Don't Hold Your Breath For FFXIII 82
IGN is reporting that the next chapter in the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIII, has barely gotten into the production phase. "According to Sony's press materials, the highly anticipated RPG sequel is now 13% complete. Yes, a low, unlucky completion percentage. But thankfully it's not as low as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which is listed as 1.3%!" And remember, even if it's completed sometime late next year or early in 2009 folks in the states will probably have a wait while the game is localized.
Re:What did people expect? (Score:3, Informative)
Needless to say, it's in Sony's best interest to have the game released sooner than later.
Re:As expected (Score:4, Informative)
FFXII sucked. I've played a total of like nine hours into it and got bored with it to the point I really don't plan on playing it again. The gambit system will literally play the game for you, leaving you free to run between cutscenes. The boss battles devolve into manually potion-spamming but otherwise letting the AI run free.
The story is practically incoherent, even this far into it. The characters are rebelling against the Empire because of the Last Rule of Politics [project-apollo.net]. (Kingdoms are good. Empires are evil.) I have really no idea what anyone's motivation is - it seems to generically be "the Empire is evil." Which is evil because they said so, with no real evidence. (In fact, all evidence so far shows that said kingdom is better off under Imperial rule than it ever was under the old kingdom.)
The license grid is insanely lame and seems to be designed to force you to buy a strategy guide. The main problem with it is that it doesn't say what a given slot does until you've got something unlocked next to it. This makes guiding advancement essentially impossible. A license that has nothing next to it may say something like "Shields" but won't offer any idea of which shields it allows. So you wind up having to guess which "Shields" you need to move towards to use your new shiny shield. Likewise, any advancing towards specific abilities is impossible.
Unless, of course, you already know what's on the grid, by buying the strategy guide. (Or looking it up online...)
Likewise, the most powerful weapon in the game can only be obtained if you don't open certain chests. Problem: most chests are randomly generated, are actually called "treasures" and there's no indication that these magic chests are any different from any other randomly generated chest. They're also strategically placed so that it's impossible to miss them while progressing through the game. They're literally placed at key points that you have to travel through.
This "random chest generation" scheme also means that some of the best equipment has a very small (less than 1% in some cases) chance of being generated, and only after building a very long "chain" (killing the same monster family over and over and over and over again).
Personally, I enjoyed FFX far more than FFXII. FFXII really has no Final Fantasy "feel" to it, and despite being set in Ivalice, has no FF Tactics feel to it.
Re:As expected (Score:5, Informative)
I felt like they fixed some stuff, then broke some more, like forcing you to grind/dungeon crawl for hours between story events. Why did they put gambits in there to automate 95% of those fights? Because most people don't like the vast majority of the fighting in previous FF games, since it's dull. Then after, going to the trouble of automating it to make it less crappy, they made you do MORE of it! WTF?
I was hooked for about 10-15 hours, but just kept waiting for it to get cool. I continued waiting until I was within ~5-10 hours of the end, at which point I checked a FAQ to see how close I was to beating it... and promptly quit playing when I found out that there wasn't enough time left for them to cram a story in there. I really thought things would pick up when Larsa showed up, but then he disappeared for most of the game and they never really did anything with him. Then I thought that maybe the bunny people village or the fight with Balthier's dad would flesh out their characters a little... but no. I kept crawling through one long, boring dungeon after another, to be rewarded with 5-10 lines of pointless, wit-free, dry, emotionless dialogue. None of the characters, with the possible exception of Balthier and Fran, seemed to give a shit about one another. I don't just mean, "there was no love story"--though they certainly seemed to set up several and then do little or nothing with them--I mean that the characters seemed to have no connection with one another at all.
I could keep going. But yeah, some people didn't like it, and I'm not surprised to find out that a lot of other people quit playing like I did.
On the other hand, I'm now playing through Suikoden V for the second time, because once just wasn't enough. Awesome.