Am I going nuts...

[Skyblade]

FFXII is a great game, and one of the best in the series. It had one of the best stories in the game, though had some major issues in pacing that sometimes made it difficult to fully appreciate on a first playthrough. It also had one of the richest worlds to explore, and really made the world seem massive -- more massive than any other game in the series, which is a tough pill for me to swallow, because I love the traditional world map that FFXII did away with. And significantly, FFXII largely dispensed with some of the most annoying and stereotypical character tropes that were overused in the rest of the series.

Great game, and sorely underappreciated.

Again, that whole "massive world" thing is why FFXII had horrible pacing.

Also, you forgot to mention that it had one of the worst combat systems in the series, despite its other strengths.

[Cuchulainn]

The combat system was fantastic man. The Gambit system was revolutionary for RPGs of that ilk. This is all just opinions of course but I thought it was the best combat system of them all. FF had to move on from that very very dated turn based system.

As Wesley stated the world is fantastic and the story is pretty much the best there has been.

[Slothy]

FFXII is a great game, and one of the best in the series. It had one of the best stories in the game, though had some major issues in pacing that sometimes made it difficult to fully appreciate on a first playthrough. It also had one of the richest worlds to explore, and really made the world seem massive -- more massive than any other game in the series, which is a tough pill for me to swallow, because I love the traditional world map that FFXII did away with. And significantly, FFXII largely dispensed with some of the most annoying and stereotypical character tropes that were overused in the rest of the series.

Great game, and sorely underappreciated.

Again, that whole "massive world" thing is why FFXII had horrible pacing.

Also, you forgot to mention that it had one of the worst combat systems in the series, despite its other strengths.

FFXII has the best combat system of any game in the series aside from, maybe, FFV and FF Tactics. The rest of the series doesn't even come close to creating a battle system that's this much of a joy to play.

[Cuchulainn]

FFXII is a great game, and one of the best in the series. It had one of the best stories in the game, though had some major issues in pacing that sometimes made it difficult to fully appreciate on a first playthrough. It also had one of the richest worlds to explore, and really made the world seem massive -- more massive than any other game in the series, which is a tough pill for me to swallow, because I love the traditional world map that FFXII did away with. And significantly, FFXII largely dispensed with some of the most annoying and stereotypical character tropes that were overused in the rest of the series.

Great game, and sorely underappreciated.

Again, that whole "massive world" thing is why FFXII had horrible pacing.

Also, you forgot to mention that it had one of the worst combat systems in the series, despite its other strengths.

FFXII has the best combat system of any game in the series aside from, maybe, FFV and FF Tactics. The rest of the series doesn't even come close to creating a battle system that's this much of a joy to play.

Looks like we finally found common ground man.

[Slothy]

Some truths are almost undeniable my good man.

[Pike]

OOC:

Just for the record, and I realize my original post was hasty and thus not clear, you are free to continue discussing character comparisons and so forth in this thread so long as it doesn't get too far off from FFXII. Everything I snipped was personal insults, or in one case just being off-topic. None of the actual discussion was snipped. This is also why I didn't just split the thread into a new one - I felt it was too intertwined to make a clean cut. I figured a new thread could lead to more discussion but it appears that you lot got there too slow. Of course, it's not too late to take it in a more serious direction.

[Tigmafuzz]

I think the combat system and world more than make up for the pacing, even if they partly to blame for it.

[Skyblade]

FFXII has the best combat system of any game in the series aside from, maybe, FFV and FF Tactics. The rest of the series doesn't even come close to creating a battle system that's this much of a joy to play.

I'd like to start by saying that any game which breaks the rules of its own combat system does not have good mechanics.

The Gambits, while revolutionary, still had some big problems.

First, the restrictions. These were just completely stupid. Your party's skills and abilities should grow, yes, but the system you use to control them should not. Having 90% of the Gambit system locked at the beginning of the game was a horrible decision, and if they ever do revisit it, I hope they just give you full control right out of the gate.

Second, the number. There are way too few. For one thing, they needed to give you a secondary and even a tertiary Gambit list that you can pull up quickly to flip out a character's entire Gambit list all at once. The system could handle any situation nearly perfectly with good Gambits, but setting up the twelve perfect Gambits that you need for a particular situation was such a pain in the tokhes that you generally just pick an average all-rounder set and went with it. Which made the game boring and made the combat uninvolved. Given us a Paradigm Shift like mechanic to completely flip out a character's Gambits for another set you've already prepared, while saving the old set, would make the Gambits so much better.

Third, the lack of options. I don't want to talk about this one too much, since I'd have to replay the game again to give a lot of details, but I do remember being incredibly frustrated by how I couldn't set up a Gambit to work in a particular and, seemingly, simple way. Not to mention things like the fact that each spell needs its own Gambit. You can easily set up half the Gambit list with just buffs to cast, all of which you need up most of the time because the game does a good job of making buffs really useful. A "cast all, in this priority order" as a single Gambit would be awesome.

It wasn't actually a horrible game system, but I felt it was just far less polished than it needed to be to be great. Granted, it was a brand new idea, but I still felt it could have been better executed.

Also, I never had a problem with turn based systems. Far better than most "real time" systems that games have these days.


But I think the world size and structure is what really killed this game for me. Ivalice is awesome, but I didn't need that long exploring it. The towns were phenomenal, and I won't deny that. But the rest of the game, while impressive in scale, just felt like one long dungeon crawl, and I think it killed the pacing and immersion.