T w e n t y S i d e d
After fleeing Marquis Ondore’s swank crib, the game wastes no time in dropping you right off at the start of the next area. Balthier, for the third time at least, caresses his ego by showing off features of his ship, this time a cloaking device he borrowed from a StarCraft Wraith. It’s sadly not inaccurate to say that the first and only cool thing Balthier ever stole was his ship and he has just been riding that good feeling ever since as a “sky pirate.” Vaan and Penelo’s bickering prompt Balthier to baldly lampshade the couple’s status as the comic relief, because sometimes the game is as unkind to me as I am to it.
The task now is to cross the Sandsea. They aren’t just being poetic with the name, either; the sand here is special, and flows like water in a vast, sprawling mass stretching beyond the horizon. Basch describes it as larger still than all of Dalmasca and booooy he ain’t even kidding. This is the first time the game drops you off at the beginning of an immense stretch of wasteland or ruins and says, “have at it, we’ll start up the plot again on the other side.” From here on out, this is more or less how the game functions, and I’ll be perfectly honest: I think the game gains something from this. There’s just something about peering out over the trackless wastes, with nothing on the other side but some magic-charged ruin lost to the mists of history, and fighting my way to the very bottom of it in search of some relic or other that just whips me into the adventuring mindset.
Unless I miss my guess, this design is another relic of the early, early era when the game was conceived as an MMO. This is, of course, par for such games; in an MMO, the boundless wilderness packed with roaming monsters and the bottomless dungeons crawling with nameless horrors and forgotten superweapons are the game. Yet I think they do a service to the game as it became. The game’s skill at creating atmosphere certainly helps this along, and yet simply having areas like this is a large part of that; as big as the game world can be, they still go out of their way to make it feel like there really is no horizon, that you could walk in any direction and eventually run into the remains of a civilization that rose, prospered, and fell eons before the Dynast-King came to power.
Since there isn’t much to remark upon until I actually get to the tomb across the Sandsea, I’ll explain the Dynast-King. 1100 years before the kingdoms of today were even dreamed up, a man called Raithwall appeared bearing artifacts of unbelievable power, claiming to be chosen by the gods to usher the world into a new era of prosperity under his rule. Thanks to the aforementioned artifacts, he did exactly that, and he came to conquer every part of Ivalice worth putting on a postcard. By all rights, his rule was pretty fucking sweet, and once things were consolidated under him, he ran his empire like a champ. Times were good, and he set things up so smoothly that the Galtean Alliance— so named because he ran it from the Galtean Peninsula, where the three continents of Ordalia, Valendia, and Kerwon come together— held up for four hundred years afterward. All his direct descendants have passed on, but even today every nation in the land can trace its roots back to the Dynast-King’s era, to include the royalty of Rabanastre, to include Ashelia B’nargin Dalmasca. (*snicker* “B’nargin”)
Speaking of Ashe, it would seem someone found her sorely missed at the Marquis’ crib… Basch takes a moment to explain the odd machines that compose a lot of the area: oil rigs! Yes, oil and electricity are actually old, passé technologies and have been ever since magitech became the standard. Electricity is still the way to go for rare devices which require a huge amount of energy at once, but for most powered devices, magicite has all but supplanted all other energy sources. The linked oil rigs make a handy way of crossing the sandsea, and they’ll be present in both of the large areas we’ll have to cross, the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea and the Nam-Yensa Sandsea, though mainly the former. The circular catwalks make for some interesting maps, though they aren’t always the most efficient for getting from one place to another.
The rigs were built by Rozarria, the great nation to the southwest in Ordalia, and longtime enemy of Archades to the northeast in Valendia.I sometimes wonder if Archadia, Rozarria, and Dalmasca might have functioned as MMO player nations in an online concept, similar to the FFXI player nations of Bastok, Windurst, and San d’Oria. Basch is dismayed that the nations in between— including both of his countries— keep getting caught up in their warmongering, but a voice comes from behind dismissing his opinion, conceding that’s simply the fate of small nations. It’s Vossler!
