I was really skeptical towards Final Fantasy 12. The last main Final
Fantasy I really loved was Final Fantasy 9. All the changes towards the
seires really turned me off to Final Fantasy 12, but I wanted to find
out what the hub-bub was about so I decided to break down and finally
play it hands on. Despite the slow start, I was surprised how good it
ended up being.
What can be said about Final Fantasy 12 that
hasn't already been said a 1,000 times already? Not much really. Either
way, I did enjoy Final Fantasy 12 quite a bit, mostly for the fun
battle system, the amount of exploring and sidequests, rather than the
storyline and characters, which is odd for a Final Fantasy game. The
graphics were really off at times, the voices sounded compressed, and
there was a few other things that annoyed me (Bahamut is stupid in this
game, and the Behemoths carry swords now? ugh). The storyline seemed
pretty short, and Vaan was an annoying main character. Outside of that
I had a blast exploring, grinding, dungeon crawling, buying skills and
items, and tweaking my gambits.
I wasn't expecting to put 82
hours into this game, but that's what happened. Final Fantasy 12 had a
really big open world, and a ton of sidequests, so the game was a huge
carrot on a stick. Once you got one thing done, you'd find a new area
or new sidequests, or maybe you just needed 10 more points to gain a
new skill you wanted, so you just had to keep playing. This distracted
me from the main quest but oh well.
----------Battle System----------
Final Fantasy 12 is a turn-based with very minimal bits of action. The
only bits of "action" are the elements of real time within the battle
system, no longer are there random encounters that transport you into a
whole new screen for the battle system. Everything is in real time and
you can run around in any direction you want. You can only control one
character, but you can give orders to your other team mates in battle.
But that's the only action you can do, running around doesn't protect
you from battle though, it won't help you dodge attacks, it's just
there to make the battles more interesting.
You can have a
party up to 3 people, but sometimes you'll get a fourth party member as
a Guest. The guest character won't gain experience and you can't equip
weapons on them, but as long as they're in your party you can bring
them in battle or use them for sidequests. You won't lose your guest
character until you advance the storyline.
The battle system
kinda reminds me of Knights of the Old Republic in a way. All enemies
are visible before attacking them, you can run up to them and initiate
the attack. Once the menu pops up for your options of attack, the game
pauses, and this is where you can take your time and input each
characters attacks. This is where the similarities end. You can also
set your characters with pre-determined attacks by using the Gambit
option. The gambits allow you to input up to 12 very specific attacks
per character. This almost makes the game play itself, but it's very
interesting. The gambits go in order of importance, so if you have
"Heal any member below 50% health" first and "Attack any monster" 2nd,
then if any character is running low on health, then your character
will stop fighting and start healing.
You gain experience and
license points after each kill, but no gil. Also the experience will
only go to the characters that are currently in your active party,
whoever is in reserve will only receive the license points, but no
experience. Each character has a license board, each license board is
exactly the same though. When you get enough license points you can go
into your license board and buy skills with them. Arguments award your
character with permanent skill boost, for example it can boost your Max
HP by 100 or strengthen your magic. Within the license board you have
to buy the ability to equip magics, accessories, armor, weapons or
technics. Just because you open that ability with your board, doesn't
mean you can use any of that stuff right away. First you have to own
the magic or weapon before you can use it. That's right, you have to
buy your magic again.
This might sound to simple but money
doesn't come easy in this game. Monsters don't drop gil, but they do
drop random loot. You can use this loot in sidequests, but more often
than not you'll be selling all of this loot so you can afford to pay
for each weapon, armor or magic for your characters. I like how loot is
used in this game more so than any of the Dark Alliance or Champions of
Norrath type games.
Since the all license boards are exactly
the same, each character are basically blank slates, you can build them
up differently early on, but you'll eventually open up the entire board
and every character will have the same skills and equips. The only
difference on the board are Quickenings you'll find on the board. These
Quickenings are kinda like Limit Breaks in Final Fantasy 7, they're
just special attacks you can use in battle but they use ALL mp. Each
character can learn up to 3 Quickenings. You can also learn Summons,
but first you have to find the Summon (they call them Espher in this
game) and defeat them, once defeated you can buy them from your license
board. Summons and Quickenings are the only unique skills on the entire
board and the only thing that separate your characters fighting style.
