well I did play it some, but it didnât interest me much and I eventually quit.
as for the wow bit, I donât have interest in games that try to be wow, for one, and the only comparison point between the two is, I dunno, you can move around while fighting enemies in both games. you can run around a world map and then walk into a city that is vaguely to scale. I suppose this all sounded very wow like in 2006, when everyone was playing wow and not every single video game released was an open world game with RPG elements, but as Iâm sure you can see in 2016 this is a pretty superficial claim
but I do want to give it another chance â and have wanted to do so for some time â because, you know, Matsuno, even if he decided heâd rather jump out of a plane than finish the game for whatever reason, and because itâs pretty. when I played it back in '06 I was pretty burned out of the whole JRPG thing, so I think I was looking for reasons to dismiss the game. that said, general consensus seems to be that there are a good 30 hours of this thing that have no business existing, which doesnât sound very enticing.
Excepting the progressively shittier dungeon designs, itâs pretty finished, tbh
Before Iâd played or more extensively read up on Matsunoâs other games I thought that the transition in FF12 from earthy politics to inscrutable mysticism was the narrative thread losing itself as a result of Matsunoâs increasing disinvolvement, but later I realized, no, thatâs kind of exactly what Matsunoâs plots tend to do, oops
The mid-game is very sparse, the main characters arenât woven into the broader narrative very convincingly, and the NPCs are all pretty boring. It feels exactly like the slightly-strangled by committee problem that it is. But the visual design and the world design and the combat all hugely hold up.
It couldâve been a lot better â particularly if you arenât interested in the high level hunts thereâs a spark missing for sure â but itâs still fairly great and unique. Particularly for how jRPGs all but died with the PS1, it stands on its own in 2006.
And seriously the original assets upscale unbelievably well, you could emulate it tomorrow and have a better time (the job system grafted on to the international edition is terrible, for one).
yeah. Itâs not that ambiguous in the end, but I think it gets way more flak for being poorly told than it deserves, and thematically itâs at least ambitious and interesting compared to any other Japanese game of the era.
I honestly like the sound of the zodiac job system over the huge license board except for characters getting hard locked into a job and having no room for cross classing.
FFXII really just ticked the game dev in me. Creating behaviors for characters felt like I was looking a layer deep through the matrix. The beginning was good long enough for this system to hook me and I totally ignored the boring middle part of the game. Also, itâs kind of gorgeous, so that didnât hurt in any way.
I wish this system was expanded upon, though. I got the directorâs cut and everytime I think FFXII I think about that interview on that directorâs cut and dude is just like, âwe were inspired by the NFLâ, and I think at the time Final Fantasy Manager edition just sounded cool. I liked to think I was a coach and these were my players and we were just fighting different sets of enemies. I wish I could have different lists of gambits I could swap to on the fly, but hey, whatever, it was neat and inspiring. This probably is on the same level as my affinity for NBA2k as an action RPG.
The monster hunting system was also key to a lot of my enjoyment, and I think it tries to magnify the fun of the battle system in ways I was describing. You find tough enemies and you have to build gambits to beat them. Essentially youâre making a whole new set of behaviors so you can defeat each tough enemy.
God I wish this game was better. Iâll probably play the remake hoping against hope now. Is Matsuno working on anything like this anymore?
bethesda to announce at E3 that, uh, theyâve decided to go into marketing idâs engines to all and sundry after all because theyâre sick of epic eating their lunch just because john carmack is a nut
I think literally all of those run id tech
this is the most hilariously dumb long-awaited victory for openGL