| Gballzack said: FFXII shows a continuing decline in the quality of original FF games being produced by Square. While their spin offs are perfectly fine, the main series games seem to be getting worse and worse with each title. |
Agreed. I use to be a huge fan of the FF series (played all of them and beat most of them and the spin-offs) but they've just been going downhill fast.
I tried to get into XII two times and both times I just got bored with it. The sound was great, the story was decent, the characters were entertaining, the graphics looked beautiful, but the game just couldn't hold my interest. Aside from the leveling, I even really liked the combat with the gambit system. I didn't really attach to any of the characters though(blaming that partly on the horrible beginning of the game), I suppose it could have been that political stories just don't interest me much either and the writing really just wasn't that great.
And since I mentioned the beginning, I'll go ahead and explain that a bit. In the beginning of the game they introduce, what, 4 characters and then take them away (of course you get most of them back, but you don't know that). It just really made things annoying and a little confusing at first; I was actually wondering if they were going to take Vaan away from me 15 minutes after getting him. That whole beginning sequence could have been a great memorable area that drug me into the game, but instead I was more worried who all these characters were, what happened to them, and I wasn't paying attention to the other things going on in the game.
I can safely say that in the first 8 or so hours of the game nothing memorable really happens. In FFVI, you have Terra confronting the Esper. In FFVII you're breaking into the Magitek researhc facility. In FFVIII...in FFX you get to see the world end in the first 10 minutes. With FFXII, there's not much to drag you into the game like the others and that's just bad for a game like Final Fantasy games. Sure, the palace gets attacked, but at that point I've already done 3 hunts, been trying to get chain 100, done some mandatory worthless fetch me this stick quests, and a whole lot of other things so I just don't care about the palace.
As for how this affects my judgement for FFXIII, it's making me happier and happier that I don't plan to buy a PS3 just for that game. I have the funny feeling that they are going to go easy on the story, have more or less lame characters, mediocre music, and concentrate solely on making the game look pretty.
