"Mediocre offline version of FF11"

INTRO:
First things first, I am a die-hard fan of all of DQ, FF, and lately FF11. There was an underlying assumption that FF12 is the "offline" version of FF11, so I have a tremendous bias toward reviewing this came, since I've played FF11 extensively.

FIRST IMPRESSION:
There's a lot of eye-candy in this game. Lots and lots of FMV's, voice acting, etc. I really hoped they didn't go overboard and focused on the gameplay and such too but.... hmm...

GRAPHICS:
Probably the easiest thing to review. Graphics are great. It really pushes the PS2 to its limits I'm guessing. There are loads of FMV's, which may or may not be to your liking. For myself, at first the fmv's were very impressive, but later became simply redundant and annoying. There are too many FMV's for the most trivial scenes. The graphics are all-around excellent throughout the game.

SOUND:
Not too many complaints. There's a lot of variation in the musical score matching the surroundings. However, the music didn't capture me like it did in the previous FF's. I'm not sure if this was done on purpose, but the battle music seems to be tuned out, which was unfortunately the part I was most looking forward to. Not a bad rating, but more of a "got the job done" rating.

VOICE ACTING:
I hate voice acting. I find that it takes away too much from the game when companies try to cover up a mediocre game with "dazzling" voice acting to try to make it into a better one. That being said, I really do have to give credit to Square on this one by hiring good (relatively) voice actors. The dialogue wasn't too awkward, although for some reason Fran talks like the computer voice on the Mac text-speech program. Interestingly, I thought the weakest voice actor was Vaan's, who is the protagonist...

BATTLE SYSTEM:
Terrible compared to FF11. They should have just taken the same battle system from FF11 instead of dumbing it down for general audiences. You can't "lock" onto enemies, so fighting two different enemies at the same time just doesn't work very well. I thought I could go fish enemies while the other two finished them off like in many MMORPG's, but no go. The new "gambit" system is basically the AI, where you can dictate which actions you want your players to prioritize. This is another nightmare on its own, which I'll talk about later.

They went too overboard with the status ailments.

The most disappointing part was that only 3 characters can fight at one time (except for guests). In the beginning, I was really excited that I would get to fight with an actual party since there were 4 or 5 guests. Nope, didn't happen. Somehow or another, you can get your reserve characters to instantly pop out of thin air during combat. Again, the part I was looking forward to the most was rampaging bosses with all 6 characters, but not this time...

SUMMONING:
But wait! Maybe the summons would be like "guests" so I maybe could have a 6 party team! (3 normal characters with 3 summons) This is how they handle it in FF11 so I had a little bit of hope left. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and the summon magics are just not very well planned out in the game. When you cast a summon magic, your other two members disappear, and you get your summon that's actually weaker than your other characters, and uncontrollable to boot. They have a decent final attack, but by end game you could have done far more damage just using your other members. Oh well. It is still kind of fun rampaging the plains with a huge giant for 90 seconds even if it is weaker than you are.

MAGIC?:
They screwed up the magic part of the game, but that's nothing new in the series. Magic spells are obsolete as soon as you can get them, except to randomly throw at flying enemies. They also changed the names of a lot of the "classic" names. What the heck is vox?

MIST QUICKENINGS:
These are the desperation moves in this game. The interesting part is that you try to chain these together with quickenings from other members while you do yours, similar to skill chains in FF11. These aren't actually desperation moves in that they take a chunk of your mp instead of a desperation bar. This means that you can use these whenever you want, including at the beginning of a boss battle. This means that the first 3/4 of the game can be beaten with just mist quickenings alone. Fail... Some of the moves are just plain ridiculous, like many of Penelo's.

AI, GAMBIT SYSTEM:
I complain about the AI, but its actually pretty good for the first time they tried something like this. You buy "gambits" in the store and you can configure your target and your action towards that target. The good part is that you can fully customize your AI for other characters. The bad part is that there are too many useless gambits, something like 20 pages (that's right... pages) of parts. The gambit system just makes the game way to easy, since you can pretty much beat the game with just your analog stick if you have a good set of gambits...

STORYLINE:
Not that bad, not that good. Reviewers saying this has an excellent storyline should play some of the older games, where game companies were forced to have good storylines since the couldn't cover up bad storylines with eye-candy. Kind of disappointed, but at the same time kind of expected. There is no character development. None. Nada.

GAMEPLAY:
This is the first FF where I've almost quit playing mid-game because I lost interest. The latter half I was playing just to get it over with. For one thing, the difficulty of the game is just too easy. I didn't take me more than one try for any of the bosses, just doing the standard debuff and hack and slash. I didn't have the best equipment or anything neither. Having 6 characters makes this way too easy.

Where are the sidequests? No really where are they? There are so many NPC's you can talk to, yet besides the Esper hunts, there are very few sidequests you can do. But of course, the worst part is...

The farming for ingredients for the ultimate equipment... is just ridiculous. For one thing, the game is easy enough to beat with store-bought weapons. Farming ingredients involves mindlessly killing certain types of mobs, zoning two screens, come back, repeat. Doing that for an hour made me realize: this game is really not that fun.

FINAL WORD:
A good game to play, well worth the money. However, it doesn't even come close to being a classic, and I would never find myself doing a replay of this game doing a challenge playthrough. The game is unfortunately a little too long to rent, but maybe you can borrow from a friend. I'm extremely disappointed the way the new RPG's are turning out from Squenix; I think they are trying too hard on things that don't really matter and forgetting about what really makes a good game. Some of the newer gamers might get fooled, but the old-school gamers would find this game kind of hollow. I can't understand how anyone would give this game higher than an 8/10. A gameplay/storyline oriented player would give this game a 6/10. I give this 6/10, but +1 for trying really hard on the stuff I don't really care about.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/16/08

Game Release: Final Fantasy XII (US, 10/31/06)