Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
Jul. 8th, 2011 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe cast of Final Fantasy XII returns in a game where the viewpoint character is actually the main character, the system is radically different and features much larger parties, and everything is a lot cartoonier.
This is a real time strategy game, but it’s RTS “lite”. They simplify it a lot from something like, say, Starcraft. Your armies are the named characters and the espers (or “yarni”) that they summon to fight for them. You have a max of five squadrons (automatically, and summoned creatures must be assigned to one), and resource gathering is only to get treasure. There are no tech trees. Instead, there are rpg elements, in that your characters (the leaders of each squad) gain levels and can find/buy/craft better equipment. The gameplay is all about the rock-paper-scissors: Flying beats melee, melee beats ranged, ranged beats flying. Most creatures have an element and an elemental weakness. Which is perhaps the reason I can play this game—the thing is, I’m not actually very good at RTS games. There’s always too much going on, and I can’t keep track of it all. Here, a lot of the strategy is just picking the right team of espers to bring into battle, then making sure you’re sending the right squad against the right group of enemies. And if you can’t beat a battle, there’s always grinding for levels and better equipment!
My biggest problem through most of the game (because grinding higher levels kept battles manageable) was keeping idiot NPCs alive. The first battle I had to try three times was one where you had to keep an NPC alive—and that moron kept charging head-first into creatures he was weak to! (You still gain XP for battles that you fail, which is a kindness, I suppose. You can also fight “monster melee” battles in finished maps as much as you want to gather crafting materials, gold and XP.)
The plot takes a while to get going. Most of the early characterization is “We’re heroic pirates! We must search for adventure!” and most of the story is “Ooo, floating continent and evil sky pirates who want to wreck it!” (I can also see why people would find Vaan annoying. He’s a classic kid hero with more optimsm than brains, but that always works out for him anyway.)
They do a decent job with the story once it does get moving, though. FF12’s Ivalice gave the impression of there being a much bigger world outside of what we saw in the game, and this shows a bunch of new fantastic locations off. (And despite introducing new races and a new monster-summoning system, it still feels better tied-in, continuity-wise, to FF12 than any other Ivalice Alliance game. And it certainly feels much more like the same world than Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story did.) Some parts of it wouldn’t make much sense (or wouldn’t carry much significance, at least) if you haven’t played FF12. In the grand tradition of FF games, they tie the system (in this case, esper summoning) to the story. Of course, also in that tradition, the negative consequences of the system only take place in cutscenes. And you end up using the Power of Friendship and killing god, but you could have guessed that from the start.
The system graphics are sprite-based and I think many of the character graphics (and some of the monster graphics) are the same ones used in Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Actually, they were apparently very efficient when it came to this, because a lot of the music comes straight from FF12, and it also makes heavy use of the classic FF “crystal theme” and “main theme” music.
In headshots and cutscenes, a lot of the characters look noticeably different and are only recognizable by their outfits. There’s a bit of Narm at one point when Penelo dances—sprite Penelo, with music notes flying off of her, and it supposedly touches an NPC’s heart. Not mine, so much. The cutscene later where she dances is a little better, but it’s still problematically uncanny-valley-ish. (Honestly, of all the characters, Penelo is the one who the artists obviously had the most trouble with. Virtually every picture of her is funny-looking.)
Overall: If you can get into the system—and the DS is certainly the right system for it, if any console was—then you can have a decent amount of fun with this. Not having played FF12 would mean you’d lose a lot of the references; given that FF12 is a damn fine game, you really should play it first anyway.
This is a real time strategy game, but it’s RTS “lite”. They simplify it a lot from something like, say, Starcraft. Your armies are the named characters and the espers (or “yarni”) that they summon to fight for them. You have a max of five squadrons (automatically, and summoned creatures must be assigned to one), and resource gathering is only to get treasure. There are no tech trees. Instead, there are rpg elements, in that your characters (the leaders of each squad) gain levels and can find/buy/craft better equipment. The gameplay is all about the rock-paper-scissors: Flying beats melee, melee beats ranged, ranged beats flying. Most creatures have an element and an elemental weakness. Which is perhaps the reason I can play this game—the thing is, I’m not actually very good at RTS games. There’s always too much going on, and I can’t keep track of it all. Here, a lot of the strategy is just picking the right team of espers to bring into battle, then making sure you’re sending the right squad against the right group of enemies. And if you can’t beat a battle, there’s always grinding for levels and better equipment!
My biggest problem through most of the game (because grinding higher levels kept battles manageable) was keeping idiot NPCs alive. The first battle I had to try three times was one where you had to keep an NPC alive—and that moron kept charging head-first into creatures he was weak to! (You still gain XP for battles that you fail, which is a kindness, I suppose. You can also fight “monster melee” battles in finished maps as much as you want to gather crafting materials, gold and XP.)
The plot takes a while to get going. Most of the early characterization is “We’re heroic pirates! We must search for adventure!” and most of the story is “Ooo, floating continent and evil sky pirates who want to wreck it!” (I can also see why people would find Vaan annoying. He’s a classic kid hero with more optimsm than brains, but that always works out for him anyway.)
They do a decent job with the story once it does get moving, though. FF12’s Ivalice gave the impression of there being a much bigger world outside of what we saw in the game, and this shows a bunch of new fantastic locations off. (And despite introducing new races and a new monster-summoning system, it still feels better tied-in, continuity-wise, to FF12 than any other Ivalice Alliance game. And it certainly feels much more like the same world than Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story did.) Some parts of it wouldn’t make much sense (or wouldn’t carry much significance, at least) if you haven’t played FF12. In the grand tradition of FF games, they tie the system (in this case, esper summoning) to the story. Of course, also in that tradition, the negative consequences of the system only take place in cutscenes. And you end up using the Power of Friendship and killing god, but you could have guessed that from the start.
The system graphics are sprite-based and I think many of the character graphics (and some of the monster graphics) are the same ones used in Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Actually, they were apparently very efficient when it came to this, because a lot of the music comes straight from FF12, and it also makes heavy use of the classic FF “crystal theme” and “main theme” music.
In headshots and cutscenes, a lot of the characters look noticeably different and are only recognizable by their outfits. There’s a bit of Narm at one point when Penelo dances—sprite Penelo, with music notes flying off of her, and it supposedly touches an NPC’s heart. Not mine, so much. The cutscene later where she dances is a little better, but it’s still problematically uncanny-valley-ish. (Honestly, of all the characters, Penelo is the one who the artists obviously had the most trouble with. Virtually every picture of her is funny-looking.)
Overall: If you can get into the system—and the DS is certainly the right system for it, if any console was—then you can have a decent amount of fun with this. Not having played FF12 would mean you’d lose a lot of the references; given that FF12 is a damn fine game, you really should play it first anyway.
