Corpse Run 218: License to thrill
LIVESTREAM UPDATE: The next stream is scheduled for Thursday, June 21st at 10 pm est! Be there or be… somewhere else.
Yeah, I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to Final Fantasy 12. That said, I figure that after sinking so much time into playing it recently, I should at least get one comic out of doing so.
For the record, I don’t just think that Final Fantasy 12 is the worst FF game I’ve ever played; that goes without saying, but there’s a chance that FF12 might be one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Why? The entire game experience can be summed up thusly:
All you (the player) do is point your characters in the right direction.
The game pretty much takes care of the rest. You set up “Gambits” through the menu which are basically instructions for what your team does depending on the combat situation. Healing, hitting, statuses… everything is controlled by gambits.
Once again, all you need to do move the team to whatever new location the story desires them to be.
This wouldn’t be so heinous if the story and characters held up. Unfortunately, FF12 fails spectacularly in that department as well; the cast of FF12 might be one of the weakest, most vanilla, most cardboard group of guys ever to set foot in a story of any kind, much less a video game. Sure, Balthier has a smidge of personality, but he is lost in a sea of mediocrity so painfully… mediocre that Antonio Salieri would start to absolve their sins.
Very rarely do I not finish games, especially after I’ve sunk nearly twenty hours into them, but I think an exception might be due for FF12. I’m not sure I’ve had any fun with it since I first put the disk in the tray.
So, I’m back from the Camp Work Weekend, and it was great! Lots of work complete! Woo! I’ll be back up there for the rest of the summer starting next Thursday, but don’t fret, comics will still be updating on a normal schedule!
As many of you guys already know, animals (mice, deer) often get in the way of my daily life and provide me with small doses of frustration. Coming home from Camp on Sunday was no exception. My drive back to the city was suspended.
Suspended by…
cows.
This. This is how you know you aren’t in the city anymore.
Unless you are in New Zealand. We have cows and sheep everywhere.
And I hate Final Fantasy XII, but I’ll disagree with one thing. While you can automate everything with Gambits, you aren’t required to do so to the point that the game plays itself, and you need to unlock a good amount of them to be able to do it to that extent anyway. Automate what you don’t enjoy, but leave the rest.
I’ll totes give that a try! I really don’t want to quit on a game I’ve put so much time into already =P
I left the Gambits alone and only set up healing ones as I tend to forget about HP getting low… The story itself wasn’t bad and the license system could have worked… for weapons. I could see “learning” how to use a weapon as you know, each blade has different weight, balance, yaddi-yaddi-yadda… but armor, come on D:
Absolutely with you on the weapons! In a way, I like that every character starts at more or less the center of the grid, so everyone is totally customizable, but the downside is that, even in gameplay, the characters are just lumps of clay as opposed to unique people.
Rich and I got into a whole conversation like that about Mario Strikers compared with Mario Strikers Charged. He likes the first one better because all the characters have completely equal attributes, making it a pure skill contest regardless of what character you choose; essentially they are all lumps of clay, but ones that you can’t shape at all. I like the second one because, even though the offensive system is completely broken — each main character can score up to 6 goals per megastrike, and even sidekicks have guaranteed goal moves — the variability between characters makes gameplay more interesting, and the presentation of the game is just leaps and bounds above the former.
It’s not that I dislike Mario Strikers Charged either. I think both are great games but they both have very different approaches to game design. I’m actually glad that both exist; they are each fun for varying reasons.
Talking about lumps of clay, it reminds me of White Knight Chronicles on PS3, it’s an mmo but made single player kind of deal. The character you create can be whatever, then each story characters can be certain trees, but they all look the same when you gear them in the best armor available :\ still a game I suggest to try though, if you have a PS3.
I’m still playing the game and I agree for the most part but I still think that every character except Vaan and Penelo had their moments. Those two should have been cut. I think Reks, Vaan’s, brother should have been the main character and I kinda wish Vaan had died.
If you think about it the game is about Balthier, a man with a history of regret, convincing Ashe not to make a serious mistake. Other than that every character is a jrpg cardboard cutout and they make it worse by giving them the same weapon and skill options on the license board. They didn’t even give them armor skins! You’d think they were all the same person were it not for the stat differences.
I hate having to deal with the drops and the loot system. It’s okay sometimes but it’s so much work! The summons are pretty cool but i’d rather control them, like you can in the international version, instead of having them follow you around like a dog.
I’m a terrible gamer for it, and I miss out on a lot, but I’ve never played one of the core FF games. I played part of I, III, watched my older brother play Disc 1 and 3 of VII, and played the first ten minutes of XIII. Other than that, I’ve played the GC and DS Crystal Chronicles and the DS FF Tactics A2, which has Vaan and Penelo make cameo entrances and you get them in your party. It’s like with the LoZ for me. I never played them growing up, so I’m not into them like everyone else. It’s sad 🙁
I like how you used different fonts for when Penelo is taking to the reader versus talking to Vaan. Nice touch.
The cow thing has actually happened to me before.
