Someday I'll Figure Out What This is About

It’s an unfortunate situation: I’ve been wanting to write more about my experiences with Final Fantasy XII, but I’ve been spending so much time playing Final Fantasy XII (close to 50 hours now!) that I haven’t had time. But no more!
If I were to boil everything good about the game down to one idea, it’s that the developers did an excellent job of jettisoning everything that was frustrating or annoying about previous installments, but still made what feels like a classic Final Fantasy game.

The Battle System

The revised battle system is probably the single biggest departure from previous games, with three major changes: no random battles, the battles take place in the main world area rather than a separate “arena”, and the traditional ATB system is gone in favour of a more real-time system.

I’ve never been a fan of random battles. Sometimes you just want to quickly explore an area; sometimes you’re in rough shape and need to make a quick retreat to a safe area; sometimes you really desperately need to get back to a save point before your girlfriend kills you for spending too much time with the PS2. Fighting monsters for experience and loot is a core part of Final Fantasy games so it’s not like, given the opportunity, you’re just going to run around avoiding fights, and having the added control over when to fight and when to run can significantly reduce frustration levels.

Since battles take place in the same area that you’re running around exploring, rather than in a separate battle arena, the whole experience is streamlined since there’s no time spent loading a separate area, or standing around afterward while the victory music plays and your gil is counted. More succinctly, you spend a lot more time fighting and a lot less time waiting for things to happen. While it might seem relatively inconsequential, I think this change is one of the leading contributers to my newfound appreciation for “grinding” (if you want to call it that) that I mentioned before.

The battle system itself feels remarkably different from the traditional ATB system, but at the heart of things it’s quite similar. You still choose actions from the familiar menu system, and each action takes a certain amount of time (a turn) based on the action itself and the speed of the character. The major difference is that the game doesn’t stop once per round for you to tell your characters what to do; the majority of the time your characters perform actions automatically based on “gambits” that you’ve set up in advance. A gambit is just the combination of a condition and an action, so you might set up a healer-type character with “If an ally’s HP is less than 20% of maximum, cast ‘Cure’”. You can turn individual gambits on or off, or even disable them for characters entirely. Additionally, you can step in and manually issue commands at any point and they’ll become the character’s first priority. In a lot of regards, the combat feels similar to something like a Neverwinter Nights game.

For the most part, the gambit system prevents you from having to issue the same sorts of commands (“attack monster”) over and over again every turn. On the other hand, it can make it feel like you’re just sort of along for the ride as your characters automatically attack and kill whatever you point them at. There are apparently even guides out there for setting up the “perfect gambits” that allow you to march through the game without having to provide any input into battles at all.

Save Points

I’m generally against the idea of “save points”; it’s annoying when you just want to quit playing but can’t find somewhere to save, and they’re especially awful when some malign game developer places them 20-minutes of gameplay away from the giant boss that keeps stomping you into a fine paste.

The first problem is actually taken care of by most portable RPGs – without changing the overall “save point” mechanic, if you want to insist on keeping it – by having a “quicksave” slot that allows you to save at any point and quit, but forces you to resume from that spot and then immediately erases the save. Adding the same sort of quicksave to console RPGs seems like an excellent idea.

All of that said, Final Fantasy XII has save points littered so liberally and obviously through the world that getting to one isn’t usually an issue. You’re literally never more than two or three areas away from a save point, and if there’s a boss coming up, it’s a guarantee that there’ll be a save point right before it. Add to that the fact that you can pick your battles, and getting to a save point has never been easier.

The game also includes a helpful message on the save screen that lets you know if you’re in an area that you may not be able to easily leave, suggesting that you might want to use a new save slot rather than overwriting a previous one. This saves you from discovering later that you’re in an area that’s currently too hard for you to finish, can’t back out of it, and unwittingly destroyed all of your older saves.

The Early Game

I also have to say that the game gets you into the action a lot faster than most of its predecessors and peers. There’s certainly some highly scripted portions early on that set up the overall story, but unlike some games that have up to three hours of gameplay that feel like watching a dull movie (I’m looking at you, Kingdom Hearts 2), it doesn’t take too long before you’re granted enough freedom that you feel like you’re actually playing the game. Before too long, you’re given access to large areas begging to be explored and while going too far out of your way will find you running into higher-level monsters ready to devour you, it doesn’t feel like you’re just along for the ride. Since it is a story-driven Japanese RPG, you never get the level of freedom you’d find in something like Oblivion, but if you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy series, you probably weren’t expecting that anyway.

Magic

My one complaint about the game is that combat seems heavily weighted towards melee combat and healing magic, and black magic (attack spells, essentially) aren’t an attractive option. Part of being successful with magic has always been identifying a monster’s weakness (say “fire”) and then casting the appropriate spell for maximum damage. You could certainly just robotically cast “Fire” for all your attacks, but sooner or later you run up against a monster that actually heals when you cast fire, and then you need to change strategies.

At least to the point I’ve played (a not insignificant amount), the gambit system doesn’t include conditions like “if this enemy is vulnerable to fire” which could be hooked up to a “cast fire” action. Unless you’re interested in manually intervening on every round (or manually turning gambits on or off in each battle), there’s no good way to have the level of control over what attack spells are cast that you might like. And since characters aren’t tied to specific proficiencies (i.e. there’s no “black mage” character who’s only useful if he casts black spells), it’s tempting (and viable) to have all of your characters focus on melee attacks and healing each other.

Characters & Story

I can’t really call this a criticism: I think the story is pretty solid, and the characters are pretty likeable, but, while it’s obviously pretty early to say, I don’t think they’re going to be as memorable as those of games like Final Fantasy VI or VII. There’s no overwhelmingly evil character like a Kefka or Sephiroth, and aside from the Viera, Fran, all of the main characters are pretty normal-looking humans (“Humes”). No one has ridiculously large swords, has a machine gun for a hand, or is actually a giant red cat. Since the character development system lets you turn anyone into any sort of character you want, you also can’t even really classify characters as “the kung-fu guy” or “the black mage“. Again, that’s not really a criticism, but I do think it means the game will be remembered more for the game itself, rather than for its characters and story.

There’s lots of other stuff I could talk about, but this is probably long enough as it is. Overall I’m really enjoying the game, and have enjoyed all of it so far. That’s not something I can say of other Final Fantasy games where at times I’ve felt like I was just slogging through sections to get to the next “good” part. If you’re at all interested in Final Fantasy games (and for some reason still haven’t gotten the latest installment), you should definitely grab a copy.