FFXII Impressions

Well I finally gave in and decided to rent out Final Fantasy XII (FFXII), as it has been out for quite some time now and I was curious to what it would be like. Also it was hard to justify not getting it, as it only costs $1 to rent for 8 days because of United Videos insanely good deals. Anyway back to the game.

It starts off pretty cool, with a really long introduction that includes both FMV's, cut scenes and pieces of long narration. The basic story is about two competing empires, and the countries in-between that get the short end of the stick and get caught up in that struggle. Most of the main characters are from these aforementioned countries. The main styling of the game seems to be a great mix between Medieval, Colonialism (there are guns in the game), and Arabian styled locations. So basically think FFX with knights, and that most the tropical places have dried up.

One of the main things I came to notice while playing the game is the great similarities to Vagrant Story, and I'm sure some of the team that made this game was originally from the Vagrant Story project. There's the poncy English accents, the very similar battle system which is a farcry from the other FF games, the exact sound of a weapon drawing and being put away, the presence of Liche's in the dungeons, the blocky map system, the presence of Grimoire's, and perhaps most telling, the leading female character bears the name of Ashe, which of course is very similar to the lead Vagrant Story's character of Ashley. The list goes on.

The battle system is quite interesting and totally different from all the other games, basically its like Vagrant Story where the enemies appear on the actual map you are wandering about instead of random encounters. That's correct, they have done away with random encounters. You pretty much click, choose a command, and the character will run and do it. You can still move the character anywhere while they are carrying out your actions, and you can set up Gambits for the other characters so they do certain actions automatically. It's a definite difference, and while the change from random encounters is refreshing I'm not sure if its better.

They've fixed some of the problems that were inherent in FFX, for instance they have better voice actors, and the lead female character isn't a pushover like Yuna was. Unfortunately some things have remained the same, like the lack of a World Map you can actually run around. The "World Map" areas are broken into small area maps ala FFX. Also the music is very sub par, but at least they have lost the insanely repetitive nature of FFX's Yu Yevon music or the battle drums that played on for way too long. The music is very minimalistic, which means it won't get on your nerves, but then again it won't make much of an impression on you and no music has really stood out as being that good yet.

There also seems to be a lot less story in this game, there are a lot of characters, perhaps too many, with not enough focus on the individual main characters. In the game you always seem to be making your way through huge monster infested dungeons, and upon reaching the end you have to head off to another one with not much story or development added. There is also too much politics in the game, which reminds me of one of the reasons of what made the new Star Wars movies worse than the originals. I'm sorry, but no one cares about stupid political motives and maneuvers when it detracts from the development of the core characters and story.

All in all its a pretty decent game, and has a lot of playability to keep someone occupied while playing through it, but is nowhere near as good as the classic FFVII. I don't think they'll ever be able to beat how good the old games were, and storywise they're even going downhill from FFX, even though that game had plenty of faults. FXII is a definite refresher for the series and has many good improvements, and it is good how they are willing to try new things to try and improve on the games. FFXII is worth playing through and a decent attempt at making another Final Fantasy game.