YES!!!Originally Posted by VeloZer0
Seriously, everyone should play but especially you and Bolivar.
P3 is my fave but judging by your taste in game design I feel you should play P4 (hell, P2 if you can find a copy) instead cause it gives you more control of your characters and how they grow and the story is more of the focus of the game than the high school Sim stuff.
My only issue with P4 is that they kinda dumbed down the combat system a little. In P3 physical attacks are treated like elemental attacks and separated into 3 types being slash/strike/pierce. This allowed more interesting party configurations and better uses of some Personas that could use all three types, as well as made the Main character even more awesome cause he can equip most of the games weapons whereas everyone is stuck using one type.
P4 chose to streamline this and turn all physical attacks into one type so it doesn't matter what kind of a physical attack it was, consequently though, they removed it as a weakness for enemies as well since it basically got dumbed down to the generic default attack which sadly cripples one party member who is actually built for physical abilities as well as a whole chunk of Personas who are built around as pure physical fighters. Despite all this P4 also introduces a bunch of new combat abilites that make gameplay very interesting, my main gripe is that I feel P3's combat is still much more polished and balanced despite P4 giving you more control (you only control your main character in P3 but can give your party members individual orders in combat).
Still, Min/Max is fun and challenging in this game, especially since status spells actually work and can save your ass at times. Teddie alone involves making some of the hardest choices in the game cause most of his abilities are insanely awesome but your restricted to only having 8 skills at a time.
P4 is probably more up your alley but P3 will always be my first love.
See, XII sorta showed me the revelation that I don't like random encounters when they don't offer challenge and as I've said earlier, I don't feel FF has made a truly challenging games since possibly FFV. I find random encounters to be tedious in all the FFs starting from VI and up to XII. X being the worst offender for me personally cause it forced me to spend more time than five seconds to actually engage enemies that are not worth my time, so I can do tedious crap so I can XP for everyone in my party. XII allowed me to let the A.I. deal with it so I can actually spend more time exploring which is one of my favorite old school RPG elements that has been slowly and painfully removed from modern RPG games. So for me, it was a win/win situation. The Mark Hunts and Boss fights provided the combat that I loved.In regards to combat being tedious, I think the one thing that separated FFXII from other titles (for me) was the amount of mana regen. I regained more mana than I spent, even on boss fights. I am extremely cheap when it comes to managing resources, so usually what keeps me engaged in battles is trying to budget it so I use the least amount of MP possible. If I don't cast offensive spells I will use too much MP healing, if I use too many I run out, ect... Thus in FFXII I had absolutely no incentive to be engaged in the random encounter. And like I said, I actually enjoyed FFX random encounter design, I thought it was probably the best in the series.
I have not had the need to do item management in an FF since probably FFIII and even then I can only safely say their are three games in the series you can do it and its important FFI-III. Starting with IV its not as important except for ethers same with five and once again by VI and up, I feel item management is useless since the games throw items at you and cut the cost of purchasing them to near pennies. In X, I never felt the need to have a healer since monsters were so weak and it was too easy to get through battles without them having a chance to attack (making every battle almost a preemptive strike) not to mention how plentiful Save points were I don't think I ever used items or even Yuna after my first play through. XII doesn't do any better but I actually liked having regenerative MP cause it made my spell casters far more useful and I didn't have to worry about their major weaknesses. Hell I find their dependency on items to be one of the reasons why I don't like using Spell casters in early RPGs.
There is a ranking system and it based on damage taken and time to beat as far as I've heard. Better ranks makes the monsters drop better loot. I'm looking forward to it cause it might make combat more enjoyable.I have heard that in FXIII there is some sort of ranking system after every battle, which I hope is a good way to keep me invested in the random battles. That is provided it isn't too easy our routine to get the highest rank.
I know too many people who go through FFT and basically make Knight with Duel Wield (Usually a combination of Excalibur/Save The Queen/ and Chaos Sword depending on whether they wanted high attack power or defense but Excalibur was mandatory for its auto-haste and immunity to Holy) and then sub Calculator with Flare and Holy as their only spells. That's all they would ever build and then they would complain about how the game had no real customization because this was the "perfect" set-up. This is kinda what your remarks on XII was reminding me of.I don't necessarily like clones, for instance I felt FFT for the most part you did better with a mixed party than an all clone one. Even when you factor in highly overpowered builds, you are better of with a several variety of a few overpowered builds. When I was setting up my party at the start of FFXII it just felt like I was being shoe-horned into making clones, as diversification didn't offer anything I couldn't do with clones.
The amusing thing is that the diversity in equipment and how each weapon possesses its own strength and play styles gave me the impression the game wanted you to do job classes. I never felt it shoe horned the player into making clones, quite the opposite actually. I highly doubt there is a "perfect" set-up with clones cause you need specific types of weapons and armor to really max out magic and as for high damage attack power there are multiple builds for that depending on what weapon you want and whether you are going for multi damage, critical hits, or just consistent high damage. Even defensive builds will require you to make choices on what type of equipment you want to use and how you define defensive as either a high stat (Heavy armor) or evasion (Light armor and weapons like guns/knives/ and ninja blades), even choosing between shields/crossbows/and guns can change the set up cause they all carry high evasion and allow you to block enemy attacks.
I feel XII does offer you a min/max paradise, you just need to look beyond your normal train of thought and experiment, much like you would in Tactics.
I'll ask the other mods, hell just having a Persona forum would make me happy though it wouldn't really make sense in a FF forum but I find the people on these forums who have played Persona have a better head on their shoulders about the series than the ones I meet on actual Persona forums. Go figure. :sweatdrop:EDIT: After reading the last few posts, they should make a Persona/FFT/FFX/FFXII forum for us, as those are the only games we really seem to want to draw examples from
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