@Rei: Hey, I said it was arguably the best in the franchise. I gotta back that up, don't I? Well, I do in theory.
@Twesterm: Do forgive me if I seem harsh. I will begin quoting your post in full in a moment, but I need to say this to start with:
Until you finish the game, you cannot pretend to have any knowledge of a character's motivations, characterization, or anything about them. To pretend that the whole of a character and everything we should know about them can all be contained in the first third (or quarter) of a story is not only folly, it is absolutely foolish. To pretend that it is the way things should be is overly close-minded and borders on pedantic. Shame on you. You are only furthering the cause of people who think that all characterization should be established in flashbacks that take place less than an hour after meeting a character in a game, for the ham-fisted bullshit that made Final Fantasy VII one of the worst games in the series, and for the mode of "cinematic gaming" that is going to end up killing the industry through sheer intellectual masturbation.
Now, with that out of the way: to begin. Your words are in bold, mine are not.
Concerning the License Grid
The problem? Every grid is the same so you have no reason to make any character different.
Compelling, but untrue. There is every reason to make each character unique, becauase characters who fulfill specific roles will progress in those roles more quickly and be more generally effective towards the niche that they fulfill in combat.
Say that I have three people at level 20 who are all-arounders. Yes, they will be able to fight pretty much anything in a level-appropriate encounter and they may not even need to use items very much.
Now, say that I have three people: Ashe playing the Healer/Buff machine, Basch playing the Berserker, and Fran going the route of Debuffer/Tank. The way it works is that Basch's whole job is to hit things until they die, Ashe makes sure that the team is constantly Haste'd and Shell'd and Protect'd (and because she is specialized in certain kinds of magic she will be better at this than if she were an all-arounder), and Fran is there to curse the enemy (since debuffs on enemies are very important in this game) and to absorb most of the hits by being the one person to carry around a decent shield. This is a highly specialized team which is very effective at killing anything, but most especially troublesome hunts and bosses. As the game progresses, the advantages granet by specialization just become more exaggerated.
A specialized team will beat an "all-around" team in any task that you give them. There is no way to argue this point without departing from reality.
Because of that, I felt no connection to any character, they were all just HP pool
I don't know what to tell you when your biggest connection to a character comes from stat management, but the issue was not there. You just didn't take advantage of the License Grid as well as you could have.
Moving apart from your argument concerning the License Grid for a moment, I'm not sure that I see the problem, but I am beginning to get an idea. If you had license points in abundance enough that you were able to get through the license board that simply, you were probably grinding, which is the source of so many problems with this game that it makes me want to put my head through a wall.
Concerning the Gambit System
Instead of letting us really benefit from their deep gambit system, they start us up with things like cure ally if their HP's are less than 90%. That's useless.
The first Gambit you get is Ally HP<50%, not 90%. 50% is an extemely, extremely useful gambit that you will use throughout the entire game, except for when you have a healer set up with specific tiered healing gambits.
They make us buy and find these gambits which sucks because money isn't easy to come by in this game for some odd reason.
I am going to assume that you know that the primary method by which one obtains money is by selling loot obtained from one's fallen enemies. I am going to assume that you do not know (even though it is presented to you in a tutorial, many people miss this) that you greatly obtain the amount and quality of your loot by chaining specific enemy types in a row. As an example, if you chain multiple wolf-type enemies together, you go from getting one pelt every once in a while, to one to three pelts every second or third enemy, to a higher quality pelt and one to three pelts in every second enemy, to one extremely valuable item or a slew of lower-value items more or less every time you kill an enemy.
When you chain enemies, you are often rewarded with small healing boosts to your entire party's HP and/or MP. It's useful stuff to have and important for quests amongst the more dangerous enemies.
By the time I finally start getting enough gambit cards to actually make some good systems, I just don't give a shit. I suffered too long with the worthless gambits so I just stopped caring about the system. I was doing fine with the shitty gambits and doing things on my own and the game was still simple so there was no reason to change.
Simplicity in gambits early on is very carefully balanced to operate according to the expected abilities of the player - which would be in line with the experience you're relating, ironically.
Also, you cannot claim that there was no reason to change at any point when you quit early on - if you find no reason to change even after finding the early, half-decent stuff, then you are probably grinding, which, yes, means that you are playing the game incorrectly.
