ItsKrista said:I only started with FF12 because I was only really playing kiddy games on PS1. I will get to the old Final Fantasy games when my backlog allows it.
12 or 13? It's funny, I actually don't mind 13. I enjoyed the game just fine. I think the nail in the game's coffin was the combat. It was a fun system... when you understood them. And I really mean understood them. The concepts weren't hard, but all the jargony crap was terrible. The combat could have been good inside of five hours, but the learning curve they were trying to match was the poor conveyance of the mechanics rather than the actual understanding of the mechanics themselves...
Oh, also the "Auto-*" ability. Basically, the combat boiled down to just making sure you had the right combination of classes... or schema... or paradigm? and then just jamming that button.
If the combat hadn't taken so long to get to a good spot, the stumbling story wouldn't have been as much of a problem.
Everybody was pissed that it was linear, but X was very linear, and people weren't really as pissed at that one (until XIII came out, and then people seem to have become retroactively pissed about it). It's a terrible criticism, though. I mean Final Fantasy VII was great, but it's not the open world or the three tiles of town screens that people remember most. The most memorable parts, and by far the best story parts, were the parts where you were locked into a certain path. Midgar. City of the Ancients. The prison under the Golden Saucer. IX was pretty similar, or perhaps even more so. There were quite a few places where, even though you could go to the World Map, there was only really one thing for you to do. Between VII and X, VIII is probably the game that gives you the most freedom from the start (aside from the flashbacks... but even then), and it was one of the most harshly received...
As for XII, that was by far the most open game since the top down style games. I personally didn't enjoy it much. I heard that the main character was actually supposed to be Balthier, but that they didn't think he was heroic enough or something. I could easily see where that was the case, because I really hated the main character. He was a dumb, annoying, cipher, who also happened to seem completely incapable of doing anything. Balthier was like a cross between Zidane and Han Solo. He was a great character, and he actually had ties to the story. Vaan? not so much.
Some really like that game. I'm eager to replay it to see if my opinion still stands. To be fair, the entire game was actually really good except for that problem, and problems that caused with the story. Combat and other systems were enjoyable.