Final Fantsay XIII

[Jonathan]

clue said:

Games on phones are great for those boring classes your getting an A in, just in my opinion

Oh man, necro bump ftw, lol.

[Itachisasuke]

THis shit better not be delayed ... this is the reason i bought my PS3 this and MGS4

[Markus]

Fuck, now I got to buy a PS3...

[Bridger - Retired Paladin]

Can someone tell me what last years profit had to do with the release being delayed of the game?

Are they now making a 3rd version so they can get more money? Well, I guess that would be about the only reason why they would do it.

I think SE started a trend of grave errors where they completely ignor their client base. I'm now for the first time considering boycoting the company as a whole.

[Xaero]

hehe i gave up on ff series i think after 12. To me 12 was jus like ok lets walk over an an all u npcs jus kill off the mobs around us, nothing for me really to do at all. the game practically plays itself

[Bridger - Retired Paladin]

Ya I wasn't a fan of 12 either. I was kind of thinking at first that it'd be like FFXI except you would automate your party. I like a job system more than a jack of all trades system.

[Sosa]

12 had the potential to be a fantastic game... unfortunately, the game broke down during the testing phase. The balance of difficulty is completely ruined, with level 30 mobs running around in the first starting areas. The gambit system, while a novel idea, ended up offering TOO much control over your characters. In interviews bundled with the special edition, the lead battle designer says that they made this choice to cut down on the redundancy of using the same command (attack, item, ect.) over and over again. Unfortunately, if you make use of gambits, there's a very good chance your party will be fully automated by the time you get halfway through the game... and you'll just end up running from point A to point B for the rest of the game.

The license system, while a novel idea, was very poorly implemented. Without the ability to see the board, planning was impossible... and it wouldn't matter anyway, because all of your characters will end up mastering the entire license board before the end of the game, making them very generic.

On the plus side, we had a decent (not fantastic,) mature story that was worth playing for...

Whether 13 will rectify these issues or not remains to be seen.

[lockejv]

News flash: each Final Fantasy is an entirely different game. Different mechanics, different directors, different gameplay. Different, but similar, depending who Square decides to assign to the project. 13 will have very little in common with 12. And yeah, 13 is delayed and I'm expecting its NA release to be at the very earliest 4Q 2008. Probably spring 2009. Most likely PS3 exclusive, but poor Sony for having to wait that long. (If XBox 360 takes off in Japan that might change, but that seems unlikely right now...horrible JP sales).

FFXII was made in the same vein as Final Fantasy Tactics, so it should have been no surprise to anyone that it was based more on gameplay than storyline. Yasumi Matsuno directed FFT, and he played a large role in the development of FFXII until he had to step down due to health reasons. Hell, the game was set in Ivalice, if you were expecting a soap opera, you weren't paying attention before you plopped down your 50 bucks.

I found FFXII to be incredibly challenging and exciting. Not so much the general story line, but the mark quests were an absolute riot. The cast was one of the weakest I thought...there was almost no development to speak of, and Ash was pretty annoying. But I logged well over 100 hours completing the game content and camping items, which tops any of my non-XI FF playtime totals since VI.

I understand why people bash the system and say the game plays itself. I found that to be entirely untrue hunting marks though - it required constant tweaking or I would die quickly. But with the general storyline, yeah, if you spent any time levelling up, you could waltz through the game without much intervention.

I welcomed the change from the staple random encounter / turn based play. It's old, outdated, and there's so much more you can do beyond repetitive menu based commands given the level of technology and resources available. Aside from XI which is an entirely different genre, FFXII was SE's first deviation from the standard so of course it wasn't perfect - I tend to agree it was a little too much hands off depending on your level.

One solution to the problem was just to turn gambits off. But the problem then became too much time spent in the menu selecting commands. It would have really helped if they would have allowed macros. Would have been easy to implement and much faster than going into the menu (which I thought was very tedius). In fact, a macro system using L2/R2/etc. would have rocked.

As far as the license board creating generic characters...come on. You have to go all the way back to FFIV to find a title that didn't allow you to make all your characters the same. Maybe 9 is an exception, I don't remember (and don't want to).

[Xaero]

News flash: each Final Fantasy is an entirely different game. Different mechanics, different directors, different gameplay. Different, but similar, depending who Square decides to assign to the project. 13 will have very little in common with 12. And yeah, 13 is delayed and I'd be surprised if it sees an NA at the very earliest 4Q 2008. Probably spring 2009. Poor Sony.

Aye, but they jus seem to be following the trend of gettin worse ;P

Ill take the original FF on the nes with where ur chars were too stupid to target a new baddie if their target died, over the last few games battle systems

I welcomed the change from the staple random encounter / turn based play. It's old, outdated, and there's so much more you can do beyond repetitive menu based commands given the level of technology and resources available. Aside from XI which is an entirely different genre, FFXII was SE's first deviation from the standard so of course it wasn't perfect - I tend to agree it was a little too much hands off depending on your level.