Concerning Regenerating MP
This really made the game too easy. It upped the pace which was cool but I didn't have to worry about budgeting magic which took some fun strategy out of the game
Regenerating MP is a boon early on and makes it possible to go through some areas without a ton of items, but the regeneration rate never changes throughout the game and your rate of magic consumption increases exponentially, especially given the cost of buff magic having to be cast several times throughout a fight. Early on it's a necessary part of the balance so that you can get through some areas given your expected amount of wealth by that point in the game (your wealth may have been too low while your level was too high, if you were grinding), but later on it is there as something you will only barely notice before you start casting the magic to drain MP from your enemies.
Yes, this becomes a necessity for the reasons mentioned before. Unless you want to grind and turn your entire party into the Incredible Hulk on Ice, your magic use is going to skyrocket and regenerating MP is necessary for the game to emain balanced.
Concerning Difficulty
Or lack of I guess. Except for hunts which were just stupid hard, enemies were just stupid easy. Even boss fights I was pretty much able to just blindly play which got me more license points. More license points meant making my characters even stronger and then making enemies even easier. I actually wish I could have traded license points for money.
That hunts were difficult at your level suggests that you were trying hunt ranks which were beyond you, that you attempted one of the "Elite Hunts" (like the all-mighty Cluckatrice at level 10) which are radically stronger than any other group of hunts at that rank, or that your gambits were set up improperly. All of these may have been true, but there's no way to tell.
License points are not the primary source of power in characters in Final Fantasy 12. Equipment is. After that, level is of primary importance. Chances are that you were overleveled, and with that combined with overly simplistic Gambits, it becomes clear why you take on (early) bosses easily but have a lot of trouble with Hunts - early bosses are generally more simplistic than Hunts, which are much more intensely strategic. This changes as the game goes on, where normal bosses would most likely have also curb-stomped you with your current play-style.
And for the record, yes, I know that Quickenings, once you get them, obliterate early bosses like a joke. I was once able to kill a boss with one Quickening chain, taking no other action except to de-buff it with an item. There is about a two-hour stretch encompassing one boss where Quickenings are overpowered in an otherwise level-appropriate encounter, though for about half the game they are unquestionably the knife that one would use to drive into a boss' heart at the end of a battle.
As I said, I tried twice to get into this game and both times quit because the story just didn't do anything for me.
There, unfortunately, is no helping this particular malady once you have experienced the story at the proper tempo and still find it uninteresting, but I'm not sure that you have.
The game starts off with one of the worst beginnings I've ever seen in a game. It starts off introducing you to one set of characters and then kills them.
Please, oh please, never read A Song of Ice and Fire, I am almost positive that you will not enjoy it.
Then you start a tutorial section with another set of characters and then they die.
This particular instance is very different from the first, in that we are given no reason to expect the characters from the opening cutscene to live beyond that cutscene. This was a good plot twist early on in the game in that it subverted expectations concerning the fate of playable characters in JRPGs. This is not to be compared to characters who only live in a cutscene scenario.
Then you finally start with Vaan and by that point I'm wondering if I'm going to lose him in 10 minutes too.
Needless to say that you did not, but you only went through the experience of "your" character dying once, not twice.
And then the rest of the story just isn't interesting. It could be me just not caring about uber political stories but the story just didn't do anything to interest me. They really did nothing to make me care what was going on in the world. The world was just where I happened to be which was boring.
In addition to what I said above, please, oh please, never play any of the Ogre Battle or Tactics Ogre games, I am almost positive that you will not enjoy them. If you don't like your stories on a large scale dealing with concepts that are both violent and intensely historical, this game and those games are one hundred percent not for you.
I could rave for pages, for hours, about how great the story in Final Fantasy XII is, from the pacing to the characterization to the slow build-up of themes concerning the nature of men and their relationship with the gods, how this is the only game I can think of off-hand except for Knights of the Old Republic II where Nietzsche's idea of Man no longer needing God is taken seriously, but I won't. It won't convince you, and this topic isn't the place for it.
Concerning Characters
Now hold on right here, Sonny Jim. You aren't in a position to comment on the characters, their motivations, their ultimate roles in the story, or pretty much anything else about them. Your characterizations of them have pigeon-holed them into blurbs that come straight out of a hoity-toity Eastern European-set shounen anime. You haven't experienced the story, have not seen what the characters are about, and are in no position to pass judgment on them. I don't like saying that to a person, but it's true: you don't get to drop a story less than half-way through and then get to talk about its character development.
I will, however, address a few specific points in each character.
