"I'm Still Waiting for that Piece of My Life Back"

My Soul Feels Ripped Off

Final Fantasy XII is to me, the biggest letdown of the entire year. It proves yet again what most hardcore gamers are too afraid to realize, that the endless massacre of (often innocent) monsters for no god damned reason is boring as hell. Final Fantasy XII was what I thought to be Square Enix's chance to finally show the potential of these mindless hack and slash MMO (albeit gone offline) games given a properly trained staff of highly dedicated individuals. I was so terribly wrong.

Unlike some people, I really wanted to like this game. In fact, just because of the series' reputation I sat down to give this game an extremely decent try. We're talking about a guy who has been playing this game for a grand total of over 105 hours of pain. Unfortunately, the game has still not been so kind enough to return the little piece of my soul that it ripped away during that time. I think I am pissed.

I didn't have any negative opinion in particular when I first heard about the ideas behind this game, in fact, I purposely didn't read any material whatsoever on it in order to not ruin my experience. In fact, I should really call what I had as a big giant surprise. Afterall, FFXII is all about surprises. Of course, in the beginning you realize you are actually being entertained because everything is new and fresh and fun, however after a few hours in you start to realize that what's actually going on is that you've been having a really bad dream about eating whole piles of chocolate pudding only to violently awake with a spoon up your ass. Oh boy.

What I was expecting was a decent game from a decent RPG company. What I got was something so insidiously manipulative and disgusting that I want to run this game over with a car, again. I barely think the hour of my life it's going to take to write this review can ever actually accurately depict the level of shameless manipulation and sheer lack of creativity that I found in this game. However for the sake of the huge amount of money sunk into this RPG, I will try to point out its finer features along with everything else I absolutely despise.

Story: 0/10
It all begins here. I am placing a lot of weight on this catagory because I always believed that the Final Fantasy series was one of the last surviving series of games that believed that a game's story was just as important as the gameplay that housed it. And so I have no problem saying that this is possibly one of the worst and most disappointing stories ever made. FFXII's story can be summarized by the same 3 words that explain the entire basis behind scientology “full of ***t”. All the characters go through barely any character development and were very obviously designed to please little teenage fangirls and fanboys that really don't give a flying crap about what these strangely dressed people are talking about (believe me, whatever the hell they put in there, it still ends up as “deep”). Every single character is beyond cliche in appearance and personality, and while the game does try to create that little bit of character development and mystery early on, about an hour into the game it completely shuts down and turns into an offline MMORPG with a sad pointless story, which you will begin to hate immediately. During my whole 105+ hours of playing this game to completion I must say there was a lot of expection built up for the final areas of the game to reward me for all the hours of my life wasted playing it but no game has ever been so unfulfilling. Final Fantasy XII contains in my opinion, the absolute worst game ending, last boss, and last dungeon in the entire series (as well as quest rewards). I was so angry at the pathetic ending that I can say with finality that I will never ever play or touch this game again. By the 90th hour of playing this game I wanted to punch the screen every time a certain character's face showed up. Of course, in all irony FFXII is probably the lengthiest Final Fantasy game to date. Unfortunately this has only compounded my problem that every time I even hear a "certain" character breathe I want to punch something usually harder than my fist. FFXII's story is weak and in its later moments will annoy the living crap out of you due to the lameness of the entire thing. Diablo's "story" most definitely eats this game alive. Hell, even Dungeon Siege's story beat the living crap out of this lifesucking dialogue and the premise behind THAT game consisted of kicking the crap out of super deadly ass monsters just because it so happened that "you were there, whoops". Oh yeah, and I forgot to say boatloads of ideas were ripped straight from FFVI, a much greater game than this pile of trash. That's not to say Square Enix can't ripoff their own game, it's just that SO much has been ripped. For gods sakes the ending music from FFVI is the INTRO music to FFXII, is NOTHING sacred anymore? Believe me, if you play this game there'll be many more desecrations to follow.

