Final Fantasy 12
Developer - Square Enix
PS2
So, I finally put aside my dislike of the over-franchised Final Fantasy series, and gave Final Fantasy 12 its just play time. After about five hours of playing it, I almost wrote my review, wanting to give it a perfect 100. After calming down, and holding off, I continued the journey in the game, up to about 20 hours, and again, almost wrote my review, this time exceptionally disappointed with the way the game had treated me, and wanting to give it more like an 87. But again, I knew that a game of this caliber deserved a level head, so I waited on writing my review again until I finished the game. Now I have done just that, and I am very glad I did, because neither of those partially-informed reviews would have done the game justice.
Never in my life have I experienced the feelings of awe and excitement I got in the first 30 minutes of playing this game. Well, that is a lie – I have experienced that kind of reaction, it was just always reserved for particularly amazing movies. I have never seen a game like this before. It plays just like a high-end movie, and for the first time in my life I was crawling through the dungeons just to get to the next piece of story. I have never felt that way about a game before, it was phenomenal. The game opens up with some of the most impressive CG I have ever laid eyes on, and begins to weave its tale of empires at war immediately. There is no slow going here, there is no boring tutorial killing rats or wolves – you are immediately fighting for a cause – and the implications are astounding.
First of all, the thing that most impressed me with this game was the script. I often speak in absolutes, which is generally bad for someone reviewing a game, but believe me when I tell you I have put a lot of thought into my next sentence. This game has the greatest script in the history of video games. Period. There is no contest; there is nothing that comes close. Whoever wrote this script deserves a raise. And a trophy. And their own holiday. Lucky for us, the script is almost completely voice acted to perfection. The guys and gals that were hired for the voices are top notch. They deliver their lines with style and aplomb, and more than once I found myself laughing out loud, or gasping audibly in my living room. Good stuff.
The next thing that caught me was the animation. Not just the fighting animations, which are great mind you, but the cut scene animations. Many of the cut scenes are not CG pre-renders, they are in-game graphics, and the animations are all custom for each scene. “Lifelike” doesn’t even begin to describe it. They truly look ALIVE. They have different walks, and ways of standing, that all show the character’s individual personalities – and not in an exaggerated way. It is very subtle, but it shows. The facial animations are expertly done as well, and when I watched the credits, I saw that they actually had multiple people that worked on nothing other than facial animations. It paid off, let me tell you.
The game plays a lot like standard action RPG’s of late, but with some really nice twists and systems. For starters, there are no classes in the game. Skills, power ups, and spells are all acquired through a “License Board”. Let me explain; there is a large grid, with various power ups in all of the squares. Each one relates to a certain spell, ability, etc. When you slay enemies, you gain points that can then be allocated to various squares on the board, and when you learn one of the licenses on a particular square, the corresponding adjacent squares become available for purchase. This has been done before, but FF12 takes it a bit further.
Also on this grid, are squares for all of the equipment in the game. Every weapon, piece of armor, and accessory has a certain square, and in order to equip these items, you must first acquire the license for it. Now, at first I was elated at this system. I love it when a game gives the diligent player opportunities to advance themselves far beyond what is standard for their stage in the game, and I mistakenly thought by grinding down monsters and earning more license points than I really had a right to, I would then gain the ability to over-equip my character, or learn some particularly awesome spells earlier in the game. I was wrong. Not only do you have to possess the license for a piece of equipment, but you also must have progressed to a point in the game’s story where such things were available to you. It gave the game a very structured, almost claustrophobic feeling. Even the abilities you could buy licenses for required a trip to a store or a rare drop from a monster to get the actual ability, and you can bet they kept close tabs on when you were “allowed” to get certain things. I hate when games do that. It is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Also, I found that the license grid did not result in “classes” forming, but rather the opposite. When I first started into the grid, my original intent was to make a standard “fighter” character, and a standard “wizard” and a standard “healer”. I could have done this, for instance by buying up all the Black Magic spells for the “wizard”, and all the White Magic spells for the “Healer”. But they mete out the new items, abilities and spells so slowly, compared to the rate the characters advance, that within a relatively short amount of time, I had three clones of each other. There was no reason not to equip White Magic on everyone, not just my healer, so everybody became a healer. Everybody had the exact same spells and abilities. The only time a difference arose in the party, was when I found some piece of equipment that I only had one of. And that did NOT happen very often. In fact, when I defeated the last boss, every single one of my characters had the exact same of everything – all the way down to weapons and armor. For an RPG of such depth and sophistication, I find that unacceptable.
