Fainaru fantajî XII
Aug. 2nd, 2007 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnLast weekend, after the PS2 not getting much use after we completed Kingdom Hearts 2 last month, Whitney and I picked up a couple of new games. We've decided that Japanese-style RPGs/adventures are our preferred area but weren't quite sure what we would get out of the local Gamestop - the purchase that I wasn't expecting when we went in was Resident Evil 4 (or, as is bizarrely written on the box, 4 Resident Evil). I've never played a Resident Evil game before,which admittedly didn't stop me being part of the smug Silent Hill superiority movement a few years ago, but I had heard good things about this one from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thebluelight1 and pami_zee. However, that one's been put aside for the moment, because for $25 we also found a second-hand copy of XII Final Fantasy.
Final Fantasy 12 is the thirteenth, tenth or fifth game in the Final Fantasy series depending on what part of the world you were born in, and much was made of the changes to the series this time around. The most significant one is that random battles have been done away with entirely, instead allowing you to see enemies as they approach your party and fight them or bravely run away as you please. This idea was used by Square much earlier in Chrono Trigger on the SNES, and I'm surprised that it took so long to emerge in their most recognizable series. Fights don't take place on a separate screen any more - instead, when you approach an enemy you can attack them directly.
Well, actually you can't - not quite. The battle system remains turn-based rather than directly involving the player like in Kingdom Hearts, so instead of running up to an enemy and walloping them then running away before they can attack back, you have to approach and stand around for a while while your bar fills up, then attack when you have the chance. This is again similar to Chrono Trigger with its "ATB2" system that never showed up again in any other game. The clash of styles was a pretty major sticking point for me when I first played the game, but over the first hour or so, I slowly began to realize how much sense it made.
FFX's fights were entirely turn-based, which ironically sped up the whole process - rather than waiting for a time bar to fill as in all other Final Fantasies (back to 4, at least) before that, the system instantly fast-forwarded to the next character that would get a turn and waited for player input. Especially compared to the sluggishness of FF9's system, this was incredible - it gave you time to flip through menus without worrying about accidentally letting the opponents get a turn in before you had the chance, and the annoying tendency of FF9 to perform actions several "turns" after you gave them out was entirely eliminated. This new one is a combination of the two systems - it's back to waiting for bars to fill before you can do anything, but you can pause the action at any time and decide what your next actions are going to be. And like FFX, the type of action you're performing affects the speed with which you can carry it out as well as the recovery time afterwards.
The real advantage, though, is that because of the lack of switching back and forward between screens, you feel like you're making far more progress throughout the game world rather than taking a few steps only for the screen to explode and another random battle to come up. FFX sped up the existing system, but FFXII put it back and tried a different angle of speeding it up, which works too. Although it's still weird seeing your characters wait around getting beaten up before they take the opportinity to take a swing themselves.
The Final Fantasy games are only very loosely connected together, in that a couple of species keep reappearing and there's always somebody called Cid. (Two supporting characters from Star Wars called Biggs and Wedge also usually make an appearance, but this happens in most Square games). Apart from this and a couple of in-jokes in FF9, nothing connects them at all - even the game system is very different between them. FFX was probably the most radical step away from typical RPG concepts, removing the entire concept of "levels" and replacing it with the terrifying-looking but actually simple to use Sphere Grid, which acted slightly like a board game in that you earned moves by getting experience and then moved your counter a certain number of spaces to cover new abilities. The twelfth game does something similar but relies on area instead of distance (I promise you, this all makes sense if you've played the game). Before being able to use items, abilities or spells (irritatingly called "Technicks" and "Magicks" in-game) you have to learn how to use them by spending acquired "licence points" to spread out the area that you cover on a chequered board. Different areas open up different classes of weapons, accessories, and so on. With the return of levelling, licence and experience points have been separated, and on the whole the system works well, though it's difficult to get your head round at first when you don't remember that unlocking a certain ability doesn't instantly give you it, and you have to actually acquire the ability separately.
Strangely enough, the "area instead of distance" idea also applies to the game world itself. In previous games in the series (but most noticeably in FF9 and FF10), the gameplay swung very clearly between two modes - towns where you had a safe place to rest and buy up equipment, and dungeons that you had to get through to reach the next safe place. This time, as far as we've played, you're given one big central city and a massive amount of land around it to wander about as you like. To keep things interesting, the amount you can actually do has been increased from just battering things - there are a lot of side quests and rewards to discover, and at the moment we've only really been taking part in the actual storyline sections when we happened to come across them, instead happily wandering the countryside maiming small animals and grabbing their loot.