Final Fantasy 10-2 and onward are not real final fantasy games. The team that does final fantasy left square and most of them retired during or after the production of 10, and they started making completely different games with a different team while keeping the same name just for the sake of sales. Even the composer, Nobuo Uematsu, is gone. He wrote every single soundtrack of 9, over 140 songs for that game alone, and much of 10, but contributes one once in a while for all the following games just so they can have his (very famous) name in the credits. The folks who made the original 10 all agree that if any game needs a remake more than anything it is 9. 9 is agreed upon to have had the most spectacular story of any of the games, but was never highly popular due to the oddness of the animation style and a rather broken, twisted battle system in which things that weren’t supposed to be killer powerful were and things that were supposed to be uber were not. If you set up your characters right, you could be massacring level 55 Grand Dragons at level 12 or so and power level your team so hard that the battle system just kind of died. This is the reason that in ff10 the game’s difficulty actually adjusts to the level of the characters, and those of us who did not know this and tried to power level actually had more difficulty with it… which is in a way what we wanted. FF9 was supposed to be the last one, they were going to be done, but it was received so poorly that they did another one because they wanted their final one to be their best, and in my opinion they succeeded. A lot of americans will rave about the greatness of seven, but I have learned that most people will say the first FF game that they played is their favorite simply because they see it as the standard to compare others upon, and while FF7 had a fantastic battle system and a wonderful villain, the rest of the story made little sense and the main characters were rather stereotypes for the most part (the black guy with a gun? the young blond emo? the girl whose entire personality is based around being in love with emo guy? come on.)
My point herein is while all of the original 10 FF games have had at least one very strong aspect to their immersion value as a storytelling medium, FF 12 fails in all of these regards. Most of the characters have a moment or two but the group as a whole seems faded, it is hard to justify the motives for what most of the group are doing with the exception of Balthier and Ashe, and Ashe is so unlikable that that doesn’t even really matter. Not to mention the clothing is so horribly impractical; even FF10 Lulu had most of her body covered with thick, loose fitting leather despite the inordinate cleavage peak, Pinello’s clothing is simply painful to think about wearing, how it would chafe, and Ashe’s outfit is just ridiculous. DO NOT get me started on Fran. It is clearly obvious that the production team had in mind nothing besides “fan service” when designing these women, their appearance and their personalities. A micro-miniskirt, armor does not make. Vaan has so many character development moments that are supposed to make him relate-able bit primarily fail, and his motive as a random orphan traveling with the group is never completely clear except in a way that seems selfish and rather pigheaded, and Pinello is simply there because Vaan is. He is supposed to be our main character, for Pete’s sake!
The battle system is utterly boring. If you’re smart enough to set them out in a way that is most practical, the gambit system will allow you to forego 90% of combat and simply watch your characters play without you, leaving us utterly clueless when we come upon a boss fight in which this doesn’t work (did anyone else have to feverishly figure out how the heck to do the limit thing after having met the onion family?) and the only real difference between characters is the animations for their limit break, or whatever it was called in that game. The ‘Charge” ability completely broke the magic system and once gambits were available to program characters to do it themselves when their mana was depleted (about 80% of the way through the game) you could really, honestly, just point and steer your team wherever and they did the work for you (with exception to aforementioned boss fights) and while this made farming a piece of cake, who wants to spend their entire gaming experience farming while not really thinking but watching? Clearly this game was made strictly for the “video games can be like movies” demographic, and while most of us like this idea to an extent, we like to be the most important thing going on in a game and not have the computer take over our primary role for us.
One big improvement over 10, I have to admit, is the dubbing and the hair. The lips move when they are supposed to and the hair actually moves realistically, which was the only real barrier to the realism in ff10. The characters always look so dirty though, and all of them wear this continuous glazed-over look when not in cut scenes. Seriously, though, “the hair is realistic” is not a reason to buy or play a game, and I have been refusing to play the numbered FF games due to the fact that this style trend has continued and, let’s face it, some of the new ones are just MMOs. Final Fantasy should be an immersive experience which tells a fantastic story to the player, and one that can live forever in that we can share it with future generations. MMOs are forever changing, forever emerging, and forever dying, and the idea that a game can no longer be played once it is no longer supported completely destroys the idea that is Final Fantasy.
On that note, has anyone here ever played the multiplayer variant of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles? The original? That game was so incredibly fantastic… they need to make a remake for the wii with more levels, a more expansive magic system, and more character customization. That game was so amazing, It was far too short, they could even make it as an MMO for the wii, no?
I played the multiplayer variant with my brother. It was pretty fun. Except the whole “only one of you can fight at the same time, since the other has to carry the chalice”. Either that, or you both could but couldn’t leave the small circle it cast.
To me 9 was always my favorite Final Fantasy. The music, and even the graphics style as a kid just drew me in more. (I guess you could say the style was a bit more zelda-ey to me?).
Even now I agree it sorely needs a remake. (Then again I also want Chrono Cross to get a remake xD)
the point of the circle – and a brilliant story mechanic they had for explaining that, too – was just to make sure everyone stayed onscreen, lol. it’s far better with three people. we had this rule that if you had the map you got the chalice.
Finally commenting for the first time, just to say the EXACT same thing happened to me. FF12 was the ONLY Final Fantasy game that I stopped playing before the end, and honestly, I didn’t feel like I actually missed anything by not finishing it
I’m curious to find out what blog platform you happen to be utilizing? I’m experiencing some minor security problems with my latest blog & I would like to find something more secure. Do you have any recommendations?