It's all down to preference, Khuutra. I personally cannot stand the grind-tastic nature of FF12. Being forced to spend hours and hours of doing nothing but repetitive fighting just over-exaggerated the game's flaws for me and made me hate it even more. Every randomly placed trap, every same-y brown environment, every irritatingly-laid-out town, every reminder that the plot was just a side-story to a much more interesting plot that I was spoon-fed in between arbitrary chapters, all of it wore on me and made me want to never put the game in my PS2 again. But for somebody who likes grind, FF12 is undoubtedly a great game, and said flaws vanish in the wake of the joy those sorts get from the grind.

 It's really down to taste.  FF games don't usually have extremely deep plots, but they are good at having consistent (or at least easily followed) ones.  While many enthusiastic FF fans will argue that the story is the lure of the series, in reality, most of the lure comes from how each game is unique from each other game, and how the gameplay is usually pretty good too.  And for more recent games (all of the mainstay titles from FF8 onwards, in fact), they've always been on the cutting edge of graphics technology for the time of their release.

You didn't have to grind in FFXII, though. As long as you didn't run from the enemies that you ran into too often and chained same enemy types every once in a while, you would get the necessary amount of AP and Gil to get the best equipment, which was much, much more important than your level.

Yes, I'm telling you that you played it wrong. It's harsh, but it's true. You are not alone in doing this.

Am I to assume that you really want an argument about "samey, brown environments" and whether or not the story was a sidestory? I can go on, it will just take a while and I have to know you'll continue to participate in the discussion.

If playing the most logical way is not the right way to play a game, then unfortunately, you can't very well call it a good game; not by any sort of mainstream standard, anyway. It may well be a deep game, or even an engrossing one, but not a good one. Good games are intuitive: you can pick up the controller and figure out how to play properly within minutes, and won't be punished for taking the most obvious course of action. That was one of FF8's key flaws too, actually: doing what you'd expect (ie. leveling up and killing everything in sight) got you punished with enemies that were too strong.

So I guess it was the counter-intuitiveness of the system that got to me most, then. Doing what made sense with an RPG didn't work. And as I said, that was what made all of the other relatively minor flaws seem far more exaggerated than they really were. All of those niggling issues with the plot, the environments, etc. that I listed were only irritating because it felt to me like the game didn't want me to succeed, didn't want me to play the game.

Oops...  Why is there no "delete post" feature?

Wait, wait, wait.

My first problem here is that you have taken "grinding" as a negative concept and then turned it into something that should have worked better than it did. The flow of the game was set up to make it so that you would not grind: you would run through, you would get gil, you would get AP
Secondly, grinding is not "logical", it is a result of habit based on the worst trope to survive the Dragon Quest days (and I love Dragon Quest, but grinding does not have a proper place in gaming anymore). There is nothing "mainstream" about grinding any more than there is something "logical" about it. The narrative indicates that you are given a sense of urgency in everything you do, so someone going just by what the game tells them will run through and play the game as I have previously described. More, the game plainly explains to you, in a tutorial that you can rewatch as many times as you want, how to maximize your time spent and how to use enemy types to chain them together to get better loot and better armor faster.

Further, using "mainstream" to describe the logic of grinding is a misnomer. Even in Pokemon, grinding is never really necessary if you know what you're doing, and the idea that the "mainstream" gamer would somehow be indoctrinated into the grinding mindset is simultaneously naive and perhaps a little willingly obtuse.

The game was not counter-intuitive, it only felt that way because it played against your expectations of how becoming more powerful in RPGs is supposed to be done, and that is part of what made it so fantastic: it kept the power creep of more traditional RPG grindfests while streamlining the process that made you more powerful. That's just wonderful.

Okay, let's start this over, shall we? Clearly we have a miscommunication.

There are a few basic precepts that users have come to expect from a JRPG, and unless there is a clear, intuitive reason for why they aren't going to be that way, most users expect those things to be the case. Here's a few key ones:

1. You need to gain levels to make progress.
2. You need to buy new equipment as soon as it's available.
3. If you can't afford new equipment, you need to gain more money until you can.
4. If enemies are too difficult, level up.
5. If a boss keeps defeating you, level up.
6. When in doubt, level up.

You can argue all you like against it, but the above outlines the basic thought pattern inherent in any JRPG experience. It's the precedent set by Dragon Quest and reinforced endlessly ever since. Breaking away from these rules without any discernible reason is counter-intuitive, since the RPGamer's intuition favors those behaviors listed above. You can argue that we've surely grown past those precedents by now, but the sad truth is that we have not. There are far, far more JRPGs which follow those rules than do not.

Basically, FF12 violates all of those rules. Leveling up has almost no impact. Equipment is critical, but buying the best stuff available usually isn't the best idea; the "real" best equipment is the stuff with hidden special abilities and attributes, not the stuff with the highest attack and defense power. Stopping to level up, the option that makes the most sense, does nothing useful.

I appreciate the desire to break away from formula, I really do. But FF12 didn't do it right. It still "feels" like a standard JRPG, to the point that following the basic rules of a JRPG seems to make sense. Being punished for doing what makes sense, or even just minimally rewarded when you expect to be greatly rewarded, turns people right off to a game.

Pardon me for a failure to pontificate, I think all of these ideas can be expressed in short and I am in a hurry.

The game told you to break those rules, as plain as day. It cannot be faulted because people sticking to tropes in spite of what the game instructed them to do ended up playing it incorrectly. Yes, levels do matter, but equipment matters more, and that is not a bad thing.

I would argue that the abandonment of these ideas is almost always a positive, and that one's expectations being subverted even unfairly is a positive as well, but Final Fantasy XII was not unfair because it told you very plainly what to expect.

However, I think that my original point, which is that Final Fantasy XII is not a grindfest, has been handily proven and even acquiesced, unless you would disagree.

I don't recall FF12 ever making it clear that I was to break away from standard RPG practices. In fact, given its overall design and layout, it seems to enforce the concept that you need to grind excessively, as it greatly resembles a MMORPG.

A game that does a good job of making it clear that you aren't supposed to play normally, on the other hand, is Chrono Cross. It is clearly not a standard RPG right from the moment you get into a battle and discover that you have 3 attack levels and no access to magic until you have attacked. It sets a definite precedent that standard RPG rules do not apply, and as such, you are very unlikely to try to play Chrono Cross like a typical RPG.

Expectations are funny like that. Unless it's impossible to miss, it's human nature to expect things to be just like what they resemble. It's a problem that's plagued game developers for ages, especially the ones who want to mix things up and make a game that sets a new precedent.

I think that the lack of random battles and the extremely slow enemy respawn rate (most did not respawn unless you left the zone) was my first indicator that the old rules were out the window, even before the little factoid about loot was presented. I would concede this point if the game still had random encounters, but it did not and so I cannot.