In that way, the game is almost reminiscent of Diablo, where you venture out to try and complete quests that you've heard about in the town or just to increase your profits (but with more gameplay than just clicking on people). And like in that game, in another unexpected but logical change, very few enemies drop money now - instead, most of them leave behind items that can be taken back to the town and sold to make a profit. It adds an extra step to the process, but it makes a lot more sense than getting 100 Gil off a wolf, cockatrice or gelatinous blob. They don't even have pockets.
Even the acting is of a better quality than before, though if you've played FFX or X-2, you'll know that this isn't exactly an astounding achievement. The trouble with FFX was that most of the voice artists were just given a list of lines without any indication of context, speed or tone, and the resultant lines were cut up and edited back together by an overworked sound team - I'd really like to know who decided that that would be a remotely good idea. It's a mystery to me why other animation has been able to get spoken dialogue right since the 1950s but games are still struggling with it so badly. Even given the difficulty of lip-synching two entirely different languages convincingly, some of the lines from that game ("That's 'Macalania'." "AAAAIIIIYYY!") have achieved rightful infamy. I think that after Kingdom Hearts, Square are managing to scrape together a few actors that people have actually heard of now, which always helps.
But by far the greatest improvement over FFX is the opening sequence. On startup, the tenth game confronted you with the most rubbish title screen ever, looking like it was slapped together by Derek Riggs after coming home one night with eight pints in him. It looks almost as if something was meant to go in that blank bar across the screen but they forgot to change it before release. (That dodgy image was stolen from someone else, it was the only one I could find as I imagine most everyone else thought it too ugly to show.) But FF12 really shows off the Square graphics people's incredible ability with computer-generated cinematics. And that music! Like most things popular on the Internet, Nobuo Uematsu (who I assume originally composed it) does suffer from a bit of a bad image because of his rabid fanboys, but on the whole I think he's severely underrated as just being a "game musician" - that theme at the end easily rivals the themes to Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
We're nine hours in now. Just another hundred or so to go.
thebluelight1 and pami_zee. However, that one's been put aside for the moment, because for $25 we also found a second-hand copy of XII Final Fantasy.Final Fantasy 12 is the thirteenth, tenth or fifth game in the Final Fantasy series depending on what part of the world you were born in, and much was made of the changes to the series this time around. The most significant one is that random battles have been done away with entirely, instead allowing you to see enemies as they approach your party and fight them or bravely run away as you please. This idea was used by Square much earlier in Chrono Trigger on the SNES, and I'm surprised that it took so long to emerge in their most recognizable series. Fights don't take place on a separate screen any more - instead, when you approach an enemy you can attack them directly.
Well, actually you can't - not quite. The battle system remains turn-based rather than directly involving the player like in Kingdom Hearts, so instead of running up to an enemy and walloping them then running away before they can attack back, you have to approach and stand around for a while while your bar fills up, then attack when you have the chance. This is again similar to Chrono Trigger with its "ATB2" system that never showed up again in any other game. The clash of styles was a pretty major sticking point for me when I first played the game, but over the first hour or so, I slowly began to realize how much sense it made.
FFX's fights were entirely turn-based, which ironically sped up the whole process - rather than waiting for a time bar to fill as in all other Final Fantasies (back to 4, at least) before that, the system instantly fast-forwarded to the next character that would get a turn and waited for player input. Especially compared to the sluggishness of FF9's system, this was incredible - it gave you time to flip through menus without worrying about accidentally letting the opponents get a turn in before you had the chance, and the annoying tendency of FF9 to perform actions several "turns" after you gave them out was entirely eliminated. This new one is a combination of the two systems - it's back to waiting for bars to fill before you can do anything, but you can pause the action at any time and decide what your next actions are going to be. And like FFX, the type of action you're performing affects the speed with which you can carry it out as well as the recovery time afterwards.
The real advantage, though, is that because of the lack of switching back and forward between screens, you feel like you're making far more progress throughout the game world rather than taking a few steps only for the screen to explode and another random battle to come up. FFX sped up the existing system, but FFXII put it back and tried a different angle of speeding it up, which works too. Although it's still weird seeing your characters wait around getting beaten up before they take the opportinity to take a swing themselves.
The Final Fantasy games are only very loosely connected together, in that a couple of species keep reappearing and there's always somebody called Cid. (Two supporting characters from Star Wars called Biggs and Wedge also usually make an appearance, but this happens in most Square games). Apart from this and a couple of in-jokes in FF9, nothing connects them at all - even the game system is very different between them. FFX was probably the most radical step away from typical RPG concepts, removing the entire concept of "levels" and replacing it with the terrifying-looking but actually simple to use Sphere Grid, which acted slightly like a board game in that you earned moves by getting experience and then moved your counter a certain number of spaces to cover new abilities. The twelfth game does something similar but relies on area instead of distance (I promise you, this all makes sense if you've played the game). Before being able to use items, abilities or spells (irritatingly called "Technicks" and "Magicks" in-game) you have to learn how to use them by spending acquired "licence points" to spread out the area that you cover on a chequered board. Different areas open up different classes of weapons, accessories, and so on. With the return of levelling, licence and experience points have been separated, and on the whole the system works well, though it's difficult to get your head round at first when you don't remember that unlocking a certain ability doesn't instantly give you it, and you have to actually acquire the ability separately.
