Final Fantasy XII Pushes Envelopes

The anticipation surrounding Final Fantasy XII has resulted in Square/Enix's largest U.S. rollout for a title. Gamespot reports that 1.5 Million units were shipped to the country to meet demand. From the article: "Even if every last one of those copies has been sold, Square Enix still has a ways to go before the game duplicates the success it experienced overseas earlier this year. Final Fantasy XII has already racked up more than 2.4 million sales in Japan since its release there in March of this year." The game is pushing graphical as well as business envelopes; Kikizo has a feature talking with some of the game developers about the game's use of PS2 architecture. Essentially, the team says, FFXII is the best a game will ever look on the PlayStation 2.

Pushing the envelope, eh?

[Morlark]

I remember much the same thing was said about FF9 on the first Playstation. And indeed, that game was visually stunning. But to be honest, I was a little disappointed in the gameplay. Still a worthwhile game, mind you, but apart from the graphics, it was not the best in the series, IMHO. Now if FFXII can pull off amazing graphics and good gameplay, then not only will I be impressed, I will be overjoyed.

Re:Also boring

[aussie_a]

Gabe from Penny-Arcade originally agreed with you, but then he saw the light [penny-arcade.com]

Re:Also boring

[spectral]

They did include auto-healing. And a way that allows you to specify when people heal, when people attack, whether or not they do it automatically or not, etc. You don't want them to do something/anything? They don't do it. You want them to cast Cure whenever they can if an Ally is below 50% health? Yeah, they can do that automatically too.

You CAN treat it like the other games, but guess what most of the other games were? Mashing the A/X/whatever button to accept the default menu option of attack, or down, X, down a bunch of times, X, to cast Firaga/Fire3/Whatever. Big deal. Unless there's strategy involved, I don't feel the need to destroy my thumb and my controller's buttons.. But if you want to, go right ahead -- the game isn't stopping you and removing all control over your characters, it's just removing the mind-numbingly boring generic fight scenes that have plagued the series since its inception. Is a random battle on a huge, open plain where a 40 foot tall monster snuck up on you, and now you have to hold down the X button on your turbo controller to 'Attack' it to death so much better than FFXII's system where you get to see them coming, run in a realistic fashion (and draw aggro), and take a hands-off / high-level approach to control the flow of the battle instead of the individual movements of each character?

Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Essentially, the team says, FFXII is the best a game will ever look on the PlayStation 2."

That's because Netcraft confirms it, the PS2 is dying.

FF 12 is one of the last games that's going to be released on the Playstation 2. Were that not the case, games would eventually be developed that kick the shit out of FF 12.

In the early days of a console, game developers seem to have no clue. By the end of a console's life, developers know every little trick and performance tweak they can do. There's a reason that as time goes on, a console's games look better and better.

Compare Kessen (Which was in the initial PS2 launch lineup) to Kessen 2. Hell, compare it to a game made today. Kessen was fucking gorgeous when it came out. It looks horribly dated today, even when compared to games on the same console - even when compared to games in the same series!

Right, then. Sorry, everyone, for apotheosizing myself into Master of the Obvious for this post, but it had to be done. I'm by no means a hater of Square (Xenogears FTW!), but I'm no fanboy, and that comment of theirs smacks of a very undeserved "LOL WE R TEH BEST!!!!!!!!!!11111111"

My thoughts on XII

[Junta]

I'm a fan of JRPGs in general, and the FF series has generally been solid, though not always great. (Ignoring FFXI because the concept never appealed to me so I can't judge).

I've been playing FFXII a while and am underwhelmed, a few points
-Graphically, beautiful, no complaints really. Well, except no progressive scan support.
-The cities, admittedly, feel like realistic cities, well, except for the MMORPG-style icons popping up everywhere, which are actually kinda annoying. I am never bothered by the notoriously sparse cities in JRPGs, but I do have to concede they could be judged weird (a huge metropolis with maybe 13-17 people you can see is not atypical in JRPGs).
-The battle system is really uninspired. Doing it manually is just not made remotely feasible in the game, and distilling your strategy into fairly hard and fast rules makes for very boring fights. Now admittedly, high rates of random encounters in previous games were monotonous as hell, but the difficult fights were more interesting, and you had the opportunity to contemplate at most any given context the risk of damage and whether heal or attack is good. In XII, the decisions are either done in advance (i.e. if health 50%, heal will happen, no thinking), or else not given a good opportunity to recognize your situation if trying the manual approach. I really liked Chrono Trigger, no random encounters, no separate battle screen, yet a traditional JRPG battle system
-The story. I'm fairly far in, and it remains one of the most boring FF stories ever. Basically there is little depth and it's a fairly cookie cutter high-fantasy story with some Squareisms tossed in (Moogles, Chocobos). It's not the first fairly boring story (FFV was very much along the same lines, and FFVIII was boring to me, but maybe a little more interesting, VI, VII, and X are fairly strong IMO).
-The characters. The characters are all very very flat and lacking depth, similar to the story
-The music. The music is also very ho-hum. FF has a tradition of memorable music, even among other games in the series I wasn't crazy about. FFXII consists of fairly generic background music with some hints of remixes of some of their staple music from the past. I have some FF tracks play on occasion in my car, but nothing from XII appeals.

All in all it feels like they wanted to make a generic western RPG with little story and heavy inspiration from the popular MMORPGs, but done very well graphically.

This is the first single-player FF series title in a long time I think I'll pass on buying.

Bleh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the GAMEPLAY and STORY envelopes were pushed to the limit for Square back with FFVI.

Pushing the PS2 architecture

[zsazsa]

Unfortunately the article really doesn't say how they pushed the PS2 architecture. Before clicking I was looking forward to an article like this amazing presentation by the SOTC dev team [edusworld.org] that really goes in depth to how they implemented the amazing effects on the PS2. Instead, we get this about the development, in its entirety: "The graphics were created using the power of the PlayStation 2 fully," Akihiko Yoshida, character designer for Final Fantasy XII, told us. "We believe that this is probably the limit of how beautiful the graphics can get on the PlayStation 2 console.". Is there anything more in depth than this miniscule blurb?

Speaking of which, does this game look better than Shadow of the Colossus? Or does it look about as good but actually has a decent frame rate?