FF XII

[niko]

Well, I've been playing Final Fantasy for more than a week now, and I have to say... not terribly impressed.  It's not horrible by any means.  There are some aspects that I thought I would loathe that have proven to be no big deal.  But there are equally several aspects that I expected *love* that have left me a bit cold.  So far, we're solidly in "Meh." territory on all fronts, with a general sense that it could've used a few more months of development to polish things up and give them the usual Final Fantasy shine.

COMBAT
I expected to hate the pseudo-real-time combat, but I don't mind it, actually. With the variety of speeds and the ability to pause the action when commands are input, it's not as hard as it could've been. Plus I really like the chaining effect. 

But I find the whole combat process is much less engaging, overall.  So much of it is just "Point your group at a monster and wait for the dust to settle."  Lather. Rinse. Repeat.  There's no real sense of accomplishment or connection to what the characters are doing - it's just getting a nuisance out of the path.  And since I've needed to spend much more time leveling in this game than usual, it really becomes something of a slog, especially combined with the way the camera angles all make me feel like I have tunnel vision.  It makes even the most sprawling locales feel like a long, boring dungeon crawl because you can't get a feel for the true scope of the space.

LICENSING
I'm not one to get keyed up over fine-tuning every little nuance of my characters, so I can take or leave the license board.  It serves its purpose just fine, and the game seems to dole out LP points generously enough that I haven't had a problem with needing to ration them or anything.

I do think that they could have polished things up to reduce all the micro-managing that has to happen.  It's such a pain getting new equipment, going in to equip it, realizing the person doesn't have the right license, going back out to get the license, and then coming back in again.  The store interface, too, makes it hard to sort out which equipment is actually better/worse for a given character, since you see don't have a way to filter for just particular types of weapons.  If your character only uses swords, you need to scroll through umpteen items and pick out just the swords (out of a good ten or more weapon classes) and then figure out which of those is better than the one he already has.  (And if more than one are, there's even more scrolling up and down to figure out which has the higher attack numbers.)  Overall, it's just a much less efficient interface than I've come to expect from a Final Fantasy game.

STORY/CHARACTERS
This is where I'm feeling a bit disappointed.  I'm hoping it'll get better, but so far, I don't see what all the fuss is about.  Sure, we've got some nice shades of gray to some of the "bad guys" this time around, but I'm not finding the political angle all that compelling.

Which is sad, because there are some good building blocks here.  I really like all of the characters.  When various characters from the prologue started appearing, I was appropriately thrilled.  (I'd taken events in the prologue at face value and hadn't been spoiled on who the playable characters were.)  But once the whole team have settled in for the long haul, they don't seem to be doing anything to expand on them at all, except for a relationship developing between Vaan and Ashe for no apparent reason.

As with the other areas, the storyline is nice enough, but I expect *better* than "nice enough" from a Final Fantasy game.  They've got great material, but the execution is just sort of lackluster.  Disappointing.