Strangely enough, the "area instead of distance" idea also applies to the game world itself. In previous games in the series (but most noticeably in FF9 and FF10), the gameplay swung very clearly between two modes - towns where you had a safe place to rest and buy up equipment, and dungeons that you had to get through to reach the next safe place. This time, as far as we've played, you're given one big central city and a massive amount of land around it to wander about as you like. To keep things interesting, the amount you can actually do has been increased from just battering things - there are a lot of side quests and rewards to discover, and at the moment we've only really been taking part in the actual storyline sections when we happened to come across them, instead happily wandering the countryside maiming small animals and grabbing their loot.
In that way, the game is almost reminiscent of Diablo, where you venture out to try and complete quests that you've heard about in the town or just to increase your profits (but with more gameplay than just clicking on people). And like in that game, in another unexpected but logical change, very few enemies drop money now - instead, most of them leave behind items that can be taken back to the town and sold to make a profit. It adds an extra step to the process, but it makes a lot more sense than getting 100 Gil off a wolf, cockatrice or gelatinous blob. They don't even have pockets.
Even the acting is of a better quality than before, though if you've played FFX or X-2, you'll know that this isn't exactly an astounding achievement. The trouble with FFX was that most of the voice artists were just given a list of lines without any indication of context, speed or tone, and the resultant lines were cut up and edited back together by an overworked sound team - I'd really like to know who decided that that would be a remotely good idea. It's a mystery to me why other animation has been able to get spoken dialogue right since the 1950s but games are still struggling with it so badly. Even given the difficulty of lip-synching two entirely different languages convincingly, some of the lines from that game ("That's 'Macalania'." "AAAAIIIIYYY!") have achieved rightful infamy. I think that after Kingdom Hearts, Square are managing to scrape together a few actors that people have actually heard of now, which always helps.
But by far the greatest improvement over FFX is the opening sequence. On startup, the tenth game confronted you with the most rubbish title screen ever, looking like it was slapped together by Derek Riggs after coming home one night with eight pints in him. It looks almost as if something was meant to go in that blank bar across the screen but they forgot to change it before release. (That dodgy image was stolen from someone else, it was the only one I could find as I imagine most everyone else thought it too ugly to show.) But FF12 really shows off the Square graphics people's incredible ability with computer-generated cinematics. And that music! Like most things popular on the Internet, Nobuo Uematsu (who I assume originally composed it) does suffer from a bit of a bad image because of his rabid fanboys, but on the whole I think he's severely underrated as just being a "game musician" - that theme at the end easily rivals the themes to Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
We're nine hours in now. Just another hundred or so to go.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-08-02 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 02:55 pm (UTC)I've started playing Diablo 2 twice and got about halfway through each time before being distracted by something else somehow - my brother used to be obsessed with it, though, and had several high-level characters on servers across the world.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 02:49 pm (UTC)One of the sub-series you might be forgetting about (due to only playing the introduction of one of them, to be fair) is Final Fantasy Tactics and its later (and actually European-released) counterpart Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - which is a pity, because it actually has a lot to do with FFXII - they're both set in the same world, Ivalice, and apart from just having the same races, various locations common in the two games can be found - the Giza Plains, I remember, are encountered quite early in both. Also, the head of Clan Centurio is Montblanc, the moogle who invites you into his clan in FFTA.
By the way, I've just remembered - isn't the US version of FFX supposed to be worse due to Square deciding "Right, we're fed up of these fans pestering us for the release - we're not finished, but take the bloody thing anyway, we'll finish it for the Europeans who are showing some patience" and releasing it in America?
no subject
Date: 2007-08-03 02:59 pm (UTC)Interesting that there are so many links between FFT and FF12 - that must be the most close link between any two in the series apart from FFX2.
I remember something being strange about the American version compared to the European one, but I thought that it was just a direct port of the Japanese version and the European one then had the "special edition" of the Japanese version, which was later released as FFX International. It's as if they're trying to confuse people.
I still can't stand Blitzball.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-04 07:37 pm (UTC)Resident Evil 1 is more scary, to the point that Calum was screaming when he saw a dog. Oh, and we're playing the remake. The first one looks too awful... type Resident Evil intro into YouTube, I don't know how to link on this. The dog looks like something from Red Dwarf.