Borkachev on 28 April 2008
All of those would suck so why should FFXII be any different? You don't actually get into the good bits of the story until 20 hours into the game and story and characters should be what a game is about. It doesn't matter that it's fantastic beyond that point, you've lost your audience by the time you get there.
Let's clear one thing up here: I'm not encouraging you to go back and play past that 20 hour mark. If you hated it up to that point, I don't think there's anything later on that's going to change your mind. What I'm saying is that you can't make general statements about it based on limited experience. You have every right to say "the story and characters were badly written early on." You'd still be wrong, but at least you'd be entitled to that opinion.
I've never been able to get more than a couple chapters into anything by Sinclair Lewis, who is generally considered a great writer. I find his stuff boring. But I'd never have the audacity to jump in with a group of his fans and critics and toss my ill-informed opinion out on them. Instead I recognize the brilliance of the writing where I've seen it and accept that there's something in it that doesn't appeal to me personally.
In any case, there are plenty of RPGs with dull beginnings that still get high praise. Okami. Kingdom Hearts 2. Xenogears (actually, about 50% of that game counts). And yes, according to pretty well all the critics, FF XII. That's just RPGs: tons of other classic games start with hour-long tutorials and other nonsense. Games are a complex, dynamic medium with a lot of tolerance for highs and lows in one or more of their areas.
Not that I'm conceding that FFXII's story is bad at any point. Right from the start it's deep, sophisticated, and extremely well-told. It's without a doubt the most mature story of any game in the main series -- I just don't find it especially entertaining. Yet I can separate my personal feelings about it from the objective facts about it: the structure of the narrative, the quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters. Some other awfully smart people, like Tycho from Penny-Arcade, apparently appreciated it more than I did, just as I liked it more than you did.
