Ah... i see. Ok, then that makes sense. I interpreted that as an MMO mechanic that doesnt quite work on offline single player where from my point of view the point is to experience the advancement of the story, but you enjoyed it and didnt see it as a grind.

The perma death feature in fire emblem is terrible and i dislike it. Thankfully that was changed with Awakening. Its not the gameplay that is bad in that situation but the design. Of course, if you're good enough you can avoid those things. :)

I can agree with FFXII not beeing for me in the form its in. If they do hope they make an open world FF again, but with less grinding required to advance the main story. Its fine for side-quests as those are an option.

I don't agree that it would have sold 10M and saved JRPGs. Infinite Undiscovery was essentially the next-gen version of FF12 and nobody cared.

I loved FF12 to death and played 127 hours, beat Yiazmat and all optional bosses, etc, but I doubt it would have received the additional praise you describe

I liked the game for what it was, I just don't think it was quite a masterpiece. Just wanted to clear this out, I don't think the game was bad. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.

Mistakes were made on the part of Square Enix. Do I think the game could have sold 10 mil copies and revolutionalised JRPGs...

If the year is 2007 when FF12 came out, the answer is no.

If the year is 2013 two years after Skyrim sold 11 mil copies (which I still can't believe), and if, only if the game was made with Yasumi Matsuno and his team with full control on the project, the answer is yes.

Well, I mainly play JRPGs for the full package of story, battles, and exploration. In the case of FFXII, I could see that the reason they mae it so you need so much EXP was as way to urge the player to chain enemies. By doing this, not only does the EXP begin to pile up, but enemies also begin to drop more rare loot that sells for more Gil. It's a win-win situation and goo game design, IMO. the decision only becomes a flaw if you mainly play for the story scenes, as that means you need to grind much more to keep up with the increasing enemy difficulty.

I actually, liked the perma death feature in Fire Emblem. However, what I disliked was the inability to save during chapters. That way, if you made a bad move, you could just rest and carry on fro where you last saved. I haven't played FE: Awakening. I've only played FE7, FE8: The Scared Stones, FE9: Path of Radience, and FE10: Radient Dawn.

I really hope they make a open world FF like FFXII again. However, I hope they inclide far more variety in the gameplay than just exploring and battles. It would be nice if they include loads of  mini-games.

Infinite Undiscovery isn't as good as FFXII though. The battle system lacks deoth, the world scale is much smaller, and the voice acting and story arem't as realistic and mature. I think FFXII, as the latest mainline FF in a series that's the biggest JRPG series, would have attracted more attention and considerably more praise.

Fair enough and my mistake. I actually like parts of FFXIII, mainly the art direction and graphics, but I found the gameplay and story to be medicore. With FFXII, there's hardly anything I dislike. It's not pefect, but the things I dislike come off as minor flaws and they're even corrected in the International version.

I didn't say the story needed to revolve around him, but he at least needs to be relevant to the plot. In X, the majority of the plot didn't revolve around Tidus, it revolved around Yuna; the POV character was still relevant with valuable insight. In VII the plot was centered around Sephiroth, Cloud was just there for revenge; the POV character was relevant. In VIII the plot is shared between Squall and Laguna; both were relevant to the story (as much as I hated Squall). In VI the cast was a true ensemble with multiple POVs; many of those were relevant to the narrative.

It's not a sterotype for the series so that's not why I think he's a poor protagonist. I do however expect a protagonist to at least have a modicum of relevance to the story otherwise why should I see the story from his POV? Why do I care? The character has no true investment in the story so he's effectively a casual observer. It distances the player from the narrative.

As for Kimahri, that's pretty much his character trope (silent, but fiercely protective; seen, but not heard) whereas in XII it didn't feel like the characters really interacted regardless of their character trope.

Why's that so hard to believe? They're different genres and people play them for different reasons.

Well I can't believe any RPG is that popular. FPS I can understand why so many people play that genre.

But WRPGS, or JRPGs are not casual games. They take a lot of time and commitment to play, I'm supprised Skyrim was that popular. I suppose however a lot of the sales were on PC, where Final Fantasy does not have a strong following compared to WRPGs, which have (as I understand) a large PC market.

To date, I don't really understand why so many people hated Final Fantasy XII. Sure, Vaan and Penelo were kinda bland heroes, but aside from that it was great. (And to be fair, Vaan and Penelo were added later on in development for bishie japanese kids to have an in-game avatar; they were never meant to be big players in the story.)

I mean, the Battle system SEEMED like it took control of you, but it really didn't. Basically, you got to program your characters to act as you would, thus eliminating redundancy. So instead of mashing X ad nauseum to finish random battles, you had to prepare in advance so the battles themselves were mostly taken care of. And to make matters better, if something came up you hadn't anticipated, you could manually control each ally's moves and thus treat it like a traditional FF game. The choice really was yours, since there was options in place to either let you use the gambit system or have the game pause when in a menu much like previous games.

The story and characters were some of the best written in the series, and the world was one of the deepest, most fleshed out ever conceived in a game. There may not have been a massive open world like the first nine games, but the way things were done, it still felt huge, and there were tonnes of hidden areas and secrets to be found.

There was enough side content to keep you busy for hundreds of hours, marks were fun as hell to hunt down and get rewards for, testing your skill throughout rather than just being endgame content.

FF 12 is another of those games that suffers from being to different than its predecessors. It should have been named something else but a numbered Final Fantasy Game.

Remember Final Fantasty Adventure? on the GameBoy? This reminded me so much of that type of game.

Had an awesome Combat "AI system" in the Gambit System. (I fucking hated the License System tho. Make it for things that ARENT weapons/armor/accessories and just for strength/magic/hp etc and it would have been great).

I thought it was one of the weaker Final Fantasy games in the character department, but overall it was a fun and challenging game.