this actually isn’t true for some of the later bosses, I had to vary my gambits a lot for the gilgamesh fight and it was a huge amount of fun
stealing is for sure pointlessly irritating though, iirc the best you could do was rig it up so he’d only try it on enemies with full HP and that kind of worked as other party members would have attacked once before he tried to steal a second time
Yeah, that’s the way to do it. I usually set him to steal at above 80% or so so he wouldn’t give up too soon.
Yeah, but I was asking for connections to the developmental process and how you believe that impacted specific parts of the game. Criticisms are usually levied at the narrative or pacing, or a mixture of the two, but this is the last series where that criticism is exceptional. My intent was never to say that XII doesn’t have problems or issues or whatever, but to try to get people to explicate what about the ‘troubled development’ narrative did to hinder particular points of the game, especially when there is an overeagerness to assign Matsuno a kind of authorial supremacy. For example, there has sometimes been negativity directed towards Kawazu’s involvement; and yet Vagrant Story, a project led by Matsuno, is the most obtuse and one of the most mechanically unpleasant games I’ve ever played; so the division there in terms of design practices – who picked up where the other left off, or whose priorities became more prominent than the other’s – is not apparent to me.
oh, yeah, I think the division between what was done after kawazu got involved and what was done before is completely opaque – any criticism of his involvement is, I think, baseless, and probably stems from then (still?)-common attitudes that all saga games are a mess, which I’d push way back on.
as far as I know there’s no attribution within square of which managers were responsible for which difficulties and how early on (beyond his comment about having been accustomed to a “benevolent dictatorship” before this project), so we have relatively little to go on beyond the finished product, and the public knowledge of what happened with mistwalker and with matsuno and so forth.
lets be real, FFXII is bad. if you want a strange, beautiful matsuno game that doesn’t really work but has a lot of cool ideas, play vagrant story. it has the benefit of being 40 hours shorter
nedge you are such a buzzkill
FFXII is a million times more pleasant than vagrant story because it doesn’t have a ludicrously complicated crafting system and exhausting rhythm combat
(vagrant story does have really nice-looking upscaled FFT assets though)
Vagrant Story looks and sounds great
I also got to a point where I could do no meaningful damage to a boss even though I tried everything I could think of and asked other veterans for strats. So, yeah, I dunno. I’m not interested in games that absolutely prohibit me purely on the level of statistical knowledge
i enjoyed vagrant story mostly on presentation, setting, and aesthetic which i think made me amenable to the really weird damage system. i got into it, because i like getting into dense things sometimes, but in hindsight it was clunky. the whole game in regards to weapon and armor management was clunky, but i really think it was the hardware working against them there. i feel a PSP remastering would have resolved those issues, pity we didn’t get one.
RISK as a mechanic to mitigate spamming attacks was neat, even neater was that having high RISK wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at times.
If you own a working PS2 I’ll just send you my copy lol
i really want to like vagrant story but i’ve failed to ‘get’ it like three times now
and i’ve finished several kawazu games so y’know, i have some tolerance for the obtuse
This is another claim which I would like substantiated.
My posts are probably annoying the shit out of a couple of people itt, but claims like these reach back to a habit on IC of producing narratives based on scant information and goings-on the claimant was never privy to. There may be a developer interview I’m not aware of which reveals this, though.
The fact that the XII / Star Wars parallels are few and quickly divergent once the surface level comparisons are made is beside the point here, but I’m willing to argue about that too.
I don’t think kit was implying intent, i.e. that someone specifically decided “we should make this more like star wars!” but rather, the way vaan meets balthier (han solo) and the princess and the shape of their subsequent struggle against the empire and the chasing of macguffins and so on sure seems like they wound up using the basic structure of a new hope as a crutch to make vaan work as a POV character
(as rye said, the game expends a huge amount of effort on making vaan work as a POV character)
one of the more dismaying aspects of this reading is that fran becomes chewbacca
Wait now, I don’t think we need to have inside information or developer interviews to make these observations. We can infer intent from the text. The parallels are more than scant and they go to the core of the game’s narrative design.
The six playable characters of FFXII correlate directly to the three protagonists of A New Hope. They’ve been bifurcated into male and female versions. Fran is absolutely referencing Chewbacca, but she’s also doing double-duty as female Han Solo. The authoritarian enforcer who speaks with a voice distorted by a mask has also been multiplied from a single “Darth” to multiple “Judges”. There are also bounty-hunters, space(air) ship dogfights, an Empire/ Resistance struggle, a desert beginning featuring scenes of diverse creatures coexisting in a tense capitalist equilibrium, diminutive desert warriors, a prison escape from a clean, antiseptic-looking cell during which one of the protagonists wears the uniform of the anonymous armored grunts. These are motifs both visual and thematic lifted directly from the movies and while they’re shuffled, it’s too much to wave away. Star Wars is there, and it’s too there to be a coincidence.
I’m not claiming that this tells us anything concrete about the game’s development, like Matsuno had this masterpiece planned out and Kawazu trashed it by shoehorning Star Wars into it. But I do think it’s clear that at some point, someone at a directorial level, was, yes, intentionally having their people look at Star Wars for inspiration.
Granted, this is how stuff gets made, and it does diverge. My point is that the derive/diverge ratio is, in this case, problematic. That’s a matter of taste though; tastes vary.
I rember that the secret best thing about FFXII was the bestiary
Every enemy description has this extremely elaborate description that shows the huge care that went into the ecosystems
FFXII is the only game with an extensive in-menu loredump that I bothered to read
Did… did it hold up
I didn’t delete it. It’s in the Games You Played Today thread.
This thread is making me realize how boring game auteur theory is.
Also of course it is Star Wars. Ff games have had SW refs for years. 12 just took the plot as well for the first like 10 hours.
I’m watching an FFX speedrun, a product only saved from absolute trashdom by its soundtrack
Ok so I stopped playing FF12 when I found that not only did you have to unlock gambit slots, which would have been annoying but dealable on its own; you also had to buy, at great expense, each individual gambit parameter. I was like yeah see ya
Did they change that in the remake? Because the gambit parameters are silly cheap (like 50-100g, which 6 hours in, I am regularly running around with a couple thousand hanging around), and a lot of them are pretty specific, so I only see the need to buy them later in the game.
The one baffling one that they make you buy is just “Self” which is silly as hell, and basically necessary if you want Libra information on everyone, which you do because that helps the weakness specific gambits be useful.
buying gambits does feel absurd but they are pretty cheap, yeah