I love turn based combat. As long as turns play out quickly, or can be fast forwarded. Without tons an tons of animation going on its all good

[lockejv]

bridger said:

Can someone tell me what last years profit had to do with the release being delayed of the game?

Re: release delayed due to higher earnings: not sure exactly, but they don't need FF13's revenues as early as they projected to satisfy their shareholders / pay down debt / whatever the reason, I don't know. Maybe they can use that additional money to increase FF13's budget. Perhaps those funds allowed them to spend more time and money tweaking FF13 for the PS3, enhancing the graphics, adding features previously cut due to deadlines...such as 6-axis integration maybe, or more online features.

I think FFXIII is going to be incredibly groundbreaking, and I haven't anticipated a title as much since XI. No idea what they have in store, but with the PS3's capabilities (HD, ridiculous processing power) and the fact they can work under the assumption that everyone has broadband, I think this title will take gaming to the next level. Not to mention they're planning 10 years of FFXIII titles...they're really going to have to start with a bang.

Of course, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within was supposed to change cinema, and we all know how that ended: very badly

bridger said:

Are they now making a 3rd version so they can get more money? Well, I guess that would be about the only reason why they would do it.

Square-Enix is a publicly held company. Their employees, especially at the executive decision making level, make money based on how much the corporation makes. Not how good the hardcore audience (small % of sales) thinks their games are, or by living in the past. If SE didn't constantly evolve to try to expand their fan base and appeal, they wouldn't be around.

bridger said:

I think SE started a trend of grave errors where they completely ignor their client base. I'm now for the first time considering boycoting the company as a whole.

No arguments from me that they supported FFXI horribly, but despite that, they're still the number one MMO in Japan. Subscription marginal cost or something, I don't know. Square is making money, achieving excellent market penetration on every game console on the market. I think they're doing a good job expanding their fan base, and their profits are a clear indication of progress. As a hardcore fan of the 16 bit era, I hated the "dumbing down" as they tried to broaden their appeal for the psx...but I let it go and as it turns out, they weren't dumbing down their games, just evolving with technology and expanding their fan base, which is rather essential for survival in this day and age.

[Ruuk]

Did you read SE is already re-releasing FFXII for the upcoming 20th anniversary of the creation of Ivalice? They are calling it FFXII: International Zodiac Job System. Instead of one license board grid, there are now twelve each corresponding to a zodiac sign and a job. Guest characters can also be controlled by the player which is nice because that really bothered me.

[Sosa]

I fully realize the point you were trying to make when you said that 12 tried to branch off and be different from the rest of the numbered series Locke... believe me, I own every game in the series (and have played through 1-12, and almost all of the offshoots.)

I especially have a fond appreciation for what they were trying to do with FFXII since I still hold a great deal of fondness for Vagrant Story and the original FFT. What I stated, however, was simply an expression of my personal disappointment with the way the game turned out.

It's a good game, there's no questioning that, really. What it suffered from, however, was a distinct lack of polish. It could have been more than 'just' a good game if it had spent more time in development, working out some more of the kinks... unfortunately, due to budget concerns and pressure to release, they let it go early. The result is a broken game.

I love sidequest stuff (I got the freakin' Paladin shield in FFVI, for what it's worth,) but the main story quest is what the majority of players are in the game for. Unfortunately, the main quest stuff is just broken. Even without twinking your characters out, enemies are very rarely challenging enough to need more than a basic melee attack/buff/heal gambit setup. What about more enemies with physical resists? Attack magic is, frankly, a waste of MP. Why is enmity control so spotty? The problems just keep going. There's really no point to using any of the large variety of weapons in the game, because a sword and shield will consistantly outpower them in damage over time... with an added evasion boost, to boot!

I liked the game. I just couldn't bring myself to love it because they failed to carry through with the title's ambitious gameplay reforms.

That said, of course, XIII will be a totally different game. The only comparisons I'm drawing here are over what we already know about the battle design (which is, admittedly, very little. It will be a real time system occurring in 3D space. What I'm trying to say is that they need to learn from the mistakes they made with XII's system, and try to avoid repeating some of the same basic mistakes... even if they take it in an entirely different direction.

Hell. It's a Final Fantasy game. We'd all buy it even if it was a bag of shit put into digitized form and slapped into a box. I just expect them to go above and beyond being "good" to deliver on the name.

[lockejv]

When I got to the more difficult mark hunts end-game, Ashe used a two-handed sword, and I had Vaan using a great katana. I used Penelo as a WHM, and for the fights where she was busy healing I equipped her with a staff. Class was determined by gear. Although the stats didn't look impressive (i.e. magic up stuff on cloth as opposed to mail), it really made a huge difference, something I didn't realize until very late when MP was becoming a problem.

Re: attack magic - I don't even remember using it. You'd run out of MP if you made a gambit for it. Actually, check that. I didn't use ranged weapons at all - so for the birds I had gambits for everyone to use magic to kill them. It was kind of cool as they came in range and everyone started casting and nuking at the same time. The birds didn't last long. At first I had everyone use Thousand Needles against flying mobs, but obviously that doesn't scale.