I’m surprised by how much I’ve come to like Vossler in this playthrough, given that I could barely remember him upon restarting. Vossler gives a token WHAT THE FUCK BASCH I TOLD YOU TO STOP THIS SHIT after he returned to the Marquis to find Ashe abducted. He also says the Marquis can only keep Ashe’s “abduction” under wraps for so long. Uh, Vossler? Under wraps from whom? The people that even know Ashe are alive at all can be counted on your hands, and our party is most of them. The only people who would be suspicious are Ghis and Vayne, and if they know that she absconded to Ondore’s care after busting out of the Leviathan, then the Marquis is already pretty well fucked, “abduction” or no. Beyond that, there’s only the Marquis himself and Vossler and his Resistance buddies. Ondore knows, Vossler’s joined up with us again, and the Resistance peons can go trip on a staircase of dicks and hit every step on the way down; they’ve never accomplished anything, and they never will. So who are we keeping the “abduction” secret from, again?
Oh, well. Fran uses her bunny-girl danger-sense to tell us we’re all fucked, and on that note the Urutan-Yensa reveal themselves. See, the Sandsea is so much like a sea that it has its own fish, too, as well as its own crab-people that ride those fish. And these crab people are the Urutan-Yensa, foul-tempered, angry little bastards that really, really hate it when tall, squishy sorts intrude on their territory. Balthier, in his unfailing brilliance, yells, “Let’s quit this place while we can!” as though we weren’t crossing the fucking sandsea, which Basch just got finished pointing out is wider than the rest of the country.
Allow me a tangent. Again.
It is worth noting that Urutan-Yensa— a common enemy in the Yensan Sandseas— have not one but five bonus pages in the bestiary (as do all of the humanoid enemies), documenting the creation of the mimic-type enemies, and, from them, Omega Mark XII, this game’s rendition of the perennial superboss. What’s more, it seems that the mimics were created to do battle with Yiazmat, the game’s signature superboss named after original director and producer Yasumi Matsuno, who created not only this game but the entire Ivalice setting as it was in Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics; the hunt for the wyrm, appropriately entitled “Farewell to a Legend,” is a scantily-disguised metaphor for Matsuno’s departure from the project due to poor health: Montblanc, the clan leader, explains that he and his siblings were all taught their respective trades by a single magnificent master. But one day, a terrible dragon appeared and, though their master did battle with it for several weeks, it ultimately took him from them all.
Yes, the final challenge of the game is to avenge Matsuno by slaying the disease, and in a real sense, to avenge the game itself; the director’s departure proved to be a poor omen for the title. Matsuno was apparently most of the brains behind the operation, and the game appears to have suffered from the lack of his vision and oversight.In fairness to Hiroyuki Ito and Hiroshi Minagawa, the game had always been troubled by frequent aggressive corporate interference, and Matsuno left the project in 2005, a year before release, after working on the title since its beginning in 2000. Hironubu Sakaguchi (the man that the Final Fantasy series calls “papa”) was so disappointed at the loss of his vaunted talents that he declined even to play more than the start of the finished title, a first for the series. Yeah, this game’s creation had some problems.
After going all Anikin on the sandpeople, the party eventually arrives at the Valley of the Dead, a long, man-made canyon carved into the living rock of the cliffs that lie beyond the sandsea. At the end of a long tunnel, an open-air colonnade stands before a large, grotesque structure. Vayne makes an off-hand comment about “Galtean architecture” at the beginning of the game, and I’ll hand it to him (and the developers!), the structures from the old era— the cathedral in Rabanastre, the tomb, and a shrine later in the game— all share a distinct style that I find really cool.
