FFXII

Huh, I swear I had an old topic about Final Fantasy games... Anyways, I recently played FFI (remade for the PSP), and it was pretty cool. I beat it in two days, lol, which is pretty decent considering it was my first time, but hey; it was originally a NES game anyways.

So, I was just looking around, and I saw that FFXII was for the PS2. Is it any good? FFII, as well, actually. That game was remade for PSP, as well. I have the option to play IV, V, and VI, as well, as PSX iso's. And yeah, I know VI is considered by many/most as the best FF. But yeah.

Final Fantasy II has a screwed up leveling system, and it was actually pretty hard for me. But all other aspects of the game are pretty nice. Wondering where the frick Leon went pretty much kept me through the whole game, because I wanted to see how beast he really was.

Can't say anything about FF XII, but Revenant Wings and Crystal Chronicles were pretty cool.

I liked FFXII. I hear a lot of people complain about the battle system though. I didn't mind it. It was a mix of ABS + their standard TBS. I think what they didn't like was the gambits though. Gambits are essentially auto commands that you can assign your party including your active character that will occur when the condition is met. You can set like a Cure gambit for the 'If 40% life' condition gambit together so that when a character gets to 40% or lower life, then the character with those gambits would cast heal. You don't just GET the gambits though, you find them or buy them as you progress through the game. You don't even get gambits for several hours into the game. I never really used gambits for the character that I was in control of, and set them up on the other 2 party members that were with me so that I didn't have to constantly swap back and forth just to get a fucking heal or dispel or antidote. I did use some gambits on my main character like the stealing gambits so that the first thing my main character did was steal if the targeted enemy was at 100% life, otherwise we'd just fight.

The other thing I hear people complain about is the license board. Every character has the exact same board, but just start at different areas, ala FFVII (and maybe some other FF that I haven't played). You gain LP (license points) for killing monsters and things. The LP board is mostly used for unlocking the allowance to use better gear. For instance, a character might only be allowed to wear leather gear 1, which is like the lowest type of leather gear, but if you have the LP, you can buy the tile next to it which might be leather gear 2, which then allows that character to be allowed to equip the next tier of leather gear. There's that but for every type of gear and spells. You unlock some spells this way, and you have to unlock the tiles to be able to use certain end-game weapons. You have to unlock all the Genji tiles to wear the armor and the sword. Of course, LP is easily gained and by near the end of the game, if you've stuck with 3 of the same characters, they can literally all be the exact same character. You just buy everything across the board and they can have the same shit. Sometime halfway through the game I remember buying several accessories (the Gold something or another thing) that gives LP to every party member even if you don't use them for each kill. So by the end of the game, even my lvl 6's and 15's that I never used could buy every tile on the LBoard. Of course when you get each character, they start at different parts of the board which make it so that each character is class specific. This eventually ends though and then any character can be basically any class. This of course is only end-game things.

I enjoyed the hunts too. It's a fun mini-sidequest/game thing that you can do. You go into basically any bar and check the hunting board and see if there are any hunts you can do. Some are hard as shit to find, as you might need something to make the monster appear or the monster is just plain fucking retarded hard to kill. I remember there's some chocobo you could hunt that's fucking invisible and only appears like 30% of the time on 1 specific map. So you have to go in, kill all the mobs and run around an hope you hear footsteps or walk into it, lol. After roaming for a good 20-30 minutes and hearing nothing, you can assume he's not there then walk away 3 maps and return to respawn all enemies and repeat until you find him. When you do, you attack and it eventually runs and you have to chase it around - except it's fucking invisible. lol

Anyways, I enjoyed it. I've recently been wanting to restart it soon. The crafting system I never really did. It was too fucking crazy with the ingredients and specific. You get shit from killing enemies and stuff. That's how you get the final weapons in the game and stuff. I didn't need those. Also I never did the final hunt because the fight lasts 2-3 hours. And that's ONLY if you're all at lvl 99 with like max weapons and stats and shit. It's just a fucking insane endurance fight. I never found it necessary to subject myself to sit and do the same attacks for 3 hours. It's the fight against Tiamat, or something. Look it up on Youtube. It's split into 2 videos, each 1hr long. :|

LOL. Well, I'm thinking of getting FFXII, then. It was pretty interesting looking, the graphics aren't bad (it's only one behind the current FF P: ), and yeah. I guess gambits were created so you could leave the game on while you fought Tiamat, lol. It's probably Tiamat because that was a boss in FFI, too, lol. So thanks! :3

Yeah. To be honest, I feel like that's the only reason the Tiamat fight would be so long - to use only gambits and leave for a while. It's not impossible, in fact I'm sure it's the only way to win. The youtube video I watched was of the player positioning the characters in such a way that the one was a tank, one was the healer/caster and the other was an archer and they were positioned so perfect that the tank only ever took the damage and his gambits were set somehow so that the aggro is never taken off the tank. Weird.

However, the reason I like the battle system (I mean the even mix between an ABS and TBS) is that although the attacks are still turn based, you're also able to just gtfo and run from the battle literally on the map. All the battles take place on the map in real-time. It's not like there's a transition that fades in and the battle starts. You can set it up so that you DO actually have a tank and that the other characters support and attack. So it does take a bit of strategy. This is different than playing a straight TBS game where you can just keep clicking the attack button all the way through each battle. I like games that require somewhat of a tank character and a healer/caster to support them.

Also, forewarning, Bahamut is not a dragon in this game, it's a massive airship for the empire, or whatever. You'll get a chance to board it at the end. The warning here is that once you board it, you're not getting the fuck off. It's the last level of the game and if you're under-leveled when you go on there, you'll be pulling your fucking teeth out trying to not die running around in there. Also, the game prompts you with a warning when you get to that point in the game though. I don't remember if it actually tells you if you don't get to return or not, but I think it's just like "Your about to board Bahamut. Do you wish to continue?" kind of thing. When you get that and you're even slightly not sure, don't fucking go in. lol

Ahaha yeah. It's funny because I can buy FFXII for $6 online at amazon. I should hop to it one day.