November 15, 2006
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XII
The great series continues. If only a person could spend every waking moment immersed in experiences like these.
The introductory sequences are the most impressive yet I think. The game gives you an immediate sense that you are about to be ensconced in a story that is going to be absolutely huge and yet very character driven. The plot is also quite darker this time around than a number of the other entries in the series. The Tactics influence is clear.
Everyone’s lauding over the combat but really I don’t get the praise. It’s basically an adaptation of an mmorpg combat style to a traditional rpg. The influence of XI is clear here. Though I think XI would have been a better game if the combat system were more like this one.
Licenses are kinda stupid but who cares. All ability systems are basically the same. This one is a mix between the sphere grid and an ability point system.
The game has annoyed me already with one simple thing. At the very beginning the story drops you into this gigantic city and you have free reign to explore it and lots of people to talk to. Only one problem. There’s no save spot to be found! In fact the first place where you are likely to find a save spot entails you getting locked out of the city before you can reach it! This is the classic bad placement of save spot problem which I thought I’d seen the last of. Xenosaga II was one of the worst but X was, I thought, really good with putting the save spots where you’d need them.
Ideally we need to start to move away from the archaic concept of the “save spot”. Minimally we could go to a save anywhere system like the Lunar games or an auto save system like most PC games have where whereever you stop playing that’s where you save. Both of those systems have potential problems with you getting “stuck” because you didn’t save at the right time so you should combine it with an automatic recovery system like your computer snapshots. Basically you should be able to set any point in the game as a place where you can go back to and restart playing from that point whenever you’d like and the game should automatically set recovery points after key plot points or at the entry point into big towns or dungeons or other milestone points. Then you don’t have to keep a bunch of save files on your memory card or hard drive sucking up space and causing great confusion as you try to remember which save files are safe to overwrite, which one you or a sibling or friend were playing and whatnot. It’s altogether the obvious system and I have wanted it for ten years. Hopefully the technology will soon catch up and make it easy enough to do that someone will bother to try.
Anyway, XII is so far shaping up to be an extraordinary game.
