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Final Fantasy XII - Post Mortem

P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Well that was a headache.
After many failures I finally got enough Arcanas to make a Hermes Sandals(ugh) accessory.

What I had to do was go to this area in Westersand with a character below 10% of their maximum HP. This causes a rare monster to appear which can be killed with a phoenix down. Now for those who don't know FFXII has an interesting aspect in that you can cause certain enemies to reappear again and again if you leave the area after you kill them and before the little numbers float up(y'know the ones that detail the exp/lp recieved). Problem is of course is getting the item drop and running away in time to keep the rare monster "alive".

Several levels and 15 arcanas later I got my sandals. The catch is of course is that I don't have anyone with the licence so I won't be using these for awhile. On the bright side I've almost finished crossing the Sandsea and will probably do a bunch of hunts, knock down a couple walls, and get me some Demonbanes.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Okay this is exactly the kind of crap I'm talking about. Okay I get to Raithwall, kill both walls, and then go down to this secret area and find....nothing. Alright there's a bunch of stairs, some bats, and a crapload of slimes...and maybe a chest with something in it.

This guide I've been following mentions that there's a random chance I'll get some gil(woop), something useless, no chest at all, or a DEMONSBANE. Demonsbane is a pretty sweet sword but unless one is reading a guide and/or they get the sword the first time they go down there they'll just be left scratching their head.

One would think that the rewards would be more obvious and guaranteed but it's more like "Great job beating that optional boss, he's a real nut right? Well you may or may not get a cool reward."

Whatever the case I got a Demonsbane and will now resume my regularly scheduled spelunking.
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
PepsimanVsJoe said:
Okay this is exactly the kind of crap I'm talking about. Okay I get to Raithwall, kill both walls, and then go down to this secret area and find....nothing. Alright there's a bunch of stairs, some bats, and a crapload of slimes...and maybe a chest with something in it.

This guide I've been following mentions that there's a random chance I'll get some gil(woop), something useless, no chest at all, or a DEMONSBANE. Demonsbane is a pretty sweet sword but unless one is reading a guide and/or they get the sword the first time they go down there they'll just be left scratching their head.

One would think that the rewards would be more obvious and guaranteed but it's more like "Great job beating that optional boss, he's a real nut right? Well you may or may not get a cool reward."

Whatever the case I got a Demonsbane and will now resume my regularly scheduled spelunking.
Click to expand...

FF 7-9 did that heavily. With good things either being up to chance or being hidden in insane ways
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
HK-47 said:
FF 7-9 did that heavily. With good things either being up to chance or being hidden in insane ways
Click to expand...

I played through FF7-9 and even the most insane secrets had some idea of logic behind them.

If nothing else at least the loot was guaranteed in every chest.

Refreshing my memory on those three games I stumble upon this Perfect Guide for FFIX. Every item collected including the Excalibur II all at or around level 1?
Holy crap people are crazy.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
And just like that a couple of guys and an airship fell down and went boom.

Now I have a number of options at my disposal:
Head for the Zodiac Spear.
Tons of marks.
Dozens of fetch quests.
Need money..lots of money

Also I've officially stopped giving a crap about Ashe and the man she knew for all of five minutes.

Oh thank you Coeurl pelts for all of your wonderful money.
 
Joei

Joei

Member
I absolutely love this game, but my biggest complaint is the randomness of the chests and their contents. FF12 obviously pulls from an MMO mindset, which is fine since I loved 11, but that treasure feature is a real pain. Chests may or not appear at certain points and may have something worthwhile, but usually something useless. I don't find that feature to work well in thses kinds of games.
 
R

RedRedSuit

Member
The OP is fairly spot on, I'd say.

Overall, I think FF XII is one of the best FFs and certainly one of the best JRPGs ever. I'll put it this way: it's the first FF (since FF V, I guess, but I wasn't that into that one) I've played through for the gameplay and not the story. I'm a huge fan of the idea of gambits (removing brainless repetition of menial tasks from general adventuring), of the hunts, of the way the areas are setup, and of the production values (voice and graphics in particular). People don't like the License Board, which is fair, but it wasn't really an issue because I had such an ungodly amount of LP from general adventuring.