Gameplay: 2/10
I have nothing against the battle system. In fact, in the beginning I actually liked what they had going. Although the system gives the game a very "Diabloish" kind of feel, technically the failure of the gameplay stems mostly from the major consequences of the very same thing. FFXII was simply turned into an offline MMORPG complete with the err...“great” story that every MMO advertises but never delivers. The consequences of turning FFXII into a Diablo type game were very dire however. This is mainly because most game developers are so unintelligent that they do not realize how truly agonizing the act of "grinding" really is. You see, "grinding" is a term used for any repetitive and completely boring action that a player must go through in a game for no other purpose than attaining higher levels and better items. These game developers are often under the impression that since so many.....dedicated people "grind" anyways that it is "ok" to include this into their game. In fact many developers actually incorporate features that make grinding incredibly more time consuming and unrewarding for no other reason other than to shamelessly increase the length of time it takes to play through their game. Unfortunately FFXII is such a game. Although at the same time the designers really tried to help you speed this grind fest a little, the fact remains that never in a final fantasy game have I ever been forced to grind and for the first time ever I must say that the casual gamer MUST grind in order to beat this game without it becoming too difficult. No longer can you just play the game by only progressing through the story line. In fact, many story areas are complete grindfests in themselves that force you to kill thousands upon thousands of uninteresting boring monsters to move forward. Often the player will find himself totally out of money and will be forced to grind up this money if he is to stand any decent chance at defeating the bosses and monsters in the storyline. Speaking of storyline, the way your average day will work in FFXII will be to enter an important area, your characters will talk some pointless cliche banter for a couple seconds, you will then proceed through a pointlessly HUGE area killing thousands of monsters before reaching your destination, your characters will start talking smack again, then you finally get kick some generic boss' ass, and lastly you haul your ass back to some town to sell the millions of useless pieces of loot you picked up on your way MMORPG style before heading off to the next story area. Repeat this millions of times and you get utter crap (you also get this game). Apparently Square Enix changed their motto to “grindelicious” or something equally life destroying considering that there is SO much wasted space in this game. Huge sprawling areas with absolutely nothing going on in them other than the slaughter of mostly innocent animals (they also made your run speed is horribly slow for kicks). It is clear that Square Enix's new battle mode could have had so much more potential, however instead they chose to include no innovative or exciting moves whatsoever and make all attacks and magicks very generic and repetitive in nature. Also, Square Enix has also used their new fast and furious battle-mode (not that fast actually) as an excuse to throw you into 128321891237 more battles than you would have entered had they kept the old random battle system. As a consequence battles feel much less epic and duller in comparison. Oh, and just for the record, one huge gamebreaker is the fact that there are actually bosses with excess of 8 000 000 Hp when damage is still capped at 9999 (you probably won't be getting here) for most attacks. Yes, all this is to say that even bosses can become massive grinds now that many difficult enemies will typically take an hour and a half or more to defeat (worst case scenario: 4 hours fighting the same boss = I'm never touching this game again).

On top of grindfest 2007, FFXII also introduces what can only described as the lamest character development system I have ever seen. Lame being the operative word. Unfortunately down at Square Enix they just don't learn. They have something called a "license board", which is about as lame as the card rule system that showed up in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (which they ripped the crap out of, no surprise there). The way this board works is that you have to attain a license to use every sword, armor, move and spell in the game. Basically it's as if you needed permission to swing a sword, look around, or even breathe for that matter. Good god, this licensing bs would have been a good reason to have a certain chronic asthma sounding character shot, but unfortunately the developers were too busy being proud of this garbage to provide even that one bit of kindness. In any case, the license board is very easy to understand. You get your item, then you proceed to go find its required license on each character's board in order to use it. I still don't understand why they bothered to put this in when license points (points required to acquire each license) are infinite and extremely easy to get when you kill monsters. You'll usually never run out of these if you haven't been busy running from everything in the game (running is also nearly useless and will get you killed more than in any FF game). No more linking materia slots up for deadly combos or learning cool new spells from espers. Instead what we have here is what I call the spoiler board, and a morally bankrupt one at that. The problem with a board like this is that you can always see the cool new weapon/armor just beyond the licenses you already have. This provides incentive to go find this garbage, and as you should of learned by now, FFXII is a very unrewarding mentally damaging game.

Unrewarding. This is exactly what describes FFXII best. The way the drops and rare items in this game are set up is absolutely insidious and downright evil. You will have to grind for every single item that's worth its salt with droprates as low as 0.1% just to be sadistic. Many great items come from chests. Unfortunately nearly every chest in FFXII has been randomized with droprates even more devilish than monster drop rates. Take my advice. Save your soul. Most people who have played this game don't even touch chests anymore. Fewer still have resisted the perfect grindfest that this game is. Never before in any game has the temptation to cause massive mental agony to oneself so ridiculously great. Square Enix really pulled out all the stops on this one. Of course, fortunately they DID put in a chain system. This ups your drop rates and the rate at which rare items appear by (at max level) 500%! Up from 1%.....that is, if you kill 81 of the same monster in the row without taking any of their items. Yes that's right, this game is actually quite forgiving compared to most MMOs out there because of this one feature. Nonetheless however it is still one more feature designed to draw you out into the endless slaughterfest. 81 monsters? That's a tall order considering you'll only feel the pain of your mistake after the 82nd bad boy goes down and you actually decide to play the game. Don't even try that with saving and reloading chests, believe me. Oh, and to make things worse, FFXII is one of the worst repeat offenders of the “re-use the same enemy as a brand new one but with different colours” ever, don't even get me started on this one.