1. Vaan isn't important for his role as previous FF heroes were, he is important because of his perspective, both as a normal citizen and as a legitimately good human being. Rash, rude, and defiant early on, yes, but the most important thing about Vaan is the fact that he's good, that he's able to look up when they are being plunged into Hell, and that he functions almost literally as the heart and soul of the team.
2. Penelo is in no way romantically interested in Vaan. This is never even hinted at. Their relationship is so Platonic you may have found it in the middle of a parable about a cave. They are essentially siblings, andn othing more. Pigeonholing Penelo into the "love interest" role is radically unfair and speaks more to your lack of experience with the character and unwillingness to look at her from any perspective except for the one supporting your expectations. I suppose it best to say that you are being very unfair to the character.
3. You cannot comment on Balthier's reasons to be there. Do you think that whole "I'm the leading man" thing is an actual reason? What is this, an anime? No. He has many reasons to want to be a part of the shaping of the destiny of Dalmasca and to become embroiled in the conflict between Archades and Rossaria.
As to the Han Solo thing, I'm going to rant about that in just a minute, hoo boy does that particular lin of reasoning get my blood up. You'll know it's coming when I start quoting you again.
4. Fran serves her own role and is very far from Chewbacca.
5. Is...is this Larsa? I'm not sure. Little guy, brother to the guy who gives the speech in Dalmasca near the beginning, fights with a sword, throws around Hi-Potions like it's going out of style? You think Larsa was just "chasing after some girl who was chasing after someone else"?
Concerning Basch and Ashe, you don't really make an argument so much as state your eternal disinterest so I will not make an argument either.
All of the characters in this game did absolutely nothing to make me like them. Vaan is just one of the worst characters of all time and he's supposed to be the one I spend the most time with! Then there's every other character I don't give a crap about with most of them having no reason to be in the game other than they needed some stereotypes or more ways to copy Star Wars.
You had to do it, didn't you.
You had to compare the game to Star Wars.
No, no. Let me guess. Vaan is Luke, Ashe is Leia, Balthier is Han Solo, Fran is Chewbacca, Gabranth is Darth Vader, Basch is Obi Wan Kenobi, and just for flavor we're going to pretend that Penelo has a role and I can't think of and Larsa is, oh Hell I don't know, Lando Calrissian or something. That about right?
No.
To pretend that every sotry which involves a conflict with an empire is somehow cribbing off of Star Was is both asinine and lazy. Nevermind the fact that Final Fantasy XII doesn't actually largely revolve around the crushing encroachment of one empire but is actually about the expansionist conquests of two of them and hhow that results in conflicts that gets smaller kingdoms caught in the middle, nevermind that Vaan isn't the hero of the story and Ashe isn't relegated to being a girl on someone's arm and Basch is thee primary hero role fulfiller and Balthier has a reason to fight without any crappy love story and Fran's story is primarily one of exile and Penelo is there fo her ability to help Vaan hold onto his humanity and Gabranth isn't even in the same neighborhood as Darth Vader and there is no Evil Emperor, ignore the fact that this game is about the relationship between gods and men, between men and destiny itself! This involves a big empire and some people are waging guerilla warfare, it must be cribbing off of Star Wars!
No. I reject that.
The primary conflicts and resolutions in Final Fantasy XII are linked by two things, thematically: the first is conflict within a family, and the second is the conflict between man and the uncaring arbiters of his destiny. There is no good and evil in this story, there are only people with differing ideologies who see different routes to achieving the same goals (and all of them involve violence). The overarching conflict between House Solidor and the Senate of Archades and the even larger conflict with Rosaria lends context and meaning to the smaller conflict between Archades and Dalmasca, and beneath that the events surrounding Ashe and her rights of ascension. In Final Fantasy XII, as in history throughout thousands of years, royalty dictates the course of events, and the actions of royalty are what determine the fate of civilization. Yes, there's magic! Yes, there are airships! Hey-o, there's a guy in full body armor who is related to the hero! None of those things are taken from Star Wars.
Star Wars isn't cut from the same cloth as FFXII. The former is a story about the hero's journey for power and the ability to fight - the latter is about having that power and trying to decide whether or not to use it.
I could go on, but I think I've yakked at you long enough.
I want to reiterate that this is not meant to be insulting to you, but in terms of gameplay I think you went into it with the wrong play method and the wrong expectations, and in terms of narrative I think you are being rather unfair.
