy games - by tradition, they've always had two sort of tiers to them. The normal route through the game can be played through at your own pace and has a difficult but reasonably possible final boss (with the exception of FF8 with Ultimecia's five hundred different forms). There's also always another secret boss that's a bit of a cruel joke, but gives you something fantastic like the best weapon in the game if you ever manage to gather enough levels and expensive invulnerability items to beat it. This is slightly insulting as said weapon would always have been useful before you fought said impossible boss in the first place, but the thought is there. The mark hunts in FF12 have been getting steadily more difficult, with the highlights so far being something with one and a half million health points, and a hunt called "Battle on the Big Bridge" that is fantastic in that it's one large FF in-joke. I thought that those were difficult, but I've just skipped ahead to look at the inevitable mega-boss at the end of it all...
As it happens, Yiazmat has fifty million points of health. To put that in perspective, our characters have about four thousand each, and do about that amount of damage per hit. Apparently two hours is considered an exceptionally fast time in which to beat him, with five hours being the usual figure. When faced with figures like that, it does seem that there are better things to do in the evenings.
The state of our characters at the moment is quite unusual in itself, actually, in that usually by this point in an FF game you'd have upgraded at least someone to be at 9,999 health and damage (particularly in FF8 where you could abuse the system to the extent that this was virtually certain for all characters). The Licence Board system isn't anywhere near as abusable, but unfortunately it's nowhere near as flexible either. The Sphere Grid from FFX was large enough to make your characters different from each other as they learned separate abilities, but putting all six characters on the same board in FF12 means that there's no incentive to specialize in one area, and all your characters become virtually the same apart from the weapons that they use. Apparently this has been fixed in the International version with the introduction of alternate licence boards for different characters, but I think it's strangely the most inflexible system yet even without predefined character classes.
We had a look at the only released preview video for Final Fantasy XIII as well, and it looks like after going for a firm "fantasy" setting in FF9 they're drifting back to a science fiction setting again. (The twelfth game is something of a crossover, looking quite a lot like The Fifth Element in places). The best bit is the fact that Square have announced that there are in fact going to be three different games with the "Final Fantasy XIII" title - one "main" game, something by the makers of Kingdom Hearts and another mobile version that I don't know much about. Combined with the decision to renumber the games in the series depending on the country in which they were released, the confusion is almost perfect.
Another unique feature of the twelfth of the increasingly inaccurately-titled series is that I do not understand what's going on in the plot at all. Usually the games are about saving the world from certain destruction through a meteor landing, or time compression (whatever that is), or something called Necron that no one had heard of until the last five minutes of the game. But this time they seem to have gone for what almost seems like a fantasy version of a political thriller, with the storyline centering around Nethicite stones and their use as fuel and weapons. There are quite a lot of side quests to distract from that, too - so far, one of the most unusual has been the one to gain the ability to talk to cockatrices. Who, naturally, speak cockney. It's not quite the impenetrable standard stream of gibberish that I use when Americans ask me to say something British ("Cor cup a love, darlin', apples and pears - jellied eels, guv'nor, and it ain't 'alf hot mum") but it's close.
Quite a large amount of our time at the moment is being spent on finding and battering several special "Mark" enemies for bonus items. This is something of an extension of an idea from older Final Fantasy games - by tradition, they've always had two sort of tiers to them. The normal route through the game can be played through at your own pace and has a difficult but reasonably possible final boss (with the exception of FF8 with Ultimecia's five hundred different forms). There's also always another secret boss that's a bit of a cruel joke, but gives you something fantastic like the best weapon in the game if you ever manage to gather enough levels and expensive invulnerability items to beat it. This is slightly insulting as said weapon would always have been useful before you fought said impossible boss in the first place, but the thought is there. The mark hunts in FF12 have been getting steadily more difficult, with the highlights so far being something with one and a half million health points, and a hunt called "Battle on the Big Bridge" that is fantastic in that it's one large FF in-joke. I thought that those were difficult, but I've just skipped ahead to look at the inevitable mega-boss at the end of it all...
As it happens, Yiazmat has fifty million points of health. To put that in perspective, our characters have about four thousand each, and do about that amount of damage per hit. Apparently two hours is considered an exceptionally fast time in which to beat him, with five hours being the usual figure. When faced with figures like that, it does seem that there are better things to do in the evenings.
The state of our characters at the moment is quite unusual in itself, actually, in that usually by this point in an FF game you'd have upgraded at least someone to be at 9,999 health and damage (particularly in FF8 where you could abuse the system to the extent that this was virtually certain for all characters). The Licence Board system isn't anywhere near as abusable, but unfortunately it's nowhere near as flexible either. The Sphere Grid from FFX was large enough to make your characters different from each other as they learned separate abilities, but putting all six characters on the same board in FF12 means that there's no incentive to specialize in one area, and all your characters become virtually the same apart from the weapons that they use. Apparently this has been fixed in the International version with the introduction of alternate licence boards for different characters, but I think it's strangely the most inflexible system yet even without predefined character classes.
We had a look at the only released preview video for Final Fantasy XIII as well, and it looks like after going for a firm "fantasy" setting in FF9 they're drifting back to a science fiction setting again. (The twelfth game is something of a crossover, looking quite a lot like The Fifth Element in places). The best bit is the fact that Square have announced that there are in fact going to be three different games with the "Final Fantasy XIII" title - one "main" game, something by the makers of Kingdom Hearts and another mobile version that I don't know much about. Combined with the decision to renumber the games in the series depending on the country in which they were released, the confusion is almost perfect.
