Multi Final Fantasy XII (The Zodiac Age)

[GwJumpman]

Just finished playing XII for the first time and that was a REAL game. I had played through like 80% of it a little while ago, maybe half a year ago, then put it down to tackle all the big games that came out over the past few months, and I decided to jump back into it after finishing XVI and it only took me like ten more hours to get to the end. This is the kind of game where I wish I could go back in time and tell my young self to play because I can guarantee I would have loved it. The Gambit system is seriously the coolest spin on turn-ish based combat that I've played. This game also has amazing presentation in terms of cutscenes, voice acting, and camera work in those cutscenes. I played XII specifically because it's in Ivalice and I'm a huge Tactics fan but between Tactics/Vagrant Story/XII they really nailed a "style" of character and audio design. Whether it's that motion-blur effect that happens when you beat a big boss or the music that sounds like it could've all come out of a single album, it's just great.

There was a funny interaction that happened near the end of the game that makes me really appreciate the game. I was in the Great Crystal area and you have to take a bunch of confusing turns unlocking gates and stuff to get to the end and the team I was using (Balthier/Fran/Ashe) was struggling quite a bit fighting these ghost type enemies and I ended up using ALL of my 99 stack of Phoenix Downs as I struggled my way through but I hit the end of my stack so I decided to change my team on the fly to use 3 casters with Raise so that I could sustain without using items, and if that team wiped I'd get my backline team out and sprint to the loading zone so I can use "Revive" on a caster and let that caster rebuild the team. I was able to fight my way to a save crystal and get back to town to stock back up, but it felt so satisfying being able to change strategy on the fly and have it make a serious difference. I felt rewarded for being perceptive about the situation (by not wiping and going back to previous save) and it was just a really tense experience. I really enjoy it when games give you challenges you can seriously fail and if this were a game made today, autosaves would've made the dungeon easier.

XII: Revenant Wings for DS is next then I'm gonna either finish Vagrant Story or hop over to Tactics Advance

 

[Jon]

I hated 12 in it's original incarnation. I enjoyed it more in the Zodiac Age. The story and characters weren't the best SE has done, but they were passable. Vaan was a terrible protagonist. Should have been Balthier. That said, the Gambit system was a total hit or miss for people. You either love it or hate it.

I found it lazy honestly, but others here love it. It's like coding light. And the fact you had to find some decent gambits was just silly. That said, Zodiac Age moved 12 up my list. I had the original 12 below even 13.

 

[Raine]

I need to play Zodiac Age, and give X-2 another pass via the Remaster as well. The one-two punch of X-2 followed a couple years later by OG XII (and then a couple more years by XIII...) is honestly what made me become super jaded towards the series - company as a whole, if I'm honest - and that kind of sucked. I was there at the midnight launch and everything.

While I adore the Gambit System, and think it should have been industry standard for any game that insists on forcing AI-controlled companions onto players, honestly? Everything else kind of sucked for me. Not the least of which being the god damn License Board. The changes made to Gil accruement, whereby enemies dropped items that you sold instead of Gil, was bad enough on its own. This incentivized grinding particular chains of the same mob to get a stacking bonus to yield better Gil, so that you could afford armor upgrades. I didn't like this.

To then double down on this, by requiring you to 1) purchase the ability to equip the thing you just bought and 2) actually locate the correct fucking tile for that thing, was... it was straight-up a dealbreaker, is what it was. I definitely spent an enormous amount of time grinding money and maliciously filling out that stupid License Board in the early- to mid-game so I wouldn't have to deal with it again, that by the time I finished I just hated the game. Every dumb thing the game did just exacerbated that - the poor pacing, dropping the political storyline for alien/fantasy bullshit, insane difficulty spikes (even with the aforementioned excessive grinding ) - and I only finished the story by hate-playing it. A good friend of mine just did the sensible thing and threw in the towel, and he was an honest-to-god Final Fantasy fanboy.

I was able to fight my way to a save crystal and get back to town to stock back up, but it felt so satisfying being able to change strategy on the fly and have it make a serious difference. I felt rewarded for being perceptive about the situation (by not wiping and going back to previous save) and it was just a really tense experience. I really enjoy it when games give you challenges you can seriously fail and if this were a game made today, autosaves would've made the dungeon easier.

#1 reason XIII sucks. Nothing you do matters; as long as you win the fight, HP and MP are fully restored.

It's part of why XV sucks. Spam healing/reviving items and win. Devs knew this, didn't bother to intricately design encounters. Or it worked in reverse; they had bad designs and just did a cheap bandaid fix.

FF3's final dungeon hurt like a motherfucker when you died. But I still remember going through it 15-ish years later, and enjoyed it at the time.