This is the requisite “Final Fantasy 12 impressions” post.
Yes, I picked it up at midnight Monday night. No, I didn’t get to play much that night. I’m about 5 hours in now, still a bit in the hand-holding stage of the game, I’m thinking (new things keep getting added to the menus). I may be the only one who’s a bit annoyed with the voice actor for Vaan, but then again my first impression of the VA for Tidus in FFX was annoyance, but he grew on me. The cutscenes are of course, very well done.
As for the actual game mechanics, the worries I had after playing the demo that came with Dragon Quest VIII are gone now. I figured out the problem: in the demo, you get thrown in to the system, and it’s overwhelming and confusing. The Gambit system seems like needless hand-holding to those of us familiar with traditional RPGs. But then as I was playing the actual game, the gradual learning experience as things go on make it seem easier to understand and use. Also, the interface is everything I’d want in an RPG. The world map is done in a style similar to WoW, where the map slowly reveals as you travel on it, and you can view any map of any place you’ve previously visited in the world through the menu. (Or some places, you can get the full map from an item.) When you view your inventory, there are little dots next to each item showing which of your characters can equip each item, and which currently have it equipped. And thankfully, for a disc-based game, the menu comes up nice and fast. If it doesn’t, that can be a death knell to a game. (Playstation version of Chrono Trigger, I’m looking at you.) And the whole system has a unique stylized look that is clean, new and easy to read.
The whole license system is annoying if you don’t know exactly which tile has what on it, and have to haphazardly move in the general direction to find the tile that lets you use the item you just found. Although this system seems to lend itself well to one of my favorite pasttimes: maxing out every character to be able to do every skill.
/jealousy
I have been playing it and thought the controls were confusing. Kinda reminded me of Vangrant Story for some reason.. but yeah this game cinemas is pretty and epic.
It reminds you of Vagrant Story because boh games shared the same director, Yasumi Matsuno. Well technically Matsuno only did about half of FF12 before he left for mysterious reasons…
omg i drove around trying to kill time the other night to wait around for midnight but i realized i had to be up at 5am and went home. but i have it NOWWWW!!! sweet sweet ff12 i’m glad you’re liking it so far; i was going to watch the bonus dvd first but i’m too excited now to just play it!!! whoo hoo!
I’m sure there are plenty of licence boards in jp version websites (if ppl haven’t made ones from the us version already… hell I think even I made one long long ago, though I never really did what I was going to do with that ff12 site…) But yeah, apparently the nastiest of the mobs really requires you to have lv99 chars (which means everyone will have their grids maxed out long before it) and therefore you end up with everyone being able to do anything (much like ff3 and ff5, and to a certain extent ff7 and ff8)…
Oh yeah, come to think I stopped my ff12 a couple dungeons before the last one way back in may or so… I really should at least finish up the main storyline… >.>
FFXII is greatness.. though I knew that back when the JP version came out ‘cuz I played it for a while. ^^ There are charts for the license grid if you really must look.. I actually find it pretty intuitive and you really only need licenses for items you’ve purchased/found so just get the ones you need. 🙂
I’m a little bummed it doesn’t run off of my HDD Loader.. copy protection I guess.. I want faster loading though ‘cuz I’m super spoiled now.