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Zkuq on 20 July 2013
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Galvanizer said:
Zkuq said:

There was practically no way besides grinding ridiculous amounts if I wanted to do anything besides follow the story, if I recall correctly. That's not open world to me. Most of the so-called open areas were too difficult to even run through, let alone be played. The game became truly open only once you advanced the story enough, before that there was no true openness. The story was slow-paced, that's not subjective. To get the story to advance even just a little bit, I had to fight a good hour or two, and that just screams slow pace. The story would have been interesting, had it not been prolonged for so long. Story-wise, the game would have been interesting if it would have been half or so of the game's actual length. And yes, in practice you do need more character development to make an interesting character. The characters certainly had interesting roles, they just weren't fully developed. In fact, they were barely developed at all. As for the improvements in the international version, I couldn't care less. I never got that version because they never released it outside Japan so it doesn't concern me.

That completionist thing isn't a huge thing and it certainly doesn't affect my overall opinion of the game. However, the game was definitely designed so that you could get everything so you can't use the argument you just tried to use. As far as I remember, all the other items were much easier to obtain. And in fact, it's pretty obvious they meant every item to be obtainable: The Zodiac Spear is clearly meant to be obtained by avoiding those certain containers, yet they wanted to make sure everyone has a chance so they put a container with a very low chance to spawn the spear. That is poor design, it only serves to make the game worse, and it really caught by eye as an example of bad game design when I played the game. It's the little things that matter, too, and this was one of those things.

So much BS in your post.

FFXII was open world. From very early in the game, you can get to places you're not even meant to go to yet. That's a huge contrast to past FF games, especially FFX and FFXIII. Also, the game has a considerable amount of optional locations that are not required for the story. The story was not slow paced. Stop feeding your preconceptions of what good story pacing is in a video game. If the game design dictates that there must me loads of gameplay between cinematics, how then is that a poorly paced story? It isn't. Rather, it's good gameplay pacing. As a video game, gameplay pacing is more important than story pacing. As for the characters not being majorly developed, I don't care for how much depth they have. What's important is not their amount of depth, but if they're interesting. In any book, film, or game, you can have interesting charcaters that have very little depth. It all depends on the quality of the script and the character dialogue.

Lastly, the game was not designed so you could get everything. In contrary, it was the opposite. It was designed so you could not get everything. Hiroyuki Ito, the director and game designer, confirmed that he didn't want all players to get every item, especially the best ones. He wanted FFXII to feel like older games on the NES where getting good items was randomized and if you didn't get them, you just carried on playing the game.

In practice it was impossible to go almost anywhere in the beginning. The game became truly open world only when the end was coming closer, and even FFX did that. Funny how you call FFXIII a past FF game, by the way. And yes, the story was slowly paced. That's exactly what it is when the story is so simple with relatively little development yet the game takes a good 40 to 50 hours on the first playthrough. Not only that, the gameplay sections between story events didn't do anything to reinforce the story. Generally I felt completely detached from the story whenever I wasn't watching a cutscene because for the most part, gameplay consisted of going from A to B with a huge horde of enemies between - and it really felt like that. I liked the battle system, mind you, but most gameplay sections felt so detached from the story.

It's funny how the game wasn't designed so you can get everything, yet you could get absolutely everything if you just played through all content there was. I don't care how they intended it to be but they made it seem like everything was made to be obtainable and that's what counts.

And one question: What do you makes an interesting character? I find it hard to discuss about characters when you talk about interesting but I don't really have any idea what that means to you.