The one big flaw is the story. I know it was supposed to be event-, as opposed to character-driven, but personally if I don't care about anyone in particular, I find it hard to give a shit about any surrounding events. It had some nice moments, but in general it was just overly complicated and difficult to follow, for no apparent reason.

So, I think it was a fantastic game with one huge problem (story/characters). That said, it's the only FF game where I've put in over 100 hours in one play-through, so that's saying something.

EDIT: Agree with people above on the whole "obscure rewards you could never figure out without a guide." It's such bullshit. Shameless ploy to sell guides.
 
C

Castor Krieg

Banned
Need to finally play it, got it day 1, made it 15h in and...just somehow didn't pick up again andleft it like that. I finished every other FF so this was kinda surprising. Tried again couple of times but never had the will. But hey, I'm playing LO for the first time, as beginning was always too boring for me. Maybe I can play FFXII after that? :D
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Himuro said:
lmao

I'm so sorry, pepsiman. Why are you doing this?
Click to expand...

No idea.

Well Gilsnapper took awhile cause my damage is lame(not as lame as marks that quadruple their defense when at critical) but it was an easy fight. Basch had a spear that slowed him down while Vaan did something that immobilized him. Penelo got all of the hate due to spamming silence until one of them stuck and then going for blind.
The Seeq was also nice enough to toss out protects/shells/random damage.

Poor bastard couldn't do a thing.

One more mark and I get my game-breaking Niho!
 
L

Lightning

Banned
Joei said:
I absolutely love this game, but my biggest complaint is the randomness of the chests and their contents. FF12 obviously pulls from an MMO mindset, which is fine since I loved 11, but that treasure feature is a real pain. Chests may or not appear at certain points and may have something worthwhile, but usually something useless. I don't find that feature to work well in thses kinds of games.
Click to expand...
That is in my opinion a good thing. The randomness of the chests allows for the opportunity to gain awesome items/equipiment/weapons from them. For example, is trying to obtain those random chests for Ribbon any worse than trying to farm 99 Dark Matter in FFX to customise it? In my opinion, no.

If you take away the randomness then the contents will also be nerfed. I would rather random chests then throw away chests. Take Kingdom Hearts 2, there are no random chests but there are just so many chests that give you nothing of worth.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Himuro said:
What's the niho?
Click to expand...

Nihopalaoa

It's an accessory you can buy from the bazaar after 10 Mark kills. Basically all of the consumable items like potions, antidotes, and so on do the opposite of their intented purpose. So like if you use an echo herb(which cures silence) on yourself you become silenced.

What makes it kind of broken is that this effect extends to the enemies. So let's say you have a remedy and you throw it at a random enemy. Now that enemy is going to have slow, poison, doom, immobilize, oil, sleep, and so on and so forth. It's like an instant Marlboro breath. Sure a number of enemies are immune to many of its effects(and a number of endgame fights are immune to them entirely afaik) but the ones that can hit have a 100% success rate.
 
T

teiresias

Member
I never really got far in this game, mainly because I honestly couldn't tell whether I was just plain playing it wrong or not.

I think I got as far as leaving Rabanaster (or whatever) and going to some town where some kid asked me to go into a mine. At the end of the mine I got ambushed by a group of Ogre looking things (can't remember what they were called). This is where I got frustrated. It was obvious within the first five minutes that I had no chance of beating them, but the game also let me just continuously run from them until I got out of the dungeon and triggered a cutscene - I think that's how it happened.

I was never clear whether this was one of those "unwinnable" battles and I was supposed to run, or whether I just wasn't playing properly and had poor equipment, or too low a level, and just wasn't prepared for them - considering I had found that dungeon somewhat difficult if I remember correctly. It wasn't that far into the game so I didn't really have that many gambit options nor alot of the license board done, but I stopped playing out of frustration, because if the rest of the game was going to be like that I wanted no part of it. I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to have done a ton of hunts in Rabanaster before leaving to build up my characters and was just woefully underpowered.

