Blurring the Boundaries

Note: The following contains spoilers; highlight the blacked-out text at your own peril.

Over the past few days, my wife and I have spent a good deal of time with Final Fantasy XII. The pacing of the game's story reminds me at times of my first experience with Final Fantasy VII, where I wondered when I would finally get to see this world map the manual had mentioned. For a series with this many iterations, I find myself amazed at some of the conventions which continue to arise. An evil twin? Seriously?? At least there are no eyepatches in sight. Also, why do these later titles in the franchise always have characters at least twelve times cooler than the freaking protagonist? I think we are at about the fifteen-hour mark (with several lengthy stops for side quests) as far as playtime is concerned, and things are finally kicking into gear in the plot department.

In a twist, I find the combat system more engaging than I expected. Unlike many fans of the series, I was happy to see random monster encounters go the way of Laserdiscs. The option to simply run past an enemy you do not wish to fight without a separate combat screen is a blessing, in my opinion. Moreover, the ability to automate your party's actions when you pick a fight is a step forward from holding down the execute button until everything on one side of the screen collapses. I wish the game had a Mug command I could use rather than manually stealing from monsters, but that can be forgiven. The only real problem I have with the Gambit system FFXII employs is the availability of targets for your actions. Whoever decided that the Charge command (which restores some MP if successful, but drains it all away otherwise) has to be triggered manually for hours of early gameplay, unless you are content to end up with no MP at random during your journeys, has earned my ire. The loot system also finds an interesting way around one of the little issues old-school roleplaying titles had: namely, why did all these monsters carry around money?

The choices made during the development of Final Fantasy XII were an interesting move on the part of Square Enix, as they took the series rather close to the experience of massively multiplayer games. Heck, the game calls the items dropped and stolen from monsters loot! I have felt an urge to play for just a while longer on a couple of occasions, merely to try to scrounge up the license points for a shiny new ability -- similar to the 'grinding' style which emerges in most online games.

I will be out of town over the weekend, so Vaan and Penelo will have to wait until next week for a reunion. I think Eternal Darkness will get the nod for my take-out gaming experience, but the decision is not yet final. Game well, and may your batteries stay charged.