The most pretentious of the Final Fantasy series. Never before has so much effort been put into a storyline that utterly fails to be memorable at all. This post will not be spoiler tagged, not that the spoilers are interesting anyway.
So, anyway, my experience with Final Fantasy 12 began a little less than three years ago when I first acquired it. I didn't play much, mostly due to personal time restraints that required me to do constructive things like graduate high school. Being the responsible young adult I was, I set aside FF12 for the sake of my education. I don't remember much from my initial play through of the first early portions of the game, which may be why I came back to it later. A few months later, once I had finally left high school, and had a summer free to fill with mindless timewasting while I waited for college classes to start, I turned my attention back to the Playstation 2 sitting in my room, with the Final Fantasy 12 box sitting on top of it.
Thus began Ampersands steady decline into madness.
Before I even begin to discuss the torturous mindfuck that is the combat system, I feel I have to begin with the utterly inane story, which strangely enough for a Final Fantasy game, offers very little in terms of characterization. Every character, from the Androgynous Main Character Vaan, to the scantily clad bunny girl Fran, work very hard to make you care about them, and utterly fail at it.
AMC Vaan was apparently orphaned in the la-- Wait, before I even get to that, there's the whole tutorial mission before the real game starts. Here, you start playing as Vaan's older brother, Reks, a soldier in some army or another attacking an occupying enemy force. You know who would have made an interesting main character? Reks. But you don't get to play as Reks, because he is apparently, but not really, betrayed by his Captain, whom he thinks killed their king. It was actually his Captains evil twin brother, of course, which is an entirely unpredictable and total original idea.
So, Vaan and his brother were orphaned in that war, Reks was apparently injured and brain damaged, and after living in a vegetative state for a while, died. Vaan then went to live with his best friend and the Androgynous Female Main Character, Penelo. Penelo is less interesting than Vaan, which is really saying something. They're little more than street thieves, or so you think, from how they steal. But in actuality, they both apprently have actual jobs helping out at a shop, which just makes the opening scene where Vaan steals something from a guard seem petty and stupid.
Since Final Fantasy 12 takes place in the same universe as Final Fantasy Tactics, it includes all of the races therein. A race of all or mostly female half naked bunnygirls, for example, and the bizzare... Dog... Things. I don't even know. Anyway, the shop that they work at is owned by one named Migelo. This game has voice acting. Every single spoken line delivered by Migelo is unbearable, due to how they decided his races voice should sound, high pitched slobbering, with severe nasal congestive issues. When they try to make him seem witty in one scene where he bribes from gate guards with alcohol to not beat Vaan just sounds embarrasing.
Now, the plot of the story goes... Well... The city state you're in is being occupied by a huge sprawling empire, which is totally original. Basically, your ragtag group of misfits are the only people in the country fit to free it from the Evil Empire's clutches, which again, is totally original. Did I mention one of the characters is a tomboy princess who wears too little armor to adequately protect her breasts, and fights in a miniskirt? Totally. Original.
But that's not really the plot, is it? It's just kind of the basic outline of the story, right? Well, since your Androgynous Main Character and his Not-Girlfriend Penelo are merely accesories to the story that revolves mostly around the Princess and the Not-Traitor Captain, It really starts to feel like it doesn't really matter if you're there or not; the adults could probably drop both Vaan and Penelo off somewhere and continue the adventure with out them at all. To make matters worse, since the game feels like an excersize in World Building, all of the important names and places and things sound completely alien. For example, when you find the friendly enemy prince, his suggestion as to what you should do with the ancient powerful artifact you have is to take to to the Gran Keltias. What is the Gran Keltias, and why should you care? I don't know, because it's never explained. Even after you find him, all you really know is that he's a Magical Old Person. Before it is suggested that you take it to him, he is never mentioned. He comes entirely out of the blue, like an afterthought with no real consequence on the story other than to put another stop on the way from point A to point B.
Some may say that the story would be more sensical if I had played Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Advance. Screw that; a story should be self contained and comprehensible. Why do you think that every single Discworld Novel takes the time to explain that the world is on the back of a giant turtle in the opening chapter? The Author must assume that every book is the first one a person is going to read, because for all he knows, it is.
Basically, the whole game feels like this; a cobbled together effort at worldbuilding that fails to make any sense when strung together.
But all of that can be overlooked for the sake of the gameplay, right? Sure, it could be if not for the fact that the gameplay amounts to little more than the time between you watching CG movies and stoyline sequences, but I digress.
The combat is boring. It's worse than boring. Basically, you program your characters to do what you want them to do in given situations, and then run at an enemy. Their timer bars fill up, and when it's full, they attack. However, there's an option in the game menu system that allows you to speed up or slow down the rate at which these timer bars fill. Since all combat takes place in real time on the map without going into the traditional combat arena, it should be obvious why this is full of exploit fun; if you slow down how fast the meter fills even for the enemies, and the meter must fill every time magic is cast, and your running speed isn't slowed down when you set the speed to low, you can breeze through areas that are far above your level and collect items that you have no business owning at an early level without taking a single hit (here's looking at you Zodiac Spear).
That's really all the combat is, programming the characters to do stuff like cast cure or revive on the fallen, and use ranged attacks on flying creatures. They'll do everything without your input. When you get into combat, you can easily set the controller down and do something else during the sequences that ARE SUPPOSED TO BE EXCITING.
Ohh, you might say, but what about quickenings? Those require split second reflexes to pull off and a lot of user input. While this is true, it overlooks something important, which is that there is absolutely no reason to ever use them. They don't actually do much more damage in the time it takes to use them effectively than you could do just by attacking. Sometimes, they do less. But it does lead into another point I want to make. All the characters are apparently capable of unleashing these huge, massive, earth shattering metaphysical powers, some of which look like they could easily level entire cities, entire combinations of them, and no one ever mentions it. When you get your first one for Vaan, around the time he is basically a level 2 street urchin that can just manage to kill a wolf, he can somehow unleash a massive pillar of fire, and this isn't strange.
Remember in Final Fantasy Six, when Edgar and Locke first see Terra use magic in combat, and the combat pauses while they totally flip out at how awesome it is? Yeah. That was a good game.
I really can't get over how nonsensical Quickenings are. Not only are they relatively weak, compared to just buying a slightly better weapon, but even after you pull off a massive combination, there's a possibility that one of the elements used in it happens to be the kind that the enemy is either immune to or healed by, negating a huge amount of the potential damage. Oh, and it gets worse. All these levels you are gaining, and weapons you are obtaining, are completely irrevelant, because the damage dealt by guns, just like in real life, is not dependant on the skill of the user. By the way, they never miss. By the way, they ignore armor. It is concieveable that you could beat the game at an extremely low level if you manage to get the best guns in the game. And yes, this has been done.
You can bend the universe to your will and create huge combinations of massive earth shattering magical attacks, but in the end, you end up doing far more damage if you just grab a damn gun.
And in the end, it turns out that the bad guy isn't -really- evil, he's just being controlled by... A monster. Just, a monster. Totally. Original.
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Topic: In which I complain about Final Fantasy 12. (Read 6655 times)