January 14, 2007
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grrr
I hate Final Fantasy XII!!
OK, that’s not true. I don’t hate it, but it drives me mad. I haven’t
completed the game yet, in fact I’m probably somewhere around the
middle of the game having not yet even gotten the -ga attack spells
yet. Probably the bulk of the story still lies ahead of me so I can’t
say whether it will be good or bad or entertaining or boring. I can say
that I like the entire primary cast and I thought the beginning part of
the story was pretty darn good and of course the cut scenes are
beautiful.The problem is, I’ve only made it that far and yet… I have over 80
hours of play time! I’m sure there are players out there who are
laughing at this who have cleared the game in thirty hours flat with
utter ease but for me the game seems to be just taking *forever*. It
drags on and on, fight after fight, boss after boss endlessly. It’s
insanity!And you know an several hundred hour game doesn’t really bother me. I
can live with such long playtimes provides I remain engaged throughout.
Ideally each time I sit down to play I should get some part of the
story revealed to me thus fortifying me enough to await my next play
sessions which may be days or even weeks later depending on my schedule.Not so with Final Fantasy XII. You see in this game I’ll get through
an interesting story scene that intrigues me and then I’ll save and
pick up the game the next day eager to find out what happens next.
There’s only one problem. To get to the next plot sequence you have to
travel through the forest of despair, over the burning desert, through
the endless plains, across the dark mountains, through the ancient
ruins, across the swamplands, cross the river, crawl underneath the
dark caverns, sneak past the uber monsters and defeat the boss, and the
other boss, and the other boss, and so on. And you do this all on foot
killing hordes of increasingly powerful aggressive monsters the entire
time. I’m only exaggerating a little bit. I’m spent several lengthy
sessions just traveling from one place to another in this game without
getting any more than a ten second cut scene to hold me over in terms
of character development or story. Worse, when you arrive there might
not be any story immediately available. You may have to talk to
hundreds of people in a city looking for the person who gives you the
information you need to advance the plot. ugh!It’s just so very annoying. This is a world where technology and magic
are supposed to be pretty advanced. We see hover bikes and air ships
all over the place, why are we walking everywhere like a bunch of bone
heads? I don’t get it. They try to justify it in story but you know
what, this is a game! The writers invent the story. They could have
just as easily made interesting stuff happen if we are caught trying to
smuggle ourselves in on an air ship or a boat. Indeed such an approach
would require th writers to write *more* story even if it is only the
tail of how the characters escaped the dungeon or managed to disguise
themselves and not be uncovered during the air ship ride. Character
development could have been interspersed throughout these episodes.But no. We walk and walk and walk. You can hire a chocobo sure but
they’ll charge you an arm and a leg and the chocobo will get tired
(Curse you Final Fantasy XI influence!) and leave you probably
somewhere where you can barely survive because you didn’t fight your
way there honestly gaining levels the entire way.The worse part is the battles through these area’s aren’t nail bitingly
difficult. My group can pretty easily wipe out three or four monsters
ten or so levels higher than us (lure-tanking is unstoppable!). I am
almost never in fear for my group’s life. In worse case you can pretty
easily run from everything though it gals me to do so. If anything I’m
more afraid for my group’s bank account. Because when things get more
challenging or if I mismanage my resources or wander into an area where
the monsters are significantly higher level than my characters, it
mostly just means I’ll have to use more items to defeat them. More
phoenix downs and high potions. Maybe even ethers if I’m too lazy to
run around back and forth and/or use the charge ability over and over
again to recharge my MP. And all of that gets expensive. Not to
mention spells and abilities and gambits and armor and weapons and
accessories all cost significant amounts of money. Sometimes you need
to buy particular accessories and/or armor to be able to deal with
particular groups of monsters and bosses efficiently even if you don’t
need those items throughout the rest of the game. Virtually every
treasure in the game is random and I have pretty much no luck
whatsoever with opening a chest with a item that is actually useful to
me so everything pretty much ends up being up to me to buy. Also since
I try to keep all six of my characters well equipped and the same level
since I like them all, I end up pretty much broke most of the game.Provided I am the appropriate level with the appropriate equipment to
go through an area, it’s pretty much just tedious boredom. I just set
my characters gambits and my characters do all of the work. I only need
to move the analog stick I rarely have to press a button. Worst case is
I run into something like an elemental and have to run for it, or I
just mismanage my mp and have to stop for a tedious mp recharging
session. Mostly it’s just on and on tedious fighting. No challenge,
just fighting.Now there are times when I find I am not really the appropriate level
or have the right level of equipment for the place I go. I can then
either charge forward, which I usually do, or I can go grind. Charging
forward just means I have to use a lot of items and battles take
significantly longer since my weapons don’t deal all that much damage.
