FF began to suck balls?

[Zargabaath]

I dislike the digs at Final Fantasy XII because everyone I've spoken who didn't like it didn't give it credit for the parts they did like. Everyone is quick to make the negative pointers list, and the game wasn't bad.

Quite true, it seems as though they are blinded by the negatives that forget the positive or view the game as entirely as negative.

And:
Why would you need to control the airship? It was a feature that was pretty good in the older games, but... okay, Oblivion reference: if you can "fast-travel", why take the horse? You take the horse because you want to explore every nook and cranny of every area. I rarely used the airships in Final Fantasy XII because I ran pretty much everywhere. Sometimes multiple times, collecting loot, items, and shit tons of exp (Embroidered Tippet ftfw). It's how I levelled so fast.

Very nice point.

If it doesn't bother you much, and would bother you if it was silent, then... why such negativity? As for kids not reading as much these days... that is somewhat a point, but if a game can cater for kids that want to read, then by all means. The voices weren't always the greatest, but they weren't "wimply ass boyband voices". Lets face it - dubs usually suck.

What voices did you find to be "not the greatest"? This is out of curiousity

That had better not be a dig at Dragon Age.

It was not a dig at Dragon Age. If you look in the sentence where I "coughed" you will see "gambits" and "tactics"; "tactics" are the "gambits" of Dragon Age. That "cough" was to show the influence and impact of Final Fantasy XII that was all.

I like the battle system in Final Fantasy X-2, but the story just isn't even comparable to the original.

I ask: do you know how hard it is for a sequel's story to be as good as the original? Expectations should be set lower because it was a sequel and it was not a full effort from Square. Being that it was not a full effort from Square, why have high expectations?

I really have not liked what Square Enix has been making these past few years. It seems that they have been more interested in making remakes and horrible spin-off games than continuing the improve the main series. They have remade FFI(2), FFII(2), FFIII, FFIV(2), FFV, and FFVI despite the fact that all of these except for FFIII have already been remade... They also made these "kiddy" Tactics games, which in my opinion have not compared to the original in any way except for maybe the battle system. I'm not even going to talk about Crystal Chronicles or Chocobo's Dungeon.

As Unknown Entity said, Square is offering their earlier works to the new generation so that may experience the games and become a bigger fan of the series. I also think with the increase in development time for games, let alone a Final Fantasy, Square needs to get some revenue. It is unfortunate and sad that it takes longer for the next Final Fantasy game to come out, though Final Fantasy XIV will be out late 2010 so we will have had two Final Fantasies released in one year, but I'd rather wait longer than Square to go under and there be no new Final Fantasies.

First I would like to say that I do not completely dislike FFXII. It is just that I feel it is inferior to the majority of the previous FF games. I enjoyed some parts of it, but there were several parts that I did not like.

What parts did you like?

1. The Story: I have not finished this game yet, so I cannot fully comment on the story, but from what I have played, it is certainly not as good as the previous FF games. The story here seems pretty generic...

All the previous FFs can be summed up to be generic, however in each game, FF XII included, there is a lot more to the story.

I feel this could have been the story to any RPG because it seems very familiar to other games story wise. I also saw this compared to Final Fantasy Tactics. In my opinion even the story in Final Fantasy Tactics is better than this story, and Final Fantasy Tactics isn't even known for it's story. Also the characters in the game are pretty generic as well. Fran and Balthier are pretty cool, but the others aren't very interesting.

And other FFs could have been the story to any other RPG and other RPG could have been a FF story. But, when you turn FF XII's story into "basically it is ..." then yes it would appear to be like a story from another RPG as other Final Fantasies could be.

While FFT's story was original not translated well, from what I gathered the story was greatly liked.

And the characters of the other Final Fantasies can be just as generic. The FF XII characters had depth, but they didn't take as many lines as past games did in creating that depth. Final Fantasy XII used less lines and less words however, what you got out of their lines was more than what was said on a scale never before done in Final Fantasy. It took the player to think about what the characters words meant, it was not spoonfed. Also, not only did they use less lines to convey their characters, but with body language/facial experessions as well.

