FFXII: What's the verdict?

[IllegalPaladin]

It wasn't bad, but I didn't like it a whole lot. I'm mainly going to compare FFXII and FFX since they were both on the PS2 and they took some of the issues with their first attempt on the PS2 and fixed them with this game.

FFXII improves the graphics and voice acting from FFX in that the character models look the same all the time instead of what looks like a low, medium, and high polygon model for the characters in FFX. Also, I didn't find any of the stupid sounding dialog lines that run rather rampant in FFX. However, the quality of the dialog is very low (compression?) and coupled with the way the characters speak, I found it very difficult to hear and follow what the characters were saying.

The battle system, while interesting, would get rather boring for me. I mean, there are still 'random' encounters where you'll be running and an enemy just pops out of nowhere. I did like FFX the most in this regard because I did like to take my time to plan things out, but FFXII removed the annoyance of having a battle event every 10 seconds while running in FFX. Heck, you could practically call out when you're going to run into a random battle and be fairly accurate too.

With the story, I hardly felt any emotion for this game at all. I found FFX to be great in this regard, but FFXII fails in my opinion because of the dialog being hard to follow (I don't really read or hear people speak like that apart from reading a book for an english class) and the sound quality of the dialog is also poor, as stated above. What's worse is that I didn't feel any connection with the characters aside from maybe Penelo and Vaan. The relationships between characters felt stale and events just seemed to feel like a train wreck that I would rather try to drive around instead of enjoying the usual ride of a good story. To FFXII's credit, FFX took a second time through so I could understand the story more, but I'm not sure I have much of a desire to go through FFXII again as I would FFX (which I've played through multiple times).

There some more things I could say about it, but these are the main kickers for me.