Quote Originally Posted by VeloZer0 View Post
X wasn't enormosly challenging, but at least it kept me occupied thinking about how I would swap in all 7 characters to get exp, while getting over kills on all the enemies, while taking as few hits as possible. Had I not carred about overkills or damage mitigation (didn't really mater, but I'm old school and budget all MP zealously), I probaby would have found the battles a fairly standard borring grind.
See, switching them all in was just horribly tedious and did make every battle feel like a grindfest for me as I would drop in someone like Yuna and Kimarhi who were totally worthless half the time. I really found leveling in this game to be boring.

What interests me is that you described XII as a step up in difficulty. I found XII to be mind numbingly easy. I just spent a few minutes setting up gambits at the beginning and then watched by characters beat the game themselves for 60 hours. You talk about games being essentially movies, well in XII all I ever did was navigate my characters through dungeons and rapidly press x during cutsceens out of habit.
This really all depends on how you approach the game and play it. I never allowed Gambits to take over my whole party (I am a control freak) so I would usually control my leader character and set up my parties gambits for tedious tasks like casting buff/debuff spells until later in the game when I opened enough of the License Board to start building makeshift job classes, at which point I built proper Gambit set-ups for said "classes" at this point I found myself needing to actually switch between party members regularly to keep myself from getting killed since I never bothered to let all my character be healers or fighters so occasionally I needed to switch up to use items or use an ability the situation needs cause the Gambits can't cover everything. So I can't exactly say I understand when people say "the game played itself" cause I would simply ask you "why did you let it?"

As for difficulty, there are tough bosses in XII, you cannot tell me you waltzed over Zodiark, Ultima, Gilgamesh, or the Elder Wyrm. Unless you grind like hell and then use a guide to secure ultimate equipment early its actually difficult to get through a majority of the boss fights and Mark Hunts. Hell just taking on the Mark Hunts as they became available proved to be challenge and I died enough times with a few of them to finally say screw it and came back to them later with better equips and levels. Many of them require strategies I wouldn't have bothered to use normally but felt incredibly rewarding none the less.


On the topic of cinematic experiences, I have to ask myself, is it really as relevant anymore? In the PS1 FFs the difference between what they can do in game and in FMV is massive, and FMVs are an essential part of the game experience. However, in FFXII (which despite my overall dissatisfaction of the game I am extremely impressed by the technical [graphics, sound, voice acting] aspects of) whenever there was a FMV it usualy took me a while to clue in that it was even happening. In game was so close to FMV that I could barely notice, and even to people more perceptive than I the difference would be negligible.

With the current (a.k.a. 'next') generation systems I don't even see the need for FMV in the game at all. Compound that with the fact the according to another thread I'm not going to look up, something like 30/38 GB of game data is FMV. I can't help but imagine if they had done the majority of this in game we would be seeing this game a lot sooner. And imho, the would make more money if they released two FF FMV-lite titles in the same span of time they released the current FMV bloated product.
I can pretty much agree with your sentiments here. I actually disliked most of the High quality FMVs cause the characters looked so radically different from their perfectly good in game models. This was another issue I didn't care about really any of the PS2 games, X's was weird cause everyone suddenly became Asian during the high quality scene and whiter than white Tidus became beach tanned, it was hilarious.

In XII, I always felt like the characters looked like Barbie Dolls cause the get so cleaned up from the awesome "dirty" models featured in game. Even XI has a few that bug me (don't get me started on Kingdom Hearts or Crisis Core) and I feel we should stick to using in-game models instead of this high quality stuff cause they are simply gorgeous at this point and Full FMVs no longer carry the purpose they once had.