Thursday, March 08, 2007

Final Fantasy XII

I promised myself I wouldn't do any more game reviews for the blog for two reasons:

1) Opinions on the internet.
2) Going on about how great other games are sort of highlights the amateur status of my own ideas.

However, my month-long obsession with this title warranted an article, simply because I've been unable to play or think about anything else. As a huge fan of all the Final Fantasy titles, I can safely say that this is my favorite.

Rather than go on about the graphics (amazing, but FF games are always top notch in this department) or music (again, amazing, especially the epic boss themes) or even the story (which is pretty standard) I'll concentrate on what makes this FF stand out above others.

First of all I should mention the battle system. While the manual introduces the game's combat as "the brand new Active Dimension Battle system", it's actually more a progression of Vagrant Story's strategic real-time combat and the real-time battle systems of a few other FF titles, notably FFXI (and many modern MMORPGs in general come to think of it) and FF:Crystal Chronicles. Making the game considerably more interesting than the usual endless chain of random encounters, players are now allowed to go where they want and take down the opponents they choose. You can often just go exploring the entire continent instead of following the next story goal, levelling yourself up to become inhumanly powerful and finding all sorts of hidden bosses and areas. You can follow the game's Hunting subquest which rewards you for taking down powerful monsters, or look for secret Espers (monsters you can summon) or even kill specific amounts of common enemies to learn secret information about new items, background on the areas/maps in the game or just jokey anecdotes in and about the world of Ivalice. Non-linearity of this scope in a Final Fantasy game is a new and welcome change.

The two new much-lauded features of FFXII are Gambits and the License Board. Gambits are a brilliant way to introduce configurable AI strategies for your characters to automatically follow in the field. It ranges from simple commands such as attacking the closest enemy and healing when low on health up to those such as casting Cure spells on undead enemies, using Potions on characters if you have more than 10 left, casting high-level black magic on your own characters when they have Reflect on them... The system allows for some amazingly complex planning and allows you to sit back and watch your stratagems go to work. Best of all, the game frequently introduces new Gambits as either treasures or buyable items, allowing you to test the waters with the simple modifiers before diving right into the more complex set-ups. Or you can ignore the Gambits and direct the characters manually if you so choose.

The License Board is less innovative though. It's basically FFX's Sphere Grid dumbed down a little using the old standard of Ability Points to direct your characters' developments. Like the Sphere Grid, you can choose the direction of how you want a character to grow; either using the old job system as a rough guide (a "warrior" character might acquire weapons and strength boosts and forgo magic) or abandoning it altogether. Unlike the Sphere Grid, all six playable characters start in the same place pretty much, so right at the start you have full command over who should become the short range fighters, the healers, mages, thieves and so on. Special areas of the License Board allow characters to learn Summonings and unique moves called "Quickenings" (nothing to do with beheading Immortals), these squares are then removed from everyone else's boards forcing you to develop your characters uniquely so they can all work towards acquiring their own seperate Quickenings at the edges and corners of the License Board.

Quickenings (which are the game's version of Limit Breaks - a classic FF staple) are controlled in a fast-paced mini-game of sorts where you quickly (hence the name?) follow one Quickening attack with another, and continue the chain for as long as possible. Damage is usually random, so one or two Quickenings may end up doing far less damage than even a normal attack and since they drain all your magic away such a result would be very bad indeed. Of course, getting a chain up into the 10s and 20s may end up destroying the boss in one hit, so it's a choice you may want to consider. Again, this make-or-break super-attack system is another example of FFXII giving players choices, instead of making the Limit Breaks mandatory if you want to take down a particularly difficult boss like with previous 3D FF games (spamming Renzokuken with Squall in FF8, for example).

I guess I'll finish by saying how the world of Ivalice is really starting to become a welcome "home" for the FF universe; the races and history of the world are fairly constant but the games are all different enough to stop it from being too overplayed. The new Summons are all bosses from FFT (a game I love which has a lot in common with FFXII) while the old summons (Shiva, Ifrit et al) cameo as the names of the gigantic airships of the token evil empire. FFTA is closely linked with this game too, bringing that annoying moogle commander Montblanc and most of the game's inventory across.

It remains an indefinable pleasure that FFXII is trying new things and a whole new battle system while still maintaining that innate FF charm and playability. I suspect I'll be playing it for quite a while longer.