Still there’s little risk of death and I still rarely have to intervene
with manual control. It just takes longer.But grinding is no better (If I wanted to grind I’d just play an
mmorpg!). You have two choices. You can find somewhere where monsters
are about your level and give you a good amount of experience and start
chaining them (so you get enough items to be able to afford better
armor and weapons) or you can just go about trying to complete the
optional quests and bosses during the course of which if you fight
steadily the entire time you are likely to gain some levels. I’ve
done both. During most of the early game I completed pretty much every
hunt close to as soon as I could get them and doing most when I had
optional characters on my team such as Larsa. Now’a'days I’m more
lazy and just grind. Now the hunts unlike most of the normal game do
get challenging and by challenging again I mean expensive. I have
gotten wiped out by a few hunts and needed to readjust my strategy a
few times until I figured out what defeated them, but most hunts I
just end up using a lot of items (which is why I did them with Larsa on
my party whenever I could, he saves you so many items!). The hunts I
think are kinda neat optional content, I just wish there weren’t times
where I feel obligated to do optional content in order to keep my
characters at a level where they can efficiently clear the areas
required to advance the story. I never minded much the classic Final
Fantasy way of putting much of the optional content at the end of the
game just before the last dungeon but Final Fantasy XII scatters
interesting challenges throughout instead. This isn’t a bad thing in
and of itself. If anything I think it’s the right way to do things. I
just think when it is combined with the endless storyless fighting to
get from one plot point to another and the feeling of being broke all
the time that I find no particular joy in succeeding in these
challenges. The rewards you get for most are not even particularly
exciting. Some are more useful later down the line as they help unlock
powerful bazaar goods but who cares about that when I’m trying to
advance the plot right now?Recently I’ve just gotten tired of the endless journeying and decided
that I’m just going to make my characters so powerful that they can
kill everything in one or two hits thus making the journey from one
story plot point to another as quick as possible. To do this I turned
to the Power Leveling FAQ on gamefaqs for guidance. I’d be lying if I
said that I hadn’t been using any of the faqs earlier. The game almost
seems to be designed to force you into using faqs if you want to go
through the game efficiently. For example, weapons and armor don’t
tell you all of their effects when you are buying them. You won’t see
how much mp you’ll go up until you’ve already wasted your had earned
gil. That’s idiotic. Further, he license board system means that if you
want to progress through to the ability to use a particular piece of
equipment or ability as efficiently as possible you need to look at a
FAQ that shows you what everything is. The board itself hints pretty
well at what direction you should go in, but that doesn’t mean you
can’t waste significant LP points going along a more expensive path
foolishly. Fortunately I’ve always had far more LP than I even no what
to do with in this game so that part hasn’t bothered me much.The randomness of the treasure chests means that if you want to get
decent items from an area you have to use a FAQ in order to find out
what chests you should restart your game multiple times over in order
to ensure that you get a good item. I haven’t done this really until I
started reading the power leveling FAQ but again its an area where FAQ
reading will be to your advantage. In order to figure out where exactly
you are going and not waste time exploring these massive terrains FAQs
also provide great utility to you as well by providing better
directions than you get in story and/or actual full maps meaning you
don’t have to waste money to buy it or fight your way to the locations
where the maps can be found.Not all merchants sell the same goods, so FAQs can provide an advantage
by letting you know where at each point in the story the best equipment
can be bought. For example early on you can get a signfiicant
equipment boos by going to Nalbina even though story-wise there’s no
reason to go there at this point.Last but not least, because of the idiotic nature of the bazaar goods
system, faqs are almost required to prevent you from inefficiently
selling items and hence losing out on the best equipment in the game.
