I thought that ff12 remake was coming out on pc, I let myself get interested in it for no reason
you’re almost certainly better off playing the vanilla game in pcsx2, it has its own fast forward button
remake’s got an awful lot going for it
yeah ok i sat down with remaster a bit after dinner and the next thing i knew i had built up an (almost) max-level battle chain killing wolves on the giza plains (the fast-forward feature is very accommodating to this end), and woah i forgot how generous the loot is when you get those battle chains goin’ (and those loot chunks just get bigger and more appealing to pick up.)
i totally forgot there’s a little banga hunter out there who will buff you with protect, he rules
if you go into the esterstand from one of the ??? exits (i loved that this game will let you wander off the rails like this so early) you’ll find ranbanastre watch npcs fighting wolves and stuff
i really dug then (and now) how they pepper the world with little details like this to make it feel alive, it’s like hey my dudes aren’t the only peeps out here on the beat killing some bad wolves.
i mean, that one dude casts protect on your party! it’s cool because it establishes the game world as a structured space where your units and all the other units are playing by the same rules. heck, go into a gambit or technick shop and you’ll find other people shopping for that stuff just like you. the system doesn’t exist for you; you exist within the system.
just like how in FFT tactics every unit in the game files has a job class assigned to it, unique classes that describe what their role is in that world, even for characters that appear only in cutscenes and never in an actual battle. i’m not sure what to call it, but it’s a very matsuno thing, and i love it.
i wish you encountered allied units more often throughout the game like this. feels like it happens a lot more in the early hours?
anyway yeah, remaster is worth it if you have a PS4!
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Ensuring every game object has a common set of definitions to ensure coherence even in emergent situations is I think best defined as simulationism. The difference with Matsuno (I guess you could call it “Japanese”) is that it’s more directly in the service of atmosphere than mechanical emergence per se (though of course there is some of that in Matsuno games, but they ain’t like, Deus Ex).
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it’s true that I’m naturally distrustful of the authenticity of remakes and am always looking for an excuse to emulate instead but if I were rereleasing FFXII I would basically want to ship the original game but with the narrative like 50% recut
i mean, i’d love that too, but it feels pretty implausible for a multitude of reasons which i’m sure you can imagine!
this is probably the best of these remasters that square’s done. also i harbor a mild-ish hope that if it’s successful financially they’ll get matsuno to do another ivalice thing (that’s not a fucking ff14 raid ugh) and give him full authorial control.
also feel free to make a post about how you’d recut ff12’s story because it’s something i’ve thought about casually many times
I would go back in time and fire every producer at square in 2004
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seriously it’s insane that they managed to fuck it up that bad, a project that matsuno, kawazu, and hiroyuki ito all touched should’ve been so much better. there’s a reason matsuno has barely worked in the past decade.
there are still signs of its brilliance everywhere which is even more frustrating
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it also didn’t help that microsoft basically bribed sakaguchi to leave with half of matsuno’s staff to go make shittier jRPGs partway through
I made my friends stay after the credits to see if there’d be another scene when they came with me to see spirits within in the theatre
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The best thing I noticed yesterday is that he casts that shit on the rabbits in the area as well because they are technically allies to him, which makes hunting them more difficult (though it’s not hard really).
The remaster is some fun shit so far. I love 12.
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More details of that image I posted in the axe they (two years since annoucement) are asking for bright talented people to come to Square-Enix meet the producer and pitch fantastic ideas for “one scene”.
Can we please get some substantiated criticisms relating to the “unfinished game / RIP Matsuno” narrative that crops up here -every- -time- XII is mentioned, including in-depth descriptions of what the plot or design elements might’ve been prior to [event]? Because without those criticisms, it’s all very vague (and also a typically convenient plot point for gamers who want to pin all perceived issues on one thing). I’d also like some hard data on who was responsible for messing up what as long as this narrative is being pursued.
