could this be the best final fantasy?

[Wolf Kanno]

I don't believe it is the best but I do feel it is very important to the series as a whole. It seems the most complete of the FF worlds and this may in fact be it's true strong point. The music, I will agree is not nearly as memorable as some of the composer's previous work but it at least works for the feel of the game. There are no bad tracks, it's just not memorable.

I won't argue about the cast and plot cause I've been doing that in two other threads now. I do find that alot of people miss out and judge it too quickly cause it's not nearly as melodramatic as the past FF's. It is just told in a very sutle way. I feel you have to read between the lines a little more and watch the characters reaction while talking to gain insight into them. Of course even I'll admit that I may also be reading too much into everything and most of what I feel is really going on is in my head

It is nearly flawless as a game once you get used to the new system. It's only glaring faults are the basic problem you find in most MMO's which is grinding, though FFXII does a slightly better job in fixing this issue, it is still there .

My only hope is that SE will remember the strengths of this game when it starts to work on the next game. It is definetly the best of the PS2 FF's no contest.

[ekkatin]

ok I didnt' read this whole thread, so sorry if anythign is repeated, I do like this game as far as the actual gameplay, but to me FF strongest point has always been the storyline, and the story in this game is weak,. I highly enjoy the game, but it just feels like something is lacking.

[MurderfaceX3]

Personally, I think that it is the best Final Fantasy yet...Just because it has the MMO sensibilities in a Single-player Framework, and thats a first for console! =)

[nik0tine]

FFXII is 70 hours of dungeon crawling, with a little plot advancement here and there and no character development.

The game is a massive dissapointment, and nowhere near the best FF. It moves way to slowly and the most interesting thing you'll learn about the characters are their names.

The music is hit or miss with this game too. Some of it is great, but alot of it just plain sucks, and none of it stands out.

With that said, this game is absolutely fantastic. I haven't had this much fun with a game in quite some time. It is great, but it doesn't deserve the praise it's getting. FFIX, VI, VII, and Tactics are all better than FFXII. I like FFVIII better personally, but that's probably due to the fact that VIII introduced me to the series.

[XxSephirothxX]

How can you say that it's both a massive disappointment and absolutely fantastic? If you think it's fantastic and are still massively disappointed, your expectations are set far too high.

I would disagree about the plot. There is a bit too much dungeon crawling, but I've only played the game 27 hours or so and I think there is ample political intrigue to keep the story going, though it does move slower than most of them, but that's to be expected when the story isn't of your typical save-the-world variety.

It's really just up to your opinion and how you like to play games. Personally, I don't think it's the best in the series, but the Gambits are a fantastic way to make random battles less annoying, the world is vast and beautiful, and full of things you can do, and the plot is far more adult than ever before. Top notch stuff.

[VeloZer0]

Because FFXII was a good game when rated on a scale of all games, but a dissapointment when rated on a scale of Final Fantasies.

[XxSephirothxX]

There are plenty of games out there just as good as the Final Fantasy series. Just because a game has "Final Fantasy" in its title, it's not all of a sudden on some new scale superior to the rest of video games. I suppose that rating would make sense if you considered every game in the series to be superb, but I'd consider that a bit silly to begin with.

[Raistlin]

How can you say that it's both a massive disappointment and absolutely fantastic? If you think it's fantastic and are still massively disappointed, your expectations are set far too high.

I think he meant the gameplay is fantastic, but the rest of it is sorely lacking. I might be wrong. That's how I feel, anyway: the gameplay is amazing, but the plot, characters, etc. are all sort of meh. I wasn't as disappointed as nik seems to be, but I still share his basic feelings of the game.

[VeloZer0]

There are also many games worse than the Final Fantasy series. The fact of the mater is, when a game is labeled 'Final Fantasy' there are certain expectations placed on it, differing from person to person. Since the game is labeled Final Fantasy we compare it to what we expect out of Final Fantasy, if it were labeled 'Dalmasca' or something like that then we would rate it against our expectations for RPGs in general.

[Markus. D]

does it hold up to "Final Fantasy XI: Chains of Promathia"?

[chionos]

does it hold up to "Final Fantasy XI: Chains of Promathia"?

Does anything?
The answer is most definately NO.
FFXI is above and beyond anything else SE has ever done, so it exists in a class all its own.
FFXII does a very good job, however, of delivering the MMORPG feel in an offline package.

Something that brings up that I've thought about a lot:
I wish that SE would use the hardrives available to some of the consoles to make expansions for regular offline console games. It's probably not anything practical or logical for them to do, just a bit of wishful thinking on my part.

[Renmiri]

the X team is doing XIII!?!?!?!?!!? omg u just made my day!

