I'm going to talk about Final Fantasy XII...which, if you're playing along at home, may make you say "wait, didn't we skip a number?"
After so many companies proved how profitable massively multiplayer online games can be, SquareEnix decided to get into that market. Furthermore, they decided to enter with their main series by releasing Final Fantasy XI as an online game. I don't like online games, especially MMORPGs, so I never played it. However, I mention it here because I feel like understanding XI is key to understanding XII.
So, SquareEnix finally found a goose to lay some golden eggs. When you have software which requires users to pay a monthly fee to use, selling standard retail software must almost seem like a chump's game. Why have your developers spend time making a single-player FFXII when they could instead be writing new modules and expansions for FFXI?
I don't really know all the reasons, but one certainly is that while a company's standard game output is limited only by their development resources, the market will only bear so many online games. If you have several development teams at your disposal, it makes sense to have some of them developing the standard release-and-forget style product. And maybe this is just my bias talking, but once an online game reaches the end of its life, nobody really cares about it anymore. In fifteen years will people talk about Final Fantasy XI the way I talk about Final Fantasy VI? Does the concept of a re-release even make sense? Even if online games are the new cash cows, for the moment it's still the offline games which provide the classics and the legacy.
So, Final Fantasy XII. Interestingly, and I alluded to this earlier when talking about FF Tactics, XII returns the series to the land of Ivalice. You may not be surprised, then to find out that instead of the departed Sakaguchi leading the project, Quest alums Yasumi Matsuno and Hiroshi Minagawa spearheaded the effort. Indeed, the only series veteran involved in the project was longtime Square developer Hiroyuki Itoh--even the redoubtable Nobuo Uematsu had left to pursue freelance work by this point.
And what did this eclectic crew deliver? Well, this is where the background information about XI comes in, because they created what is essentially a single-player MMORPG.
This seems like a contradiction, but ultimately that's what the game feels like. Behavioral and cognitive scientists have known for a while that the structure of MMO games exploits the way our brains work to trigger action/reward systems, and XII carries that same structure. Battles occur on the world map, much of the adventure actually happens through the quest system, and the focus is much more on epic battles against large monsters for great rewards.
Another weird part about XII is its equipment system. X had the sphere grid, which required characters to get points and advance on a grid system to learn skills and gain stat boosts. XII turns this on its head by giving characters a similar grid but then tying it to equipment rather than stats.
This is certainly an interesting system, but it leads to wonkiness like "I found this shirt but I don't have enough points to actually wear it" (Scott Ramsoomair lampoons this
much more eloquently than I can in comic form). I understand why it's there: yet another step on the path to letting characters retain their individuality while still being customizable. I can appreciate the sentiment, but I am nonetheless unimpressed with the result.
The other controversial change is the gambit system. Essentially, it's a way to control your characters without actually controlling them--though direct control is possible, in large real-time battles it's always nice to have a way to make the character you're not directly controlling still do approximately what you want. This system is, in my opinion, again designed to make up for the fact that FFXII is an offline online game. Since you don't have live, thinking party members, you have to program your characters to do what you want.
I thought the gambit system was pretty OK, but in the end SquareEnix get zero points for coming up with a decent solution to a problem they themselves created.
There's a lot more I could say about FFXII, but I feel like I've covered the basics. Ultimately, the fun 30-hour game is buried in another 30 hours of MMO-like grinding. I don't object just because the game asks players to repeatedly do relatively mindless tasks for relatively miniscule rewards--especially because I don't have to pay every month for the privilege--but this isn't the sort of game I get excited about.
The reason many old-school series fans (including me) mock later installments even as we recognize that individually they are not necessarily bad games is that each one represents a step away from a series of games we like and toward a series of games that some other demographic likes. For me, at some point along the way the Final Fantasy games stopped being, well,
Final Fantasy. And though I can write words about the characters and the plot and the world and the various systems which compose the game as a whole, those words will just be dancing around the fact that this isn't my game and this series is no longer my series. To those whose series it has become and whose games these now are, I am happy for you. But it's not mine.
Next week: brief words about some of the games I didn't cover, some closing thoughts, some statistics for nerds like me, and maybe some other stuff. I dunno! I haven't written it yet.
