People struggle with VAGRANT STORY because, even with the in-game mechanical encyclopedia, it’s too easy to overlook how the affinity system works, and how important it is.
Put simply, every time you attack an enemy with a weapon, you are simultaneously playing three different games of Rock-Paper-Scissors, and depending how those games play out, your attack will do trivial amounts of damage. The three games are damage type (blunt, piercing, slashing), damage element (fire, water, light, dark, etc.), and monster type (dragons, humans, elementals, etc.).
So, when you come across some skeletons, you’ll do good damage if you hit them with a club that has undead affinity, and probably either physical or light elemental affinity depending on whether they have higher magical or physical defense. It doesn’t help that the way to find out which affinities to use is to first cast a scan spell at the enemy and then open your menu, go to the status screen(?!), and then switch from seeing your character’s stats to seeing that enemy you just scanned(?!?!). Combined with the fact that you also have to open your menu every time you change weapons—something you might arguably do every time you fight a different enemy time, i.e. once or twice a room—plus spend time mucking around in menus to move affinity gems from one weapon to another, particularly since you can’t really carry enough weapons to account for every situation, and the end result is that it’s often less painful to just create an endless combo of 1-damage attacks at 100 risk, and to hell with the menu.
I really loved the idea of Vagrant Story.
Just gonna respond to some comments plucked haphazardly from this thread:
[quote=“Iacus, post:95, topic:4948”]
I have to say that while the job system still seems like a poorly applied patch on top of the original game whose benefits escape me, the fact that you can now have 2 jobs per character makes it 1000% more interesting. Still not as good as the ability to respec your jobs at any time, but pretty decent nonetheless.[/quote]
That’s not at all how I remember the License Board playing out in Original Flavor FFXII. Even with the intention of branching different characters out in different directions, the urgency of semi-realtime combat and the safety brought about by redundancy meant that, while I might have nominally built one character as designated healer or black mage or whatever, in practice every character wound up getting the most important abilities, the most efficient damaging attacks, etc. Most FF games have a tendency toward party homogeneity in the end, but XII aggravated that because of how easy it was to just swap gambits from one character to another. I didn’t want to spend minutes at a time redesigning my gambits every time I swapped certain characters out, so I wound up with three similar character builds that were shared by two characters each. Kitroebuck’s narrative correlations above wound up being mechanical correlations as well, in my case. The job system would at least force me to switch things up.
I’ve played Vagrant Story and FF Tactics; I am sympathetic to claims that Ivalice stories are hard to follow, because they lean heavily on “He fought with your father in the Clone Wars”-style world-building, where everyone and everything has prior history that may or mayn’t be relevant to what’s going on now. If you can recognize the historical or pop-cultural stories they’re modeled on, you may have some advantages, but it’s still easy to get caught on a tangential detail somewhere and lose track of the narrative filigree.
This is in pretty stark contrast to other FF games which might have convoluted histories, but those histories are directly connected to the events transpiring in the game and must therefore be explicated during the game’s narration, rather than mentioned twice and dropped in an encyclopedia.
This may have more to do with the fact that I haven’t played XII seriously since its launch, but I don’t even remember what Fran’s arc is. She left her people to travel/be with Balthier? Is… is that it?
This sounds pretty dismissive, but I actually can’t remember! And I even considered FFXII my favorite game for years.
I have fond memories of the Bestiary! I wish FFXIII had been as thorough with its in-game encyclopedia, because the monster designs in that are fucking bullshit and I really want to know what a bunch of those were supposed to be. It did at least provide the context necessary to interpret the events of the plot.
I like this take! I’m probably more forgiving though in that every Final Fantasy game establishes a semi-acceptable baseline and then plummets to a lower level somewhere before the ending. Usually that corresponds to the point where you get an airship and can go tackle sidequests and the storyline set-pieces fall away in favor of bosses taunting you at the end of dungeons. It feels like XII falls into that storytelling structure unusually early, though, but that might be an uncharitable reconstruction of my memory of the game.