Fimbulvetr said:
What does a final fantasy "feel" like?
Tell me, I want to know.
Ok, I just want to get this out of the way, I don't want to get into a heated discussion here, and I don't want to offend anyone; this is just my opinion. I realize that saying "it just doesn't feel like..." is very vague. It is just something that a fan of the series know's. Like you know when your playing Mario , Zelda, or a Dragon Quest game, you just know.
FFXII felt more like a spin off. It is not one particular thing. It just did not posess a lot of the traits past final fantasy's had( I am mainly talking about 1-9).
I am pretty oldschool; I prefer turn based battle system, and will admit that ever since they dropped the turn base, I have lost a lot of interest in ff games, though I seem to be in the minority these days. I am open to action based but I am not a big fan of the "gambit" system. I don't like bots; it takes me out of the whole "i'm in control" feeling. It makes me feel like a program is playing the game for me.
I didn't care for the main protagonist. He was boring, lame and uninteresting and I know that is not what they were going for. He was overshadowed by almost everybody else. If people don't care about the protagonist, they are not going to like the story.
I didn't really feel the urge to explore the world like past games; I actually found that whole "monster slaying sidequests" to be fun, until I found out that they were not tied into the main story in any real way.
I need an airship that I control, that I can land where ever the hell I want, not one that acts like a teleporter/zone entrance.
As for the story, I found too much of it was narrated and was complicated for no apparent reason. It had a simple beginning and end, but the middle was not interesting at all.
The game itself used FFXI's engine which I personally think was a bad idea. It was beautiful and all, but how are you expected to take an engine that was intially designed for a mmporg and successfully turn it into a single player experience? I just found FFXI's battle system much more interesting then ffxii's.
I don't know man, I just really didn't find it fun at all, and that is the bottom line. I am sure if I replayed it again, it would be slightly better the 2nd time around, but I really do not have any interest in replaying it any time soon or at all for that matter.