I've not played the Tactics series that much, so my experience with Ivalice is pretty much FF12. It may be the case that the other games may be better. But as such insofar as I'm concerned, my personal experience with Ivalice has been negative.Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
I don't care if you hate the game and feel its awful we all have our own opinions and I'm not really going to bother convincing you one way or the other. Though lashing out at the the whole Ivalice franchise cause you didn't like XII seems pretty silly to me.
*sigh* I don't know at what point you started to assume that I was wanting a game filled with clichés. If you'd have bothered to read what I had posted you'd have seen that my primary complaint was that there was no character development and the story was way too straight forward.
Let me tell you a bit about storytelling; generally speaking drama is created within a narrative via two major means; changes in the present status quo of the story, and changes in the protagonists/antagonists. In the case of the first the game, while including several major plot points where events do happen, none of them are unexpected or particularly interesting. It's amazing that in the course of the game your party gets captured twice. To me that just smacks of a lack of any ideas. This is also coupled with the fact the story never throws you a curve ball. One of the things I tend to enjoy when watching any story are the points when a major plotline is revealed, or an intriguing new aspect is added to the mix that completely changes the proceedings. These are the real memorable moments of a story; examples such as FF7 when you find out about Cloud's past, in Fallout 2 when you find out about the experiments being done on the vaults and in Knights of the Old Republic when you find out about your character's past. It's these moments that many players tend to remember, the point where a new piece of the puzzle that is the narrative fell into place and things became interesting. This never happens at all in FF12. The only point where the game becomes even mildly interesting is when the Occuria show up. But even then the game does nothing with them. I was expecting them to be at least some kind of credible influence in the actual plotline, but they basically show up like some kind of obscure Deus Ex Machina, say some cryptic lines and are never heard from again. They may as well have mentioned it in the credits; "By the way, there's these things that made all this happen, but you don't get to do jack about them". In short the game presents no real intrigue during the course of the gameplay, and even the basic storyline which is presented isn't even that well done. I mean you don't even see the final boss with the exception of the starting cinematic and near the end. He's not that much of a credible threat. Neither is the Empire. There's no sense that what you're doing is urgent or even necessary. Personally I felt by the end that the world wasn't even improved; it just had a different administration.
Now let's get onto the characters. I don't know how necessary it is to argue about the lack of character development, but I'll do so. Basically there is none, or practically none. Each of the characters gets to the end of the game in pretty much the same state as the start. They don't overcome any personal goals, demons, internal conflicts, they don't improve in some way, they don't show any kind of emotional progression throughout the entirety of the game. There are some character attributes which, if they had been fully realised, would have moved the characters away from the cardboard cut-outs they are. But these are just glazed over so quickly if you blink you'd miss them. Vaan has a backstory about his brother being killed, but it's mentioned a handful of times and then forgotten. Basch's story about killing the king is quickly swept under the rug with an "evil brother" device (by the way if you want to bitch and moan about clichés, stick that particular one in your pipe and smoke it) basically turning him into a gruff-voiced bodyguard. Ashe is basically a bitch from start to finish, and to be honest is as unsuitable and unworthy of ruling over Ivalice as a sack of potatoes. Fran and Penelo are essential worthless in terms of their motivations since they're essentially just the taggers-on to Balthier and Vaan respectively. At the very least Fran has the most developed narrative vis a vis her expulsion from her homeland. Penelo on the other hand is utterly pointless as a character. She has no motivation beyond being a puppy-dog to Vaan, no background of note and has I think the better part of ten lines in the entire game. Balthier is easily the most intriguing character but despite this he's actually the one character that's developed the least. You get all these really nifty hints of his past life and his ties to the Empire, but it's never really explored fully. It's the metaphorical equivalent of hanging a piece of meat three feet away from a cage lion with two foot long legs. There's such a lack of anything close to character interaction as well that makes the game so damn dull. In every drama there's at least some kind of conflict internally with the protagonists, some way in which they directly interact with each other and through this their own stories and personalities develop. There is none of that in FF12. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if the party got to the end of the game without knowing a damn thing about each other. They may not even know each other's names. Then there's the antagonists, who by and large are more interesting to watch than your own party. Yet they never seem like a credible threat, something that you should be fighting against. From what I can tell the Empire is actually the superior of the two forces, and in all honesty if it were up to me I'd rather they were in charge than Whats-her-face. We have an end boss that doesn't even show his face for the majority of the game, yet we're supposed to feel some sense of achievement in laying the smackdown on him? It's almost as bad as Necro in FF9 who just springs out of nowhere. I can't even remember the name of the bad guy you fight at the end off the top of my head.
If all of that is too much for you to read let me summarise; FF12 fails to create any kind of meaningful development in both it's characters and it's plot. It's as stock as you can get and not even the interesting kind of stock. The narrative is generally straightforward with no points of interest, certainly not something you discuss with others afterwards. The characters are walking mannequins designed to say the occasional lines of exposition, beyond that not offering anything in the way of intrigue. This isn't a case of wanting clichés, this is a case of wanting something, anything to happen that's worth pumping forty+ hours into this game. In short there isn't. You could write the script for this game on the back of a napkin over your lunch-break if you choose to do so. By the end of FF12 I felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment, cheated by a storyline that never delivers and is so predictable in it's outcomes and direction I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I wasted my time playing it to the end.
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