First AAA JRPG of this generation?

[Paul_Warren]

nazanips said,

"On the flip side: FFXII was freaking awful.  For all Mass Effect's faults it was still a good (but not great) game underneath.  FFXII was a melee button-mashing, cliched-story, horrendous characters, autopilot combat, broken mess of a game.  It was nearly flawless on a technical level, but did almost nothing else right."

 

Wrong on all accounts. Final Fantasy XII received a 10 from Play Magazine and a 9.5 from IGN. It also won IGN's Playstation II Game of the Year Award for 2006.

http://bestof.ign.com/2006/ps2/39.html
http://playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.showGamePage&Game_ID=407


Play had this to say about Mass Effect:

"Ten gamer score points are awarded when Commander Shepard finally takes, to put it mildly, the skin boat to tuna town. It’s an achievement, all right, to attract a woman to his cabin for loving, but not much of one. At one point, the role-playing game Mass Effect makes it so overt that Shepard actually has to choose between potential love interests: the alien Liara, whose race incorporates both male and female characteristics; or the hard-fighting human Ashley Williams.

This should be epic stuff. The space-based Mass Effect is mature enough to show, at least partially, characters progressing toward the physical act of fornication. Yet it’s not emotionally developed enough that players will care about, or be moved by, any of it. Shepard’s ultimate choice, the progression of his relationships, and the very explicit love scene itself all come with almost zero emotional resonance. It’s all just a series of dialogue choices leading up to partial nudity.

Mass Effect spans some 30-35 hours of gameplay. It offers up situations where game characters can, and will, be killed off in the course of space battles. This is important, Mass Effect screams. The galaxy is at stake. People are going to die.

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. The impact is missing because the characters are, for the most part, zeroes. They have all the charm and depth of an ATM card."

http://playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.showGamePage&Game_ID=693