Upon entering the colonnade, a glowing, toothy bird attacks, and is promptly blinded, silenced, and barraged into nonexistence by four graverobbers. Upon its death, a strange lantern-like device within the structure lights up. The party climbs the steps while Ashe ruminates a bit on the Dynast-King, and about his relics: the Midlight Shard, left to the predecessors of House Nabradia; the Dusk Shard, left to House Dalmasca’s founders; and the Dawn Shard, interred with Raithwall in his tomb. Now, if one bearing either of the other shards wants to go creeping around in the tomb, they’ll be totally safe, but of course our party is shit out of luck, and will have to fight our way all the way to the bottom. Bring it!
There is no door into the structure; at the top of the steps, one must use the magic device to teleport within. You’d think Raithwall could have just skipped the giant bird and warped everyone who came to the tomb without the right stone to a room with no exit, deep underground. But of course, Raithwall seems to have anticipated someone might need the Dawn Shard someday. Once within, it’s only a few steps onto a narrow passage before a time-honored tradition of the series commences: a Demon Wall. Behind the party, a horrific statue comes to life, waving two massive swords in front of it. A dozen insectoid legs begin pulling the whole structure slowly but surely forward. The party must defeat the wall, retreat into the passage behind them, or be crushed. Demon Walls are generally a massive pain to fight, and this one’s no different; let’s just run away!The Wall is intended to trap the party on a narrow catwalk above an abyss, but it activates as soon as the party leader hits the trigger; the ensuing cutscene showed the Wall move right past bemused straggler Penelo still standing free, off to the side.
Once through the door leading deeper into the tomb, the light is too dim to see much of anything… except two eyes gleaming in the darkness. It’s a second Demon Wall! And this time, there’s no escape. However, this catwalk is about three times longer than the previous one, and the Demon Wall isn’t quite as strong as the first. The fight isn’t much to write home about, except that the Demon Walls are the only enemies which can inflict the X-Zone status, temporarily removing a party member from play, which can only be lifted by moving to a different screen.You really are supposed to run from the first Demon Wall your first time in the tomb, but 100% of Rocketeers polled gave no fucks, and it was ground into dust with the second. Defeating it gives access to some optional areas with later-game treasure.
The tomb is neat to look at, but I won’t bore you with the details of the epic switch-flipping errand that took place within. Fran stops par-way to infodump Penelo about Mist, the glowing yellow-orange phenomenon that amounts to raw magic floating through the air. It’s a recurring element throughout the game, and occasionally serves whatever purpose the writers need it to.
Once the party arrives at the bottom, they confront a massive humanoid creature with horns, red hair, and a smaller double growing out of its chest. It’s Belias, the Gigas! Belias is the real tomb guardian, and can be a tough fight if you aren’t overleveled and cast a ton of water spells at it. Once the fiery scion is defeated, it collapses into a shining crystal, which shatters.
Fran, ever the knowledgeable lady, quotes a bit of lore: Belias was one of a group that rebelled against the gods themselves, and, utterly defeated, was bound in eternal slavery. Ashe knows a bit more. It’s said that young Raithwall, before becoming the Dynast-King, defeated Belias in battle, thereby impressing the gods so much that it was bound to him in servitude. After the Dynast-King’s death, it remained so, guarding his grave and the Dawn Shard alike.
Ashe also reveals that Belias, and it alone, is the treasure of the Dynast-King, as it is now bound to them as it was to Raithwall so long ago. Balthier isn’t pleased by this news, but fuck Balthier: I wasn’t too happy to hear it, either. Espers are pretty worthless in battle,Espers were infamously underpowered in the original release, though subsequent re-releases keep trying to make them more useful. and I was always broke throughout the game. You just don’t promise an adventurer treasure where there is none, be they player or character.
But we came here for a MacGuffin, after all, and a MacGuffin we shall have. The Dawn Shard is ensconced before the sarcophagus of mighty Raithwall, casting an effulgent lilac glow over the chamber. Vossler seems dazzled by the sight of it, and urges Ashe to take it quickly so they can GTFO. As she approaches it, a spectral vision of the late Lord Rasler appears before her. No one else can see it except Vaan, which pisses me right off. They never even attempt to justify it, and it’s pretty obvious they only enable him to see these visions as a fig-leaf justification of his eternally-irrelevant presence.
