Final Fantasy XII Pushes Envelopes 132
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.
of course it is the best now... (Score:1)
Pushing the envelope, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Still, FF7 was no Xenogears. Not the most graphically advanced RPG like FF9 or ChronoCross, but WOW, what a game!
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It's actually the gameplay folks are talking about (Score:2)
As someone who's spent many hours into the game so far, as well as read a multitude of reviews and opinions, I can definately tell you that it's the gameplay that's getting the most attention. It's a vast change from the traditional Final Fantasy games, and a lot closer to its MMO sibling. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the new Gambit system and such (you can read more abo
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Also boring (Score:3, Interesting)
Battles are horribly boring. Auto attack, who in the world decided upon that? Hey, you there, attack those guys! I'll just sit back and heal...
If they had included auto healing as well, the only thing the player would need to do is walk around between way points!
Re:Also boring (Score:4, Informative)
Ally:HP Cure
Will automatically heal any hurt party member.
I personally find the battle system fun. Now unless the sh*t hits the fan, I can just let the system handle it. Honestly for non-boss fights, why do you want to be hitting the same instructions over and over?
The other thing they have done is add in nasty high level monsters mixed with the easy ones in some areas. Since the fights aren't random, you can see them coming but if you don't pay attention or just assume you can kill it, Game Over.
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Re:Also boring (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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I've played a number of jRPGs in my day, and in the FF series the gameplay in XII is easily my favorite.
I've been spoiled lately by other developers like Game Arts (Grandia series) and Tri-Ace (Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Radiata Stories) and their game's lack of random battles. As a result, I've come to grow very sick of games that still use these archaic sys
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Graphics that great? (Score:2, Interesting)
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FFXII is pushing the envelop, but showing age. (Score:5, Interesting)
Overall FFXII is visually impressive but coming out when it did it's showing just how weak the PS2 is to the next gen systems, and totally invalidating Sony's claim that it could have lasted 10 years. It could only have lasted that if people didn't care about graphics and they do. Early Gamecube games looked on par with some of FFXII's graphics and even first gen 360 games easily smoked it.
That all being said FFXII is an incredible game, and that's coming from a guy who really hasn't liked a Final Fantasy game since FFVI. It breathes new life into the game while retaining the same style setting it always had. If it wasn't for Gears of War, FFXII would be the only thing I'm playing. Both Gears of war and Final Fantasy XII are worthy of all the praise they have gotten as one is the final "great" game. And Gears is one of the first of the new generation.
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If you enjoyed Vagrant Story... (Score:5, Interesting)
Gabe from Penny-Arcade has a review of his first 20 hours with the game that I think is spot on.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/show/21973 [penny-arcade.com]
This game does for Final Fantasy what Resident Evil 4 did for Resident Evil - it reinvents itself and succeeds in surpassing its predecessors in nearly every way.
so does the post office... (Score:5, Funny)
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...and the box/case art is sad (Score:2)
Perhaps it's only the local copies, but something seems horribly wrong. If it weren'
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For myself, perhaps suffering from nostalgia, there is room enough for both systems.
Where does it push them? (Score:2, Funny)
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Of course not. Not including meaningless battles would be better. Automating meaning
Right. (Score:1, Insightful)
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 th
Actually not... (Score:2)
What if you hate square-enix? (Score:2)
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2. The story is the best I've seen in a FF game since FF Tactics.
3. Your character is railroaded, but in a slig
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My thoughts on XII (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
FFXII on PS3 (Score:2)
Does anyone know if FFXII will look better being played on a PS3 than on a PS2?
Given the Lik-Sang shutdown by Sony, I have a fair amount of hatred stored up for them, so I'm still wavering on if I'm going to buy a PS3 or not.
Pushing envelopes? (Score:5, Funny)
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I feel that the battle system and the music in FFXII are superb. One of the most annoying aspects of random encounters is that they break up the music. The new system lets y
Bleh. (Score:1, Insightful)
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There are other ways to improve combat.... (Score:2)
1) Instead of making hundreds of repetitive battles against less skilled enemies, why not make fewer battles against more difficult enemies where you are not guaranteed to win every time?
2) Make the battles more like FF Tactics, where you incorporate positioning. Instead of Fire1/Fire2/Fire3 have a mass range fireball vs a controlled stream of fire with the differences being the area of effect. Incorporate flanking at
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Dragon Warrior isn't Square's franchise, but Enix's, and hasn't changed much based on what I've seen of the previous games... I played DW7, and got the same feeling you had. Guess that's why they named the series "Drag On, Warrior"... It wouldn't have been as bad if at least the combat system was halfway interesting,
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This is rather disappointing as at one time Sony said the PS3 would up-scale PS2 game graphics, giving them a HD-boost. But alas, it seems this was just another pipe dream from Sony.