There's a ton of sidequests in the game, so much that you'll be
distracted from the main storyline. Honestly, the sidequests are
actually alot more fun than the main story. The biggest sidequests is
are Hunts, if you go to any bar in the game you'll find a Hunt board,
and there's a list of monsters and their rank. Once you read a little
info on the monster, you have to find the person that posted the Hunt,
once you find that person, he will vaguely tell you where the monster
is and you can go out and search for it. Hunt's are basically optional
boss fights and theres a ton of them.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Vaan, the brother of a rebel solider. Vaan lives in
Rabanastre, a city that was overtaken by the evil Empire during a war
years ago. Vaan dreams of overthrowing the Empire with his best friend
Penelo. As these two decide to sneak into a castle full of Imperial
soldiers, they run into treasure hunters / air pirates, Balthier and
Fran. As this party band together in unfortunate times, they run into
Ashe and Basche. They later find out that Ashe is the forgotten
Princess of the previous Empire, and she goes on a quest to gain the
power to overthrow the Empire.
I really really didn't care for
Vaan as the main character, luckily once you gain a full party, Vaan
becomes more of a background character. While you're forced to use his
as your main avatar while walking through towns, he quickly because
unimportant to the story, and you realize he and Penelo were more
tutorial characters. It's like you're being forced to play as Roxas in
Kingdom Hearts II but he never leaves the party. Ashe and her quest for
power is the focus of the game.
With that said, I still didn't
care much for the storyline, as matter of fact I was pretty bored
during most cutscenes. This was also the least story driven Final
Fantasy I've played since Final Fantasy V. You'll get maybe one dialog
scene each time you visit a new area, and most of those scenes don't
have much to do with anything. I was expecting an epic storyline like
the original Final Fantays Tactics, while the storyline had elements of
Final Fantasy Tactics, it was no where near as complex.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are weird for me. Final Fantasy 12 has alot of open ended
worlds, with real time combat, this is alot different than the previous
Final Fantasy titles, excluding Final Fantasy 11. New age Final Fantasy
games usually have smaller environments, with alot of prerendered
backgrounds, cutscenes, and many other tricks to make the game look
really good. Final Fantasy 12 had to drop all of that to make a more
gritty game, while there's still some CGI cutscenes, they mostly look
like the game engine graphics touched up. Some of the cutscenes are
extremely pixelated too. The worlds are much bigger than any main Final
Fantasy, but because of that the textures seem dull at times. Despite
all those set backs, the game still looks great and looks alot better
than games of this ilk. I do like the gritty art style that brings me
to mind of Vagrant Story for obvious reasons.
----------Sound----------
The music is classic Final Fantasy, basically what you would expect
from a Final Fantasy title. Has there ever been a Final Fantasy game
with bad music? The answer is no, this is no exception. However, the
voice work is an iffy subject. Half of the cast sounds English, and
some sound American, it's a weird mix that works. My biggest grief with
the voices is how condensed they sound. There's a weird echo effect
that makes the voices sound as if they're recorded with tin cans. It's
not as bad as the original Baten Kaitos, but it's enough to remind me
of that horror.
----------World Map----------
The world
map is completely open, there's no overhead view or dot-to-dot map,
similar to a modern Zelda game but much more massive and explorable.
You can open a map that shows you each town, field or dungeon, but
that's the only purpose. For most of the game you have to walk, but you
slowly get better transportation like a Chocobo that runs across the
fields, or a Teleport stone that let's you teleport to previously
visited save crystals. You'll eventually gain a ship near the end of
the game, or you can pay for a flight cab to transport you the bigger
towns. There's alot of options.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
82:06:35
The game is a little longer than this because you can't save within the
final dungeon. The last dungeon is short, but there's quite a bit of
boss fights and story, so you can probably add an additional hour and a
half to that total if you include the end credits and final scenes.