Of course, I love the whole "idea" of the game - making it more MMORPG-like, particularly the size of the explorable "zones" (to borrow a MMORPG term). If this game had been on PS3 and had a co-op mode I think it would have been a blast to play online with other people just exploring the world and fighting mobs.

FFXII and FFVIII stand as the only two FF games I just never "got". I did eventually catch on to how to properly play FFVIII and beat it, but I'm not sure I can summon the resolve to do it with FFXII, to be honest, even though the game has great art design and I love the MMORPG aspects of it.
 
J

jett

D-Member
The only FF I felt compelled to complete nearly entirely(did all the hunts). Fighting Yiazmat was just epic. The gameplay is the best in the series for me. Yeah, the plot isn't that great and falls apart when the Occuria or whatever appear, but the characters are great. Certainly liked them better than the crap cast of FFX. Hell, I also liked the FFXII storyline better.

Ah, what FFXII could've been if Matsuno hadn't got all depressed and shit.

fake edit: oh yeah, for some reason I felt like replaying the endgame earlier. :p Mecha-Saiyajin Vayne is like the worst FF boss ever, still. So bad. On the plus side, it seemed to me that the real-time cut-scenes had proper english lip-synching(although it wasn't all that great), so it bodes well for FFXIII. Even the CG seemed to match accurately...but maybe I was just seeing things.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Sorry Red Scarlet me and Himuro go way back. :D

Now I'm in the mood for some FFXIIing.

Gonna play through this again, beat it again, write a review this time, and be done with it forever.
Level 32 already? Jeepers! I haven't even went and talked to those dudes with the silly helmets.

Gonna go see a doctor about that Ringwyrm.

And like that the Ringwyrm is gone. Slow + Blind + Immobilize = Crippled sack of garbage.

My last playthrough I didn't even so much as look at status-effect spells. God I was so dumb.

Woot got an Icebrand. I'll have to test this baby out on King Bomb when I visit.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
And Niho just turned one of the most annoying bossfights(King Bomb) into a cakewalk. Dude still hits hard but being free of healing, summons, and oil/fire is great stuff.

Next stop? Zodiac Spear.
 
Red Scarlet

Red Scarlet

Member
Alternatively, you could shoot him with a silence bullet or slash him with the Mage Masher if you don't have a Niho. On my "speed run", I used a dejon/warp mote thing as soon as the battle started to get rid of the first bombs that start the battle with him, then used either the bullet or knife to silence him, then slash away.

A Vaccine on him with the Niho would prevent him from rehealing, too.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Woop woop got the Spear. Nothing like running through trap-filled hallways being chased by six or seven level ?? guys.

Now to go raise a ton of LP. =(
 
M

Mudo

Member
I love FFXII. Up there with my favorite FF's for sure. I think 13 is taking a step back in the battle design, but it's not a dealbreaker for me or anything - I just wish they would have evolved XII's system and balanced it out. I think my love for the game stems from loving MMO's. They share a lot in common with each other. Story was a letdown but yeah, the MMO aspect kept me absolutely hooked the whole way through. The soundtrack is great, I still listen to it regularly. Voice acting is top notch and I think is the best I have heard in a game before.

Oh and Hunts need to be in every FF going forward.

/bow FFXII
 
H

Hobbun

Member
Can't say I am a really big fan of XII. Everything I could deal with, except for the combat system, which I hated.

But I am glad you enjoyed it, Himu.
 
P

PepsimanVsJoe

Member
Just killed Whitey(aka the Trickster) like nothing at all. Zodiac Spear still looks dumb but man it's so good it makes me forget that I could be casting Bubble/Bravery/bunch of other buffs before I take on the marks.

Now to grab me a Fomalhaut. Then go after that pervert slime cause apparently it's Ladies Night in FFXII-land.

Oh and what is the deal with protect lately? I haven't had to recast that in a long time(not that I'm complaining)

Oh man Fomalhaut is so awesome.
 
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