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Re:What if you hate square-enix? (Score:3, Informative)
So basically, instead of traditional J-RPGs where you're just micro-managing actions, you are managing strategies. Instead of saying, "Oh, character X is hurt, time for me to have character Y heal them", it is now, "Oh, I should have this character do all of the healing, and let my other guys just focus on damage."
Can't really answer that for you, since story is obviously subjective. That said, it is FAR more story intensive (albeit linear) than a game like Oblivion. I haven't played NWN2 yet myself, so I can't compare against that game. As some other folks have mentioned, the game and plot are a lot like Square's lesser-known titles, Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. And I think that's a very good thing, since it's much more mature than your typical "stop the evil bad guy, save the world" fluff.
Surprisingly, yes. I can't say enough good things about the License Board system. It's a weird mechanic and not really realistic ("I have to have a license to wear a hat?" is a common complaint), but it allows you to do customize your party very differently than how others may have.
For example, my friend and I are playing through the game, and we've set each character up with a completely different arche-type. Some of the bad ass warriors in my party, are spell-slinging mages in his. And neither of us appear to be punished for doing so, as the difficulty appears to have remained the same. That's amazing.
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FF XII is not the best the PS2 will ever look. It's worse graphically than games like Jak2 (came out 3 years ago) which used techniques like super-sampled antialiasing, tri-linear mipmapping, full day-night cycles, no loading times, vehicle physics (albeit annoying at times), and all at mostly 60 frames per
re: battle system (Score:1)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/show/21973// [penny-arcade.com]
FFXII = Spiritual successor to FF Tactics? (Score:2)
For those of us who happened to love FFT, I'll go out on a limb and say that we are all loving the changes in FFXII. I like how the story is a lot more mature. I wouldn't say it's "boring", just a lot less flamboyent and in-your-face fantasy than some of the other FF games. The music, is a lot like the other FFT titles, which I am diggi
Re:It's actually the gameplay folks are talking ab (Score:1)
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It won't. There is no added content to be unlocked by a PS3. In fact it may look worse (inconsistant framerate) depending on if they use emulation or not.
Re:It's actually the gameplay folks are talking ab (Score:1)
And that's why I am enjoying it so much. I have always hated the random battles of the FF series: walking along in a completely empty area, and then suddenly a monster materializes out of thin air. This new approach makes far more sense to me. If there is a giant monster out there, it makes sense that I can acutally see the thing first.
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I'll probably stay away from Vagrant Story then, because as much as I absolutely love FF12, it's musical score is probably the weakest link. I'm a big prog head, and Uematsu's scores actually started me playing video games in the first place... I just miss the classical/rock fusion that Uematsu brought to the genre. Hamouzu did a great job doing similarly fuzed work, but with his own style, during FFX, and I was really hoping he'd take the reigns for FF12. FF12s score, while "pretty" just seems a bit "safe"
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Unlike the PS2 and Xbox 360, the PS3 does not do any enhancements in backwards compatibility mode. How it looks on the PS2 is how it'll look on the PS3. There's no free upscaling to 720p or 1080p or free FSAA like the Xbox 360 does with Xbox games, no texture filtering like the PS2 does for PS1 games, etc. Just the same old PS2 game being played on the same old PS2 hardware embedded inside the PS3 (that's what the slim PST
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Pushing the PS2 architecture (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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Well, honestly, FF12 is impossible to compare to any of the previous final fantasies (the ones you love, and the ones you don't like), or Kingdom Hearts (which I thought, blew as well, btw), or Dragon Quest 8. The "streamlined battle system", that you talk about, makes the full game much MORE strategic than the rest of the series, instead of being a button masher, it becomes more like a small-scope RTS. You become the "manager" of your party, not so much the invisible hand.
Actually, the closest thing I ca
Annoying article (Score:2)
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2 - Think the politics of Final Fantasy Tactics without the religious tie-in. It's an "us vs. the empire" story that isn't just about you chasing after a madman like in Final Fantasy VI, you're actually working towards kicking the empire out and establish
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Gabe from Penny Arcade answers many of your questions about it on this page. [penny-arcade.com]
Final Fantasy X was a pretty good game IMO. I'm hoping I enjoy this one at least as much. Though I did like Dragon Quest 8 quite a bit so my opinion probably doesn't count much for you
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It's a shame too, since the PS3 has been in developer's hands for so long, they should be able to release a PS3 version at the same time.