IIRC 12 was delayed multiple times, and the console only FF fans were pissed because they didn't play XI and had to wait so long. Not sure where you're getting "unfinished" from.

I thought the mark hunts were incredibly well done, and for me it comprised the majority of my playtime and defined the game. Some of the fights were so very intense and challenging, no other console FF battles came close. But then I didn't really mess with any optional bosses beyond VII so I can't say for sure.

Macros would have really helped. It was sooooooo tedius to go into the menu to heal / raise someone. Macro could have worked like this: triangle to toggle between your characters. R2 to activate white magic with cursor memory. X to select the spell, D-pad to select target, done. How fucking difficult would that have been? A few extra lines of code, really. It would have played more like Star Ocean 2, where you controlled one person completely and just focused on healing your DD's who auto-attacked.

[Sosa]

Learning key abilities allows your to regenerate MP more quickly than you'll likely be spending it, unless you have a single character that's responsible for putting up with all the buffs/debuffs/healing.

A brief example of that...

Basch was my "tank" character. Due to abilities learned on the license board, he recieved MP every time he: A) attacked, B) took damage and C) killed an enemy. Mosters hate curing magic. Curing magic also tends to drain MP quickly. So what's the obvious solution here?

...Make Basch the main healer. With a sword and shield, his attack speed will pretty much ensure that he never runs out of MP... and the cures will compound his "hate," allowing him to tank better. That kind of gambit/license synergy is exactly the kind of stuff I loved about FFXII... unfortunately, it was also the most unbalanced factor in the game.

I did the same thing as you, as far as setting everyone to cast 1,000 needles on Avians... even at later levels, it was an effective solution... however, I think it got to a point where they just started casting Flare instead.

I agree that the hunts were very well done. For the most part, they were interesting and challenging... the difference of our opinions here lies in the fact that they chose to make the campaign so brain-dead it literally becomes a "Point-A to Point-B" affair where you let your characters automatically fight everywhere between. The challenging marks were fantastic - but they should have applied that same level of dedication to the main campaign.

As for it being unfinished... just because a game was delayed multiple times doesn't mean it was ready to be pushed out the door. The game needed more time in testing, and this is plainly obvious, if nowhere else, than in the license board system. That game definately could have benefited from a few months of last-minute polish... unfortunately, they were forced to release it early. It doesn't mean it was ready: it means they put it out before they were done.

As for your macro suggestion... I strongly agree with you, on that one. Honestly, I feel a macro system would have been a far better solution than the gambit system in general, but I suppose they would have worried about there being too much to micromanage, or having it come across as "FFXI: Offline Mode."

[lockejv]

I forgot how much I enjoyed discussing console RPGs

It took me 100+ hours to beat all the marks except the last one (Yiazmat or whatever). The problem with fighting him is you have to do a lot of intervening because he likes to kill your party members. Since he has 5 million HP or whatever...it'd be a nice accomplishment, but I guess it's just not worth the boredom to me.

Back to my 100+ hours point. If you ignore the marks and don't spend a lot of time levelling, the main story will offer a degree of difficulty. But if you hunt, you raise your level above the story arc, it won't. I believe this was intentional. It's a 30-40 hour game for those who just want to win the game, but it's a 150/200 hour game for those who want to do everything.

I'm surprised you dislike the license board so much. I liked it, I thought it was fun looking forward to what to unlock next. Yeah, everything was hidden, but I think the intent was to force people online to look it up or to help sell strategy guides. Didn't bother me at all. I'd prefer a class system over license boards, sphere grids, materia, and junctions, but it's FF, they abandoned the traditional class system in their games a long time ago.

I liked having gambits for buffs and status effects. It was nice not having to worry about it. It was also nice setting the healing up. Tweak your gambits based on the boss attacks, and kick your feet up and watch your characters kick a little ass after a few adjustments. I found it quite satisfying, and every now and then something would go wrong and you'd have to step in. For the more difficult fights, some of them were pretty wild. On more than one occasion my 3 chars would wipe and I'd have to finish the boss off using the limit attack from my severely underlevelled back row. Sometimes it wasn't enough and I'd have to reset. There was plenty of difficulty, you just had to invest a fair amount of time progressing through the hunts to get to it.

I didn't have a single buffer because they'd run out of MP, and I had all the MP regen stuff unlocked pretty early. Haste, Shell, Protect, Bravery, Faith...but it eventually got to the point where Ashe was so strong with her Sunflower sword that I didn't want her losing any DPS, so Vaan and Pen split her duty.

All this talking about it now I want to go play! Now that I think about it, I liked 12 much better than 7, 8, 9 and 10, mostly because I was really into the mark hunts and it offered a lot of playtime in the process. Sword hunting was fun too, farming the rare items and such. Helped ween me off of XI. There was plenty of tactical depth if you chose to go beyond the story, and that's just not everyone's cup of tea.