this is all from memory, but:
– the opening cutscene, which if memory serves both played before the title screen and was skippable in the original release, contains a huge amount of essential plot detail as well as the only coherent motivation for ashe and basch (who are the only two playable characters who have any real connection to the game’s main narrative), but is presented as just “generic war scene” until you accidentally watch it again 15 hours into the game and figure out what’s going on
– both the primary antagonist and vaan are nothing but cyphers for the kind of characters square wanted in their game at the time; vaan has basically no connection to the narrative at all and seems to exist exclusively to give players of the first six hours of the game a naive softboy they can identify with
– there’s exactly one cutscene like a third of the way into the game of the villains having a discussion about trying to track down the protagonist, which is something that FFT did to great success to round out its tertiary characters, but here just feels like a weird one-off exception to the otherwise consistent POV of vaan not knowing what the hell is going on
– the whole ivalice franchise that square was attempting to construct around the same time after they’d committed to giving one of their major properties to matsuno feels like a lot of arbitrary “worldbuilding” (judges! bangaa! OK!) that doesn’t amount to much; in light of how FFXII turned out, the existence of the FFTA games seems like a budgeting error
– most of the time that the game is sending you from point A to point B in its latter two thirds you’re looking at about three or four hours spread across huge expanses in which there is no narrative, you completely forget what’s going on, and when you get there they mutter some nonsense about ashe’s dead fiancee and a crystal
– the only plot beats I can remember from the last ten hours involve repeating an early minigame in which you try to drum up support for a revolt by running around town and yelling at people, and a totally mis-told arc about a former judge who sacrifices himself to get revenge on the empire, except the entire concept of “judge” and “empire” is so muddy by that point that it’s not clear why this is significant
– as a general rule, the narrative beats are all really inept; the game successfully conveys the impression of telling a story around the edges of a historical epic the way that FFT did, except it seems most of the time to be telling, like, the wrong story, or a story that doesn’t make sense, or has no purpose.
someone (not sure if it was matsuno) did grant an interview at one point about how the formation of mistwalker took several essential middle managers and development leads away from the game’s staff, and it is common knowledge that matsuno basically worked himself sick on the project and left square over it. I don’t think there’s ever been a more detailed postmortem than that but it’s nevertheless very clear that it didn’t come out as intended, it’s not just “gamers” trying to scapegoat.
the FMV direction is generally pretty strong though! obviously that team was able to work with the narrative sketches they had.
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TBH I always assumed this was one of those Gamer Legends with almost no supporting documentation, made possible by the general Japanese illiteracy of the community.
what is the point of holding your entire experiential and critical relationship with the material hostage behind this narrative cage of But The Game Is Incomplete and Dang What Could’ve Been!!! it’s been exactly what it is for 11 years and arguably probably not all that meaningfully different from the alternative. like, how many FF games are even wonderful exemplars of neat and tidy development cycles resulting in well-paced, literary satisfaction that we’re eternally restricting the conversation around 12 to its being some sort of standout failure in this regard
it’s even worse than just putting all your eggs in an Authorial Intent basket because it’s leaving engagement on hold in lieu of insight into speculation about what would’ve been the result of a million levels of If that never actually happened.
i guess where i’m at with videogames now i
a.) don’t really get any of the things you listed about the game mattering in 2017 and i’m generally distrustful of any instance of someone’s opinion of a work having crystallized without reassessment over a decade ago
b.) don’t really understand needing a final fantasy (or any jrpg) to work 100% at face value
What is interesting about FF12?
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I feel that Matsuno’s storytelling style involves a lot of plates spinning delicately and it’s liable to collapse in a heap of Proper Nouns and allusions to events the player can’t remember.
I thought his storytelling wasn’t very successful back when my experiences were SNES Ogre Battle, Ogre Battle 64, Tactics Ogre Advance, and FFXII; playing Tactics Ogre and FFT shows the sharp edge of subtle context he’s playing with that can easily get lost as game development shifts missions, goals, characters around.
Jeremy Parish’s recent article isn’t up to the standards of Polygon’s told history series but I get the impression from this and talking to friends who worked at Square at the time that it wasn’t so much that Square spit out Matsuno, as the project spun out of control even while he was there.
For example, the Parish interview states that Vaan was present from very early on, and I believe it; Matsuno was working with a much bigger IP and much bigger constraints and I can easily see him not un-screwing the protagonist situation from what the early script required. A 200±person studio is moving fast all the time and decisions, even narrative ones, have to be made on the fly all the time.
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yeah, in a lot of ways, ff12’s messes actually precisely and predictably live up to matsuno’s reputation up to that point. it was more the scale and visibility of the mess than the presence of it. which is to say: fft’s plot used to be spoken about in similar terms to the way we approach ff12 now, the difference is that with fft we’re allowed to talk about other things too.
FF12 had really cool monsters, I consider that mission accomplished far as anything in it matters
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