The Gaming Den

Has anyone played this yet? What are your first impressions? An improvement over Final Fantasy 11, or just more of the same?

I think the FF series has gone to shit ever since Sakaguchi left Square-Enix. I'm not saying everything the man did was good, but I am saying that it's not Final Fantasy without him in charge.

Which ones did he do?

The only ones I really got into were 7 (first PSX game I ever played) and... 5? The one where you can change jobs by changing hats.

Oh, and FF: Charlie's Angels FFX2 was fun (a terrible game, but fun).

I was in the open beta for a bit and it's pretty much an acceptably pretty MMO where you do in fact get to change your jobs by changing your hats. Well, weapons, but that's close enough. I stopped playing because the software cursor was just too awful. Squeenix has apparently fixed it now, but the laggy cursor and menus were just too much at the time for me to keep trying it out. An open beta should be mostly a server stress test, any UI issues like that should have been worked out months beforehand.

I never played FFXI so I can't say if it's an improvement or not. I can say that the whole experience felt incredibly grindy and the variety wasn't enough to hold my interest. I could spend my time making my character just become an awesome supaa high level chef which almost made up for the bullshit inherent in MMOs.


And Sakaguchi was involved in every FF up to FFX. Although for FFX he was only executive producer. Every Final Fantasy before that (except for FFVIII) he is credited with original concept.

That, depressingly, makes sense.

I tried to like Final Fantasy 12. I did.

But it gave me no reason at all to care about who I had in my party. I might as well have set the bunny-girl as the party leader so if I had to stare at a walking/half-jogging ass for the whole game, it should be a pretty one.

There's a 14? I honestly stopped paying attention after 1 (that tells you how old I am ).

Maxus wrote:That, depressingly, makes sense.

I tried to like Final Fantasy 12. I did.

I actually enjoyed FF12, but it would have been much better if they would have left Basch as the main character as originally planned instead of making Vaan the center of the game. FF12 was *supposed* to mainly have been an homage to FF4, but that didn't pan out because SE is always trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the shrieking Japanese schoolgirl and American weaboo cosplay chick demographics that they possibly can, so they put a mincing boy-girl in the spotlight as the main character.

And the guy that invented Ivalice left after FF12, so yeah, that game world's pretty much in stasis from here on out.