Recently, after coming across a "The Clash on the Big Bridge" remake in the FF12 soundtrack I decided to give it another chance, after all, that song kicks ass, who knows, maybe I was just being too hard on it.
Well, after playing it for a while now, about 30 hours in, I can honestly say that it is a much better game than I gave it credit for. Sure, the story for the first twenty hours consists of: go into dungeon, fight boss, walk outside and see ships flying above you. The "main protagonist" isn't even integral to the plot, but you can do what I did and just cut him out of the party by using three other characters.
However, I do still have some issues with the game. For one, it's a grindfest... even more so than it's predecessors. You fight through an enormous area, get to a boss, die, go grind, fight the boss again, die, grind just a little more, change a gambit or two, then win. Rinse and repeat. Also, the concept of Licenses is such metagame bullshit that I can scarcely fucking believe it. Why do I need to spend magical points that are NOT tied to experience in order to gain some intangible "license" allowing me to equip a piece of armor? Experience points fall under my suspension of disbelief, I'm willing to accept that your progress through martial prowess is measurable by a set amount of points that each victory is "worth". But license points do not fall under this suspension, what the fuck is a license grid? Is it an physical piece of paper that I have to mark off? What's to stop me from marking off every part of the grid immediately? Also, the concept of buying technicks and magicks makes no sense to me either. What does an "Aero" look like? Is it a scroll? Is it a magic orb? The prospect used in some PnP RPGs of spending XP on upgrades is understandable as well, your XP is teaching you new moves through itself, that makes sense. Spending license points does not. What the fuck are license points other than a metagame concept that was just thrown in to make up some bullshit progression system?
Whatever, Final Fantasy 12 is definitely better than I remember, but it's still not very good.
Personally I never played any of the final fantasy's. I played some games I imagine are like final fantasy though (Chrono cross FTW!) but I keep having people I deem sheep tell me that all of them are such great games and an amazing series. While I recognize that some of them are actually good games I guess I just have problems going along with what the popular mass. My feelings towards final fantasy mirror that of the Disney channel, Kingdom hearts (I know its a great game but the amount of fangirls who obsess over it make me want to gag so I don't even touch want to touch it) and of course most of the halo series. Sure I played the campaign on most of them but thats only so I could figure the story enough to debunk peoples arguments on how awesome of a story it is even though its filled with flaws. I always enjoy coming here though, nice opinions and great rants. Always makes my day.
ReplyDeleteBefore I get started I would like to thank you for your compliments, it feels nice to have someone give me some praise on something I had absolutely no audience for for about three months.
ReplyDeleteBut now we get to a little problem I have. As you may have guessed, possibly from my rants that don't have to do with video games, my views not what you'd call "socially accepted", and I revel in this fact. I hate the status quo and I take every chance I can get to fuck it over. However, disliking something simply because it's popular is not the way to go about that. You're the only one missing out in the end. I don't expect this to change your mind in any way, but I do HIGHLY suggest you at the very least do a little bit of -ahem-.. shall we say less than legal activity and download a SNES emulator to play FF6 and a translated FF5. They are my two favorite Final Fantasy games, and if it helps any bit, FF5 is probably the one that time has forgotten the most, two being close by. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who considers FF5 their favorite FF game, simply because it was never released in the states originally and when it was released for the gameboy it wasn't advertised.
Anyway, thanks again for the compliments.
Cheers,
HappyPariah