| Darc Requiem said: I didn't care for XII, but I'd rather play it than XIII. For all of my issues with XII, I could see myself playing it again. I don't ever want to play XIII again. |
My first playthrough of XII was ok. But I enjoyed it a lot more on my second playthrough. Knowing what to expect, I had a lot more fun tweaking my gambits and wandering around its world in search of every single piece of equipment and beating all the Marks.
First time I play a FF game is almost always to discover its story. Although the story of FF XII is a bit more mature than the other games, it still lacked something I think. Mostly character interactions. The game failed to give me any sort of emotional attachment to any of its characters. Balthier was cool and all, but that's it.
But its gameplay grew on me the more I played it. The way you keep on optiming your gambits and adjusting your strategy on the fly, as well as the constant free-roam, made the game a good departure from the usual turned-based titles, and I was actually curious to see how this kind of battle system could evolve from there.
XIII tried to make compromises between XII and older turned-based titles, but they did so to the detriment of actual player controls, which I don't think is ever the best of choice.
XII lacked actual button presses, something more active for the player, yet you still had complete control over your characters by fully "programming" their battle behavior from scratch. XIII made the battles much more fast paced and you actually pressed buttons (even if most of the time it would me the Auto option), but you barely had control over your party members since you could only ever control one character. They should have allowed the player to configure the behaviors of each characters depending on its Paradigm, making something similar to the Gambits in XII.
I salute their will to make things fresh. I understand you can't always get it right the first time.
If I was them, I would try going further the road that XII went.