Monsters, are as usual, top notch in their weirdness level. Although they really all are clones of eachother with different skins it's usually OK to look at, as these are quality skins rather than slight variations. Monster AI has also jumped one notch up to doing pre-programmed cheap bs to get ahead to actually give players a challenge this time. Often they will have rigged moves, and gross amounts of hp, but aren't we all used to this by now? Along with a tougher monster AI there's also a rather in-depth “gambit” system included that lets you directly set up the AI of your party members so they can perform complicated situation based actions. Of course, here is another lame part of the game. The fact that gambits... or what I like to call “involuntary mind control” is actually recognized in the game by the characters and sold in shops as a normal item. In any case the system does work rather well and after a while you'll find yourself in auto-killing funland all over again. Oh boy, where have we heard this before? Yes, some people like having their finely tuned machine characters play the battles for them, but then again some don't, it all depends on how supreme of a hypocrite you are. Unfortunately though, the gambit system really is missing several key AI commands such as “perform this action once”, which can make it impossible to efficiently set up your characters to pull off moves such as “steal” efficiently in battle. Oh but don't worry, the actual killing side of the auto-killing is actually almost too efficient however. Square Enix practically made Dungeon Siege 3 before it even came out. Good job guys, I hate that game.

Graphics: 10/10
Simply magnificient. A nice change from all the rest of the entire game. These graphics are THE pinnacle in ps2 gaming and probably the main reason at this point to buy FFXII. Square Enix doesn't need to follow the rules because they have money, and there's no question where it all went. Highly detailed environments and cinematics as well as a huge number of animations and imaginative characters make up the world of Ivalice (God can they just get something original already?). Ironically, the pretty graphics were probably indirectly why the gameplay has a lack of interesting moves or features. Not to mention the entire 5 minute cutscene while my character performs a weak move syndrome is back, although not nearly as frequent as before thankfully. In any case, the graphics are simply stunning to look at. Texturing is also highly detailed of course. While these graphics don't compare to the graphics are newer consoles, they definitely are something to consider when buying this game. Particle effects are also obviously excellent, and a good reminder of Vagrant Story, a much older Square game using a somewhat similar battle system. There is a high usage of bright colours and open skies, which really gives you a nice sense of freedom, all the more reason to think it's really a shame that the rest of this game didn't fare so well.

Sound: 6/10
As usual, Square Enix doesn't travel lightly in the sound department with excellent voice-overs and sounds all around. If not for their mind-blowing (not in the good way) hyper cliche script, the character voices would of sounded excellent on their own. Voices are very varied and believable in their performances and had a great deal of potential. Ambient and battle sounds are also very pleasing to the ear. The music however, is rather generic. Without Nobuo Uematsu at the helm, there are really no excellent tracks at all in the whole game except for one, which you will never ever hear until the end. A shame really. Most tracks sound strictly like unmemorable movie tracks even though nearly every area in the game has its own unique music. Overall though, the movie music does its job well and never seems to get in the player's way (or even become noticeable at all). Definitely a functional offering to the final fantasy series at the very least.

Replayability: 1/10
Phew, I'm glad that's over.

Conclusion
You know what? On the surface, this game really does look and sound quite nice. Problem is, everything else has gone to crap. I am really very saddened that this game had such great potential but royally screwed everything up. Final Fantasy has always been about the stories, the characters, the ideas. And while it still does feel like a part of the series, the stench of a big business corporation garbage is all over it. There was no grand vision here, no great story to be heard, and that's the biggest downfall of this game. I'm surprised that along the way they managed to screw up the gameplay to hell as well. Go figure. In all actuality, the game isn't that terrible, but it's really too bad that after finishing the game, all you feel like is ripped off. If there's any Final Fantasy game out there that you feel like sitting out, make this your first.

Final Score: 3/10 (not an average)

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/07