There are no hints as to what recipes unlock what equipment for the
most part and the nature of the system is that if there is a recipe
that requires you to sell 2 of X and another recipe that requires you
to sell 3 of X, if you sell 10 of X today, you’ll unlock the 3 of X
recipe but not the 2 of X if you are missing other components for the 2
of X recipe. If you acquire and sell those other components of the 2 of
X recipe you’re still screwed until you get 2 more of X and sell those
as well. Why? Beats me. That’s just how the mindless system works. So
yeah to earn money you sell what monsters drop but if you don’t use the
faqs you’ll either lose out on money or you’ll miss out on all of the
potential bazaar goods you could unlock. Meaning again, huge advantage
to the players who use the FAQs over the players who try to play
through the game honestly. Also why on earth are some loot used for
other things and others just sold for profit? If you’re going to have a
distinction between items and loot why not actually make it a
meaningful distinction? Teleport stones and Gysahl greens should be
items *not* loot!And when reading the Power Leveling FAQ I discovered the crowning jewel
of folly in this game. You see the primary tip of the guide is
essentially the get a mighty weapon called the Zodiac Spear
ridiculously early and then breeze through the game one hitting
creatures left and right. Awesome right? Well I actually feel it’s
pretty idiotic to make a weapon that powerful available so early in the
game no matter how challenging the method to acquire it is (in this
case you just have to run through areas where the monsters are way
stronger than you which is lot easier than it sounds actually). But
anyway that’s not the real stupid part. You see the stupid part is
that the way you get this mighty spear is to open a chest that is
guaranteed to have it…. unless you opened any of a number of specific
other chests that appear earlier in the game. If you open any of these
“special” chests the Zodiac Spear just won’t appear for you. Why? Beats
me. It just doesn’t. No there’s no riddle or hint or clue in game to
tell you not to open these chests. There no rational reason you
wouldn’t open these chests *unless* you’d read a faq that told you not
to do so. Again the game pushes you into the hands of the FAQ and
Strategy Guide writers. Just as bad is the fact that many of these
*special* chests appear really early in the game so that even if you do
pick up a faq half way through you’re likely to be screwed. The game
basically rewards you for playing irrationally by giving you one of if
not the best weapon in the game. Why on earth would they make the game
work that way? There is I hear one other way to get the spear a chest
with like a one in a thousand chance of existing and having it in it.
ugh! I definitely feel that final fantasy X did a much better job with
their method of providing players with the best weapons in the game.
XII uses primarily random chests and bazaar good recipes and occasional
rare steals all of which to me is idiotic.Fortunately the power leveling faq did provide enough other tips to
improve the speed at which I can go through the game and alleviate my
boredom. I went and grabbed a bunch of death bringer swords plus some
dragon armor, and I bazaar-ed my way to a nice axe, and stole my way to
relative wealth from the Bomb King and I’m grinding on chumpy skeletons
to increase my level at an extraordinary rate. I even contemplated
doing the auto-leveling faq thing to gain levels without having to be
at my playstation at all. I may yet to resort to that but for now it’s
a little beyond my tolerance for cheating cheese. But if that will
enable me to advance the game and get to the rest of the story at a
nice pace I may yet do it. Hopefully though the deathbringers plus
skeleton grind will be sufficient and I can finally feel as if I am
advancing he story sufficiently each time I sit down to play instead of
wondering if today will be a boring session of endless walking or an
exciting day of good story development. We’ll see.My last pet peeve is that certain characters have strictly worse stats
than others, throughout most of the game, punishing players who like
those characters and want to play them even if only a tiny bit in this
case since stats are so insignificant. That’s still really dumb.So far I find that final fantasy xii has extraordinary graphics,
interesting characters, great monster designs, good challenges,
interesting terrains, and at least parts of an interesting plot (so
far) as well as an interesting and unique combat system, but the pacing
of the game absolutely stinks and the poor design of some of the
advancement systems really bothers me a great deal.I am still reserving judgment as to whether I think this game is worthy of the Final Fantasy name. We shall see.