The gameplay itself was a joy, however. The fighting was fluid and tight – and I never felt bogged down or like I was “grinding” monsters. Each kill was quick enough to keep the pacing fast, but slow enough that there was an element of strategy to it. The control scheme was simple, with standard menu driven combat, but done in such a way that speed and quick thinking still played into whether you wound up dead or not. Simple, elegant, engaging, with a slight sense of urgency. Each time I fought an enemy it felt worthwhile. It felt like I was DOING something, instead of the traditional mind-numb that you can fall into when playing RPG’s. How this game got me to enjoy killing 100 enemies in a single stage before I could progress, I will never truly know, but they did it.
One thing in this game that I have never seen done before, in any way shape or form, was what they called the “Gambit System”. Gambits are a way of customizing the AI of your two party members. See, most games just have some type of traditional AI that the party members use, and you usually have no control over it. Sometimes it is good, and sometimes it is bad. A few choice games even game you some control over how your party members would behave – but nothing like this. Each character has a certain number of “Gambits” they can have equipped at any given time, and you get to write these Gambits yourself. Each Gambit is made up of two parts, basically a trigger and a response. For instance, a fairly simple Gambit you might want to make early on, would be something like “Player Any - <60% style=""> Clearly, this offers many possibilities.
By the end of the game, each of my characters had around 10 – 12 Gambits active at any time. When I needed it, they would cast Haste on me, making me attack much faster. When anybody got low on health, they would heal them. When they were affected with a status change, they would cure it. You can use any spell, item, skill or action in a Gambit. So, if a monster has Reflect on (it makes spells bounce off of them and hit the caster), a character’s gambit can tell it to stop casting spells on the creature. Things like that. AND, you have to find or buy each of the pieces of the Gambits in your adventures. So as you progress through the game, and gain more Gambits, your AI options become more robust, and you can rely on your party members more. I really enjoyed the Gambit system, and thought it worked very well in the context of the game. And for you hard cores out there, you can also manually control all the characters yourselves, even with Gambits turned on. Your manual control will take precedence over any Gambit that might activate, and after your command has been issued and performed, the Gambits will take back over. All in all, a great idea that both enriches the gameplay while at the same time simplifying it.
The sound is also just fantastic, and it is readily apparent that enormous amounts of time, money and talent went into the score. It feels like it BELONGS in the world you are playing in, and they never resort to overly dramatic music to tell the tale for them. The voice acting, script, and animations do that for you. The score is there to enhance, not overcompensate – and the result is a subtle boost to the overall feel of the game.
The graphics actually looked a little dated, even for the PS2, most particularly the textures in the terrain. I know, I know, the PS2 is yesteryear’s hardware, and I should cut it some slack, but I can’t. The low-resolution maps might look just dandy on a smaller screen, but on a big screen, the jagged lines and blurry details detracted from the overall appearance. This isn’t to say that the graphics were all bad, mind you, the character models and corresponding maps were top notch. I mostly had issue with the terrain, buildings and locales themselves.
The game is also just jam packed with extras. Hours and hours of side quests, special monster hunting missions where you play bounty hunter to the world’s most dangerous foes, and more. You could easily wring 100+ hours out of this game and never get bored. When I finished the game, there were many MANY spells, abilities and pieces of equipment I had never found – and I am contemplating going back into the world to find them.
This game brings a lot to the table, and no real
RPG fan should go without at least giving it a fair shot. Even if you hate the gameplay (which I doubt), you will still have gotten to experience those first 30 minutes, where the story is laid out for you masterfully in a piece of fine cinema. Even if that is all you take from the game, it will be time well spent, and more likely than not, you will become hooked by the compelling tale, and want to continue this epic adventure. All in all, pound for pound, I would say this is Square’s finest hour, which is a truly remarkable feat indeed.
Score = 98%
Subjective Score = 95%
If you are able, you must try Space Giraffe. Space Giraffe is something so brilliant and so weird that most people will hate it. Video games of this sort don’t come along every day. It is special.
Space Giraffe's next subversion is it's graphics. Some will love them, while many will hate them. Space Giraffe has a uniquely crazy landscape. It looks like it is set inside a music visualizer, inside the last 20 minutes of 2001, inside a psychedelic trip. This is very pretty, but it is horribly cluttered, and it makes the onscreen action very hard to follow. A classically grave design sin, Space Giraffe has carefully and deliberately given this game poor visibility, and this partial blindness is essential to the Space Giraffe experience. The second key to Space Giraffe is accepting that not being able to see what is going on can be a good thing.
The game is filled with a steady stream of nonsense and non sequiturs in the form of text and sounds and visuals. It is filled with references to chaos and to chaos worship and to the practitioners of such. It is played in a psychedelic environment, a deliberately poor environment for a structured game. All of this creates an atmosphere of Discordian mystique that I feel is reflected in the gameplay. I truly feel that Space Giraffe is a work of chaotic magic.
