This post is by guest blogger Aramis.
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Tags: ps2, rpg
So I finally got around to playing the much-reviled demo for Final Fantasy XII and unfortunately I can kind of see what everyone’s griping about. Normally when I read angry internet nerds* I figure they’re getting worked up over essentially nothing. When a respected source is telling me the same thing though, I’m a bit more apt to take notice. Not to say I always agree with Tycho, but he’s definitely a voice I respect so I decided to hunt down a demo disc and give it a spin. I’ll refrain from hyperbole: the game as it appears on that whirling torus is neither “jank” nor “the stank.” It is, however, not your grandma’s Final Fantasy (which probably involved a more resilient Polident).
Ivalice, a world we last visited in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, the excellent (if overlong) Gameboy Advance game, is at war. If we’ve learned anything from recent history it’s that war is messy. The Judges, the Viera, the Bangaa, and of course the clever and cuddly Moogles all remain from the Ivalice of old, but gone are the precision orchestrated strikes against enemies arrayed as upon a chessboard of battle. Examined through the lens of modern guerilla warfare, FFXII’s Gambit system of auto-battling character AI and the loose, real-time brawling of the Vagrant Story-inspired combat style makes sense. Which is not to say it’s great fun to play.
Who’s a cute moogle? Yes you are, yes you are.Let’s not kid ourselves here, if you’re a FF diehard, you’re going to buy this game–hell, I’ll probably get it for Christmas–but just know that unless you adjust your expectations you’re almost guaranteed to end up disappointed. The graphics are lovely, if unremarkably so, and the plot looks to be the typical labyrinthine soap opera of plucky heroes, overwhelming odds and unwieldy romantic dialog. In other words, the same old Fantasy. The hotly debated issue in every new installment, the only thing that seems to matter, is the fightin’: active versus passive, real-time versus turn-based, random encounters versus pre-arranged rendezvous. Which will it be?
The worry is justifiable. Combat is the central mechanic behind every Final Fantasy game, the thing you spend the most time doing in game, and FFXII’s feels unpolished and ill-conceived. The environments they’ve created don’t even feel set up to take advantage of the more fluid combat they’re attempting. It’s as if they tried to approach Zelda’s gripping first-person sword-in-your hand combat from the other direction. They’ve got the in-your-face clash of steel and sting of sorcery feel, but you might as well be a butterfly flapping your wings to cast Bolt3 for all the sense of control it feels like you have over the characters’ actions.
Today on Bungee Jumping Off a Dinosaur…Games that do give us a large measure of control over our wins and losses tend to elicit a stronger emotional response from us, both when we win and when we lose, because everything rides on us. FFXII’s combat (both in Wait and Active mode) wrests that control from our eager hands and makes the victories and losses primarily the characters’ doing. Yes, you programmed that character’s AI, but there are so many levels of abstraction between you and that swinging sword that paradoxically, even though combat constantly threatens to teeter into a sloppy punch-up more akin to a bar fight than a planned attack, you end up feeling less engaged, not more, less like an active participant in that scuffle and more like some tool safely outside the bar, full of bravado and empty words of encouragement.
* As an internet nerd I’m allowed to say this. :-p