Jacob Repp

Final Fantasy XII Impressions

November 23rd, 2006 by proj

As I posted earlier there was already a lot of things to like about this game. It definitely deserves the high marks it has received in the gaming press. This is one of the few games I’ve played in the past couple years that I had no problem dedicating a huge chunk of time to. All said and done my game timer was at 110 hours. I actually fell asleep 3 times playing the game which accounts for at least 18 hours of play time

Overall I enjoyed the game and thought the story was one of the best executed of any final fantasy. So now that that is out of the way I have a few bones to pick. There are a few things that frustrated me a lot about this game and areas where I felt that the normal final fantasy depth was not present.

Frustrations

The ultimate weapon and armor are not clearly attainable, however their existence is clearly marked on the license board making their unattainable status much more annoying. This punishes the player who doesn’t use the walk-through or cheats. This size of game should not require multiple plays to get the best gear.

Example 1: Zodiac spear can only be obtained in a specific chest when you do not open any chests for the first part of the game. Impossible to know without reading a walk through.
Example 2: Genji armor can only be obtained by ’stealing’ from Gilgamesh. I spent almost an hour defeating him and did not know this simple fact.

Annoyances

Weapons and armor are not upgrade-able, the whole equipment system felt very flat.
The bazaar system is unintuitive. You sell a few hundred items and some rare stuff randomly pops up in the bazaar. It just feels like a very cheap out because they didn’t have time to implement a crafting/synthing system. Dragon Quest 8 by contrast had a great item synthing system with recipes you would discover by exploring the world.
Character specialization came down to what buffs you wanted to keep up and what equipment you use for a specific character otherwise all characters were interchangable. Eventually one of my front-line warriors became my primary healer. There is no skill tree or individual development to be had here. By level 50 or 60 all characters are basically equal.
The game was very easy. They stuck to tried FF status effects and spells. The only way that bosses were made more difficult in this system was by having lots of HP and cheap attacks like disease or mega-status effect. No new statuses or strategies were introduced with the move to a more real-time battle system.
Elemental effects are under-rated compared to other FF games. Rarely was there a need to optimize elemental defense or attack to defeat enemies in a particular area.
The quickenings and summons are very under-powered weak sauce. You’re better off just using melee attacks and standard spells. This was very annoying. Past FF games had amazingly powerful summons and limit breaks, there actually was a point to traveling around and finding them.
Music was meh. Only a few tracks stood out.