Uhm (Score:1)
A for effort (Score:2)
I give this game an 'A' for effort.
I have been a diehard fan of the series for several years. I started playing Final Fantasy titles on the SNES when I was kid, and I watched the series have its ups and downs. Looking back on them, I have to say that I started playing the series right around its peak (VI being my favorite title, followed strongly by VII). I liked the other games a lot too, but I could tell that the series was floundering. Each new installment had something great about it, but also some
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Dream Theater owns. And apparently, so does the new Final Fantasy. To be honest, I didn't get into FFX-2 (it's probably been played all of 2 hours so far) so I was holding my breath on XII...
I keep hearing this point being made (Score:2)
Played it in Japan, burned out 30 hours in (Score:4, Interesting)
I notice one of TFAs says there is no main character, which is more or less true -- I was equally bored with all of them. The only time one shows a spark of that old Square spirit is when Air Pirate says, ironically, "I'll tell you who I am: I am the main character of this story!" And for a brief period of perhaps 15 seconds I was thinking "Alright, I have passed the boring prologue, now we are going to get to some ADVENTURE". Nope.
It was about 10 years ago when I played FFVI for the first time, and you can see how low Square has fallen in the plot and memorable character department. Compare Air Pirate Dude with Edgar. The very first time you meet Edgar, he shows more panache than the entire party has in the time I've played FFXII. I remember his lines from a decade ago ("First, I'm captivated by your beauty. Second, I'm dying to know if I'm your type. I suppose your... abilities are a distant third consideration.") FFXII, I swear, its been maybe two months and I would have to wrack my brains to dredge up anything related to the plot or characters. Marle? Marsh? Whoseherface, the princess. I remember her skill readout like it was yesterday (I was aiming for white mage with a sword). Can't remember a thing she ever said.
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Re:wow, let's have everyone open up a can of hate. (Score:2)
If I do get sick of the FFs I'll move over to BoF IV before hitting Wild Arms and then Suikoen 1 and 2. Then I might get me some Kartia.
I've got 5 other games on the PSX that I've never completed, and after all these years I do want to complete. And I enjoy every single one of them (school and "teh latest game" often got in the way of finishing
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Feh, Square is like Apple (Score:1, Troll)
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MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
You answered that nagging question for me. It does indeed have a very similar feel. I had no idea it was made by the same design team, but it totally makes sense.
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Oh, do they ever. After I first got gambits (the things that streamline battle) I ran amok in the sewers, killing and maiming far faster than I had been. I leveled about three or four times before I came down from my high and realized I should probably, y'know, advance the plot. So I go where I was supposed to... and enter my first real boss fight with Firemane. "Ha ha!" I thou
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FFXII is a brilliant game, and so was FFVI. Get over yourself.
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That right there is key, it might be the best a PS2 can do but that's not as good as the prettier games of any console that has come out after it... I also think it's a joke that TFA uses "screen-shots" from the Pre-rendered video cut scenes as an example of how good it looks... aren't we beyond that kind of stuff at this point? If you're going to brag about how good the game looks, I don't know, maybe show some pictures of the actual game.
I think that graphically even the best the PS2
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My impressions (Score:2)
I just wanted to comment about the battle system here though.
I get what they were trying to accomplish with the gambit system, but from the comments here it doesn't seem that every does.
The gambit system enables you to come up with a strategy for the entire party. It allows you to automate all the repetitive commands you do *every* fight, while still giving you the freedom to c
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Personally, I never could figure out why they didn't borrow the battle system from Chrono Trigger for use in the FF series. The random battles in FFVII (and more or less in the rest of the FF series, but FFVII was definitely my favorite) was probably the only thing I didn't like about the game. The battle system I did like.
But if there's no excellent story, no excellent m
I would go ahead and call it... (Score:1)
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http://www.zophar.net/psf/VagrantStory_psf.rar [zophar.net]
Here is the Vagrant Story soundtrack - give it a listen! The Firefly forest sticks out in my head, along with the 5 track opening sequence. The reason I mentioned 12's music as a plus is that it has a lot of overtones and nuances that invoke a great bit of VS nostalgia for me. I'm a huge Uematsu fan too, and I agree with your comments on 12's
Graphics (Score:2)
What a silly objection (Score:2)
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I can understand it would have been a challenge to program in soft resets (there are alot of game objects in each crash scenario to reset) without doing the easy thing and just reloading the assets off the disc but it would have been worth it. If you want to
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