Seriously. A spiritual sequel to Vagrant Story would be one game I would put my life on hold to play the shit out of
I love that game. It’s worth figuring out how to play it.
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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.
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Also, uh
I feel like I’ve read several people say things like this recently, not that I can find any other examples at the moment. Well! Now that I am in this thread, I can declare that all of you saying stuff like that are more articulate than I am. Did you see that horrible post I just made? The words in that were awful. Your bullet points are easy to follow and excellent.
Yeah good luck explaining this kind of design monstrosity from FFXIII
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Wiki entry for the spell Vanish from FFXII:
“Enemies can detect players by vision, sound, life and magick. Vision is the only sense that can be deceived by the Vanish status. Sound detection is usually not as far-reaching as vision. Walking on noisy terrains, like water splashing, can rouse nearby enemies. Certain types of monsters (undead, plants and bugs) can detect players who are low on health, usually less than 40% of max health.”
Oh my god, FFXII
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There is an engine analysis FAQ on GameFAQs that goes through the actual damage formulas and statistical weights for the different weapon types versus the stats for individual characters. I love the hell out of that document; it’s so thorough. And after breaking down all the weird, different ways that spears and blunderbusses and charges and katanas work, the conclusion he draws at the end is basically just none of this matters. The game’s so easy that any statistical gain you get from matching each character’s stats with complementary weapon types and weapon modifiers is dwarfed by the gains from simply leveling up, by hitting the next tier of gear, and playing even semi-efficiently. This whole system of generating mysterious-but-consistent damage numbers is completely obviated by the other systems that exist in the game.
I’d love to see what speedrunners could do with a hardtype version of FFXII.
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My explanation is that someone rules
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Why do people keep thinking the “original plan” for a game, which is to say a version of the game that has never and will never exist, is a think worth talking about in comparison to a game that does exist? Even moreso when there is no way of knowing what that “original plan” even is? Like this is just authorial intent folded in on itself a million times past even the authors themselves.
the game is being rereleased and there’s a million things they can change (and they’re changing some things)
whether your imagination links your desired changes back to your own inferences [this seemed rushed, this was overemphasized, it seems like it meant to do this] or internet rumor about people’s health and company politics, who cares?
if you can’t look at a game and see another, desirable, whole, what are you doing when you play them?
if you’re not going to talk about it now, when?
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summons were really terrible against bosses and none had any longevity compared to anyone with a self heal gambit
they were so cool looking but sucked so much
quickenings were actually effective but hideous and had no relation to the game
ok that’s the only stuff that hasn’t been mentioned yet I am aligned with all the “this game is good in lots of ways but not excellent like it should be?” crew and this extends to story and Star Wars and purchasing gambits etc etc etc
has anyone ever played revenant wings
I played it a bit and got bored fairly early on.
Also, can the anti-authorial intent people please stop pretending that the existence of an author and a creative process behind things can be utterly obviated as if it didn’t exist? It’s like their own version of the vacuum
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No one is pretending this at all. But to hold a supposed version of a game (that again, does not and cannot exist, and mostly is the product of supposition based on a scant few comments from people working on the game) against the game that does exist is basically pointless. Of course the one that doesn’t exist is always going to be better, because you are imagining it as perfect and comparing an actual (flawed) thing to imagined perfection. It’s not that the process doesn’t exist, but the current object is being devalued by an imagined version of the same object, instead of talking about the actual current object as it is; it’s not criticism as much as just speculative fiction.
Yeah, this is my reaction to RevWings. I think I might still have a copy somewhere. It was kinda dull.
Plus we’ve all met authors and who can say they are not terrible
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look if it makes y’all feel any better I can talk about obvious design compromises and bad decisions in shipped games whose development isn’t shrouded in this whole narrative of what happened at square
like bort said, that narrative really isn’t the point, this game just has a lot of obvious design compromises!
Calling something a “design compromise” still implies that there is this ideal version that is not “compromised”, which is kinda the problem though?
I fail to see how it is a problem.
One can infer, from their knowledge of videogame production, the financial realities of the studios producing the work at the time and prior knowledge of the director’s work that such work doesn’t match an educated expectation formed with this knowledge. I don’t think it necessarily implies a “perfect” version of the work to compare to.
But yeah, this isn’t really my discussion. I’m not really knowledgeable or interested on what (is pecieved as) “the version that could have been”
yeah, this doesn’t register for me at all – I’m not at all sensitive to the distance between an actual ideal and a theoretical ideal. it’s the same “this is really good in parts, but how could it be better?” discussion you’d have about any other thing.
I do see potential for cheapening the work as it exists if you’re the type to regard every arguable flaw, and everything that creates friction, as a “compromise” that should’ve been alleviated, but I really don’t think that’s an issue on this website or for this game.
Again, one is still creating an idealized version of the game (an “educated expectation”) based on one’s knowledge and supposition based on previous work, and then comparing the actual game to that idealized version. All this is actually saying, in the end, is that this work is not one’s idealized work, which of course nothing ever will be, so…? One would still be comparing something that exists to something that doesn’t, which is just not really useful.
So for like ff12, if you want to talk about why buying gambits is a problem or not cohesive with the game as a whole or whatever, that’s a good thing to talk about. But if you want to say(assuming nobody on the staff ever said “we didn’t want to make people buy gambits”) “well clearly the choice to have people buy gambits is design compromise that Matsuno (or someone else) wouldn’t have made if not for Square/budget/etc.”, that’s not really saying anything about FF12 as much as what your head-canon Matsuno is like , who, it should be noted, is not the actual human Matsuno, as much as your derived version of him based on previous games he has worked as part of a team on and a few interviews (assuming you don’t personally know the dude and have talked to him about this stuff, which if you have, please share).
I think what diplo was expressing earlier in the thread, and what I am trying to say here, is that talking about the development history of the game (or the version that might have existed if such history was different) does nothing at all for critiquing or even really discussing the game itself. It is potentially an interesting story? Sure, but it doesn’t explain anything positive or negative in the game, or analyze why those are positive or negative, or any of that. Cuba’s post above about paying for gambits is infinitely more insightful a commentary on the game itself than any number of “what do i think matsuno should have possibly done when making this game” posts.