Dr. Cid, Gabranth, or Ashe were not interesting? (To name a few)

2. The Battle System: I admit that the battle system in Final Fantasy XII is pretty addicting initially, but later on in the game, the flaws start to appear. First of all, the License Board is very easy to complete.

It is not difficult to complete the License Board, but how often has it been hard to "break" the system or to become "beast" in any other Final Fantasy game?

After this, the game kind of loses its incentive for level grinding, and just battling random monsters in general.

I know you haven't forgotten about farming for loot to gain weapons via the Bazaar. Also, what level did you complete the License Board? I am around level 65 and none of my license boards are complete, though I probably could complete it with the excess license points I accumulated.

This also makes all of the characters exactly the same. Easily, all your characters will have the same skills, magick, and be able to equip the same weapons and armor. This leads to the characters being generic once again.

And there a few Final Fantasies where the characters are distinctively different. Most Final Fantasy games have allowed for loads of character customization, Final Fantasy XII is not different yet garners more heat.

When I go to the Final Fantasy VI gamefaqs boards I see plenty of topics or posts about the best set-up for a party, for getting the most out of the characters with great detail about what is best. In Final Fantasy XII, the characters do have grades in the stats, yet I see nothing of the same for FF XII as in FF VI, for example. The same thing can be done for Final Fantasy XII, the best tank, the best damage dealer, mage, etc., but it has not been done on the same scale. But why is there hate on FF XII and not on the other games? It's because it is a blind hatred toward the game because of the change, not on the quality of change which is good.

Also the Gambit System turns out to be pretty ridiculous. You could set up all your characters so that they would automatically attack, heal, and everything else so that in battles you no longer had to do anything and could destroy just about anything by only walking up towards it and letting the characters fight with their Gambits.

And setting up your gambits is optionally and how many you set-up is optional as well. Are you telling me you don't like being able to have an option to turn off the gambits? Would you have preferred that you had to use gambits for all the characters? Unlike past Final Fantasy games where if you didn't like the battle system you couldn't change it much - in Final Fantasy XII you could change it more than any prior game. The developers did not limit the player, appreciate their genius to allow such an option.

This might have worked well for the characters you weren't controlling, but it just turned out to be bad that you could have all of your characters do everything without any thought from the player. This took a lot of the difficulty out of the game. I know that it is possible to control your characters without the Gambit system, but I don't think there should even be such an easy way out as the Gambit system.

Keyword: could. You realize this, yet still try to penalize the battle system regardless. The option to turn the gambits on or off nulls that point. Thought is still required because you have to set-up your gambits to the situation which changes as many have said that during the tough fights they had to change their gambits. So, you don't like any AI system in a RPG? The gambits gave control to the player like never before. Square said, "We won't make pre-rendered tactics, but we will allow the player to create their own system, to try and figure out the best set-up". There have been bad AI systems in RPGs before, why players would hate having control like never before bewilders me; do players not like having control?

4. Voice acting. This doesn’t really bother me to much but it would bother me in the slightest if they still had it silent. I’m sure kids don’t read that much these days, and it was good for me as a 10 year old. The reason for this is not that i think about it at this age, my imagination of some of the voices for FF characters were just that, they were left to my imagination and thats better than some of the wimply ass boyband voices they've give us.

I did not add this response to my previous post because I did not want to have this overlooked as I find it to be quite a great point against the quote about.

It does appear that children read less and less, I was not one of them, however if you played Final Fantasy XII - if you listened or read - you would know that Final Fantasy XII is the best game for young minds. I had recently started FF VI up again, though I may hold off on it for a while, but it amused me how basic the vocabulary was in the game and it is the same throughout the series - except for Final Fantasy XII. For any young mind there are more words that they would have to look up than in any previous Final Fantasy. The sentence structures in the past games were also simplistic, yet take a look at Final Fantasy XII and you will have to stop to think about what the character said because of the complex sentence structure and the fact that there was more in the sentence than what was just said - something not done by past Final Fantasy games. In the end, Final Fantasy XII is great for kids as it teaches them BIG words and involves critical thinking.

P.S. There are also subtitles availabe so they could read it as well.