Read it and party!!!
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/706/706153p1.html

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)
Motomu Toriyama (Director)
Yoshinori Kitase (Producer)
Tetsuya Nomura (Character Design)
Nobuo Uematsu (Theme Song Composition)
Masashi Hamazu (Composer)
Eiji Fujii (Movie Director)
Isamu Kamikokuryou (Art Director)

[Dell]

the X team is doing XIII!?!?!?!?!!? omg u just made my day!

Read it and party!!!
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/706/706153p1.html

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3)
Motomu Toriyama (Director)
Yoshinori Kitase (Producer)
Tetsuya Nomura (Character Design)
Nobuo Uematsu (Theme Song Composition)
Masashi Hamazu (Composer)
Eiji Fujii (Movie Director)
Isamu Kamikokuryou (Art Director)

X and VII is a disappointment (To me). I doubt FFXIII is gonna be good. However, I won't judge it yet, I just got a feeling.

[Coronet]

I have a love/hate relationship with this game right now. I've logged in 90 hours of the game and honestly I'm getting bored. I'm not attached to any of the characters the way I was in FFX (one of my favorites storyline wise. I thought it was the most creative!)

Storyline: The story starts out great! There seems to be so much energy, so many interesting things and unknowns. And that's where they leave you. After 10 hours, anything "interesting" they bring up isn't talked about again. You go on missions that seem to end pointlessly. You get magical items that are supposed to advance the story, yet aren't talked about indepth. I found myself advancing the storyline, taking an hour to do some sidequests and then forgetting what the hell I was supposed to do next.

Character Development: Penelo who? Seriously, half the characters in this game could just as easily not be there and have the story advance all the same. You could throw out Vaan, Penelo, and perhaps even Fran and have the story advance near the same. None of them play vital roles at all, but are rather "along for the ride". I was talking to my boyfriend as I played the game and asked him what the point of Penelo was and he said he had yet to find a reason. You can sum up the back stories of most characters in 3 sentences. There are no background arks that tell anything interesting about the characters (Minus Fran in one small section, but it's hardly in depth). I didn't feel the characters grew or changed much through the story. Not much character interaction, no romance (which is a good or bad thing depending on who you are), very Star Wars. Characters are killed off and you barely feel a thing.

Voice acting is A+. I'll give it that.

Music is a hit or miss. Depends on what you like. I was "so-so" with it. Some tracks were awesome, others were blah. Very FF:Tactics.

Battle system is fun and open. You'll be doing a lot of hack and slash and little magic casting (besides white magic). By the time you get the strongest spells, they do almost the same DPS (damage per second) as quite simply just having auto attack on the monster. The damage ratio between spells vs. melee is pretty awful. Spells should have been stronger.

Espers have little to no backstory. The first summon you get has some story, but the rest are just there. You get them through the storyline. Half of them are optional with no story. They appear, you fight them. The end. The only "story" you get is from the game's beast log which tells some info on them that you don't get in the game otherwise.

Animation is very nice. Ingame, it's pushing the limits of what the PS2 can handle. It's a step up from FFX. Environments are lovely and the cities are beautiful. Dungeons have a tendancy to be repeat square rooms with lots of monsters though.

FMVs are nothing we haven't seen before. FFX had better, more eye-candy ones, in my humble opinion.

So, comparing FF12 to FF10.

Storyline: FF10 wins that one by a long shot. I was almost in tears at the end of FF10. Talk about unhappy endings!
Battle System: Toss up. FF10 had a larger sphere grid that took far longer to finish than the license board. At the end of FF12 (without much work at all) all my characters were clones of each other differing in only a few STR points or MGK points here or there.
Gameplay: Faster in FF12 by far. Both are good being Final Fantasy games. I'm ok with both honestly.
Characters: Much more memorable ones in FFX. I'm sorry, I really wanted Vaan and Penelo to have points and kept waiting for the points to come, but alas, they didn't.
Music: FF10 wins. The only thing I liked better in FF12 was the theme song. Suteki da Ne bothered me for some reason.

And a final note: FF12 has some oddly long load times. Between using Quickenings and changing zones, there's this slightly longer than should be lag fest.

[Wolf Kanno]

I'm going to apologize for being a hypocrite right now.

I'm sorry, I won't do it again...

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I have to laugh at how two people can play the same games and walk away with completely differnet opinions.

I could take your entire post Coronet, replace FFXII with FFX, change a few names, and you would have my basic opinion of how I feel about FFX. Though I wouldn't be that generous with the combat system review.

We are both entitled to our respective opinions though so I'm not trying to say you are wrong. We just have really different taste. I only mention it cause to me, you are comparing FFXII to what I feel is the worst game in the series. Whereas you feel FFX is the best. I'm not trying to pick a fight though, so please take this with a good sense of humor.

Anyway, I would like to ask that we try to tone down the point by point comparisons to other FF games. Please