FF XII Re-make, New RPG Announced By Square/Enix

Yesterday was Square/Enix's annual media party, and there were a couple of interesting announcements. Game|Life's Chris Kohler was there, and reports on the most interesting announcement: a Final Fantasy XII re-envisioning entitled International: Zodiac Job System. The title will feature the same story, a further-refined combat system, and a series of 12 separate license boards. Each board corresponds to a traditional FF 'job', like Monk or Red Mage; at the moment there is no plan to release it in the states. Other announcements include word that Star Ocean will get the remake treatment, with the first two games coming to the PSP sometime in the future. They are also working on a next-gen Star Ocean 4; no details about that. Crystal Chronicles for the DS drops in August in Japan, no US release date was given. Finally, screenshots and videos of The Last Remnant capped off the event; we talked about the game earlier this week when it was announced.

Re:An honest question:

[jimstapleton]

I didn't get introduced to anime before FF games, so it's not that.

Until recently, they didn't have any continuous storlines - each was in a world of it's own, so it's not that.

Honestly, in my oppinion, the gameplay is fun (though it's gone downhill since 7 IMO), the graphics are usually pretty nice for the systems, the music is pretty good, but a with a few exceptions, and the usually have very nice storyline in any given game.

Re:An honest question:

[tzhuge]

FF games are more than the sum of their component parts. They're a convergence of interesting characters, intriguing story and incredible production quality.

That being said... I have a friend who really dislikes FF games even though he loved Chrono Trigger. He got me thinking about it and I realized that FFX is the only FF game I have ever finished even though I've played pretty much every single one. I think the series has somewhat staled. A cynic might say that FF games are just interactive fiction chained together by a series of random encounters. That's why I think FFXII is a great step forward even if it wasn't perfect. It finally made some changes to the core game play. I'm sure there are some fans who hate the changes but clearly you're not one of them. So, I would highly recommend that you give FFXII a try even if you hate the other FF games.

Re:An honest question:

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"What is the special appeal of Final Fantasy?"

I don't think I can definitively answer your question, but I can tell you I was hooked on Final Fantasy 3 because of the story. (Before I go any farther, I just want to say that the story in FF3 was far better than either of the movies. I don't want to confuse you on this point. ;) ) I can give you an example. One of the characters was a heroic king that had recently lost his family to an invasion. He joined your party after he had saved them from certain doom. A little while later, a journey through his castle caused some memory montage scenes to appear, showing us a little glimpse of the joy he had at spending time with his family. It became clear that their loss was deeply affecting him. Eventually your party finds the ghost train that takes the spirits of the recently deceased from this world to the next. While fighting to save the world, he's presented with the possibility of staying on the train to be with his family. I don't think my description is doing it much justice, but it was quite engaging. As you played, more and more of this story involving several different characters unfolded. It was amazing. I remember sacrificing sleep just so I could see what happens next.

I didn't have the same attachment to the games released after that, so I really cannot tell you about the modern appeal of it. For me, it was simply that a good story is a good story. Unfortunately, I have every single beat of the battle music burned forever into my brain. ;)

Re:An honest question:

[Garrett Fox]

The first Final Fantasy was one of the first console games I played, so the series has nostalgia appeal for me. What I enjoyed about it (in hindsight) was exploring a big game world on an epic quest, being able to wander around instead of being stuck in the linear levels of most games. In reality the series is nearly linear because the geography just happens to force you to do X to get a ship, then Y to get an airship, etc., but there's still a sense of there being some freedom of exploration and a "living" game world outside of the dungeons. For comparison, I also liked Morrowind.

I enjoyed FFIV and VI (aka. FF2 and FF3), FFV when I got to play it, and eventually FFVII. These consistently had memorable music and interesting characters. By this point I was starting to think that the plots were repetitive, weak or nonsensical ("Mwahaha, I'm gonna blow up the world because I'm just that evil and crazy!") and that the battle sytem was dull. I also thought that Square had become obsessed with improving its graphics at the expense of other innovation. For instance your typical RPG villager still mostly stands there waiting to spout a line of dialogue just as in FF1, and magic still mostly consists of elemental blast spells. I ended up migrating to games with more interesting battle systems (Grandia 1&2, FF Tactics, Star Ocean 2, Disgaea 1&2) and have ever since then expected more from an RPG than the FF series tended to deliver.

So, for me the appeal was in the characters, the music, and the novelty of a console role-playing game.

Re:Remakes...

[Fallingcow]

I think that the combat system in FFXII was a work-around for a fundamental problem that has yet to be addressed: most fights in FF are boring as hell.

Everyone that I know who plays FF games does it in spite of random encounters (yeah, they got rid of those in XII, but there are still more-or-less required fights every few steps on most of the game's maps, so they still count) and grinding, certainly NOT because of them.

The big draws that I see:

1. Epic boss fights
2. Storyline
3. Character development
4. Character building

My number one complaint: I think that I spent a greater percentage of my time in FFXII fighting boring-ass fights than I did in, say, X. The fact that I didn't have to sit there pounding the "x" key while I did it is beside the point. Aside from that, in the four areas I listed above, FFXII seemed like a huge step backwards.

The boss fights, practically without exception, consisted of my having two characters set to auto-heal while my strongest one was set to auto-attack, because any other arrangement resulted in death. My only interaction was to do the mist attacks from time to time. Any other strategy would usually end in a quick loss. Often, the fight came down to luck-of-the-draw on a mist combo, resulting in a re-load if it failed. Aeons were less than worthless. The caster characters nearly always did more damage with a physical attack than magic, and besides, they spent all their time healing my tank.

The story was SO promising at the beginning, but ended up being so simple that one could tell--not just summarize--the whole thing in a paragraph or so. It was a bit like reading only the first and last chapters in a book.

Vague hinting at some kind of interesting background for a series of mostly-static characters does not qualify as character development.

The leveling system was dull as hell. I didn't really give a damn what anyone acquired on the board, and about 3/4 of the squares earned were entirely useless, just there to be buffers between actual powerups.

I know that a lot of people loved the game, and I don't mean to offend them. They like it, I don't. It's just that, from my view, the parts that were the big draw for all of the FF fans that I know were all terrible in this game, and the one big complaint that EVERYONE had (boring random encounters) had one aspect tremendously improved, only to have another made much worse. The whole thing felt like a bumbled, half-assed attempt at modernizing the franchise, and it felt like the developers only got to finish the first 1/4 of the story before they were told to rush the game out in a week.

I was so excited to get the game, and loved it for about six or seven hours of gameplay, but it ended up being one of the most disappointing RPG experiences that I've ever had (Suikoden IV was, for obvious reasons, the most disappointing).

I guess what I'm saying is that I definitely see room for improvement. If they release this here, I might rent it for a weekend to see if it's really any better.

Re:Remakes...

[blahplusplus]

"The combat system was, in my opinion, the best part of FFXII. "

Ouch, all you had to do in FF12 was navigate, the computer would do everything for you. This is *NOT* my idea of gaming. Why did they not have the computer navigate for you too and you just sit back and watch?

I must vehemently state that people that like FF12's combat system are one of the reasons gaming is going to tank in the future, all the interactivity is being dumbed down or driven out (automated) entirely, people complan of "button mashing" or "grinding" but at some point you've automated the decision making process and taken yourself completely out of the loop of actually interacting and gone into complete passivity, the exact opposite of what gaming is supposed to be about.