Final Fantasy XII

The credits are currently rolling on the other exceptionally long item I've been working on to start the year- Square Enix's Final Fantasy XII. That's right, I'm now halfway through the twelve-game series (skipping MMOs). And as far as I can tell, this is the one that has strayed furthest from the established formula. Tons of changes were made, and while some of them caused controversy from die-hards, I think they were necessary. I mean, how long can the company put new stories over unchanged gameplay and keep the whole thing fresh? Well, let's take a look at the big ones, one by one. First, the story. Rather than going for the typical "band of misfits vs the ultimate evil", a more politically charged story was used. The citizens of Dalmasca, a small kingdom caught in between two huge feuding nations, seek peace, causing a small group to seek help from both sides in order to prevent a war. It's hardly some great story, but measure it up against the bare-bones early games and the angst-heavy more recent installments, and it suddenly looks Shakespearean. Second big change, the license system. Maybe it was due to my familiarity with the Sphere Grid from FFX, but it wasn't all that hard for me to figure out what was going on. Basically, for every enemy you kill, you get a certain amount of experience (leveling up works the same as pre-FFX games) but you also get a small number (usually just 1) of license points as well. Each character then can spend these license points to buy licenses- 30 license points might buy you the ability to use a new sword, or a new magic spell, or maybe a gambit slot (more on that later). This doesn't mean a character suddenly has the item available to use- you still need to find or buy the weapon or spell, and also have the license to use it. This might sound overly complicated, but I should note that I never felt limited by it- I rarely had an item but not enough license points to use it. It also gave the beginning of the game a bit of guidance- a character who started out with a gun would probably upgrade to another gun when the time came. Later on in the game I found that most of my license boards started looking exactly the same- when i bought a powerful weapon for one character, I usually liked it so much that I bought it for the rest as well and everyone ended up in basically the same situation. Anyway it certainly requires a good deal of time and research, but overall I felt like the license board helped more than it hurt. And now we get to the big one- the overhauled combat system. First of all, no random encounters. You walk up to an enemy and attack it with no transition into a battle scene. This also means that you control just one of the three active characters. The other two characters (and the one you're controlling, if you want) are controlled by a system of "gambits". Gambits are essentially a bunch of if-then statements designed to simulate how you'd play if you were controlling the character yourself. For instance, if a character's HP dipped below 50%, you might want to give them a potion. Now you can set a character up to use a potion whenever that situation occurs. At the start of the game you can only use a few customized gambits, meaning the game won't exactly play itself, but later in the game when grinding becomes a must you can set up gambits in a way that let you grind level after level by simply moving from enemy to enemy without pressing any buttons. I know Stan wasn't a fan of this, as he likes inputting an action for each character in his turn-based combat, but I really enjoyed this setup. It's less active, sure, but to me it was more fun deciding how to set up gambits and then see how they worked than to manually press "attack" over and over. This also led to a godsend of a cheat I found online- with the right setup of gambits against the right enemy, you could literally turn off your tv and go to sleep while your characters keep leveling up. Of course this calls into question why grinding is really necessary in the first place if it can be this mindless, but that's always going to be a part of rpgs I guess. There were other changes as well- finally you can rotate the camera, Cid is suddenly not an ally (did they do this in any other games?), and the super-fun limit breaks known as quickening chains. So as far as I can tell, this is actually pretty far from your typical Final Fantasy game. But whatever. As you can tell from my post, I enjoyed it very much. It's hard to tell where I'd place it among the ones I've played so far, but a true rankings won't come til I complete the six other non MMOs in the main series, including two of the consensus best games of all time. Can't wait.