The vision of Rasler disturbs Ashe, but it also reminds her of her resolve, and with the Dawn Shard in hand she renews her vow to avenge her late husband and everyone else the Empire has taken from Dalmasca.
Now, the entire reason we hiked across the fucking sandsea instead of taking the Strahl was because the entire region is a “jagd,” and skystone, the magicite which makes airships fly, doesn’t work due to the powerful, turbulent mist of the region. So suffice it to say it’s a bit of a shock when you exit the tomb and are immediately swarmed by Imperial airships which had been lying in wait for the party.
The Travelog continues next week.
Footnotes:
[1] I sometimes wonder if Archadia, Rozarria, and Dalmasca might have functioned as MMO player nations in an online concept, similar to the FFXI player nations of Bastok, Windurst, and San d’Oria.
[2] In fairness to Hiroyuki Ito and Hiroshi Minagawa, the game had always been troubled by frequent aggressive corporate interference, and Matsuno left the project in 2005, a year before release, after working on the title since its beginning in 2000.
[3] The Wall is intended to trap the party on a narrow catwalk above an abyss, but it activates as soon as the party leader hits the trigger; the ensuing cutscene showed the Wall move right past bemused straggler Penelo still standing free, off to the side.
[4] You really are supposed to run from the first Demon Wall your first time in the tomb, but 100% of Rocketeers polled gave no fucks, and it was ground into dust with the second. Defeating it gives access to some optional areas with later-game treasure.
[5] Espers were infamously underpowered in the original release, though subsequent re-releases keep trying to make them more useful.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
So. The Sandsea. Apart from tomato enemies at the entrance and the exit, the area has one enemy*: the Urutan-Yensa. They spawn close to each other, and can cast haste and slow. I ended up with a chain of… I think over a hundred kills on these guys. You’re fighting a lot of them as you go.
The Sandsea is a series of silo catwalks. Each of the silos has three exits; the one you came in on, and two others. Unless you’re checking the map, it’s very easy to take a catwalk, end up on another silo, go across the next catwalk you see, and end up back where you started, or on the silo before that one. This is worsened by the battles taking place on the field; your characters move around the field during their fights, and at the end of it, good luck remembering which direction you were facing when it started.
This is the first area where you’re really going to be living on the map screen, and it won’t be the last. The game loves having passages that crisscross and link to each other, so a path you’ve never traveled before can easily take you backward if you don’t check the map.
*(Apart from the 45,000 hp, damage-reducing Elemental, that turns hostile if any magic is cast near it, including by your enemies. That thing’s halfway through the Sandsea, and if you fight it, it will kill you incredibly dead.)
Man, the chain system is one of my three least favorite mechanics in the game. In theory it’s a “reward” for killing lots of the same enemy, I guess trying to make grinding less painful, but in practice it feels more like a punishment for trying to play the game normally.
It’s not like you can meaningfully control what enemies you find, except by running around the same area constantly, and constantly seeing “chain broken” is annoying. Or if I do get a chain going, now I feel like I need to run past other enemies to avoid breaking it… but maybe there’s treasure by those enemies (can’t open treasure while in “run away” mode), so I end up cheesing the game trying to open the treasure without letting my party kill any of the enemies. It’s just not fun.
Yeah, rationally, I get that I’m probably supposed to just ignore the chain unless I feel like grinding, but telling the JRPG player to just ignore the skinner box seems like perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding of the target audience.
—
And even for it’s intended purpose… fighting the same enemy over and over is still boring. Yes, the fast forward button (which the original game didn’t have, of course) helps a lot, but my first choice would be a game design that didn’t encourage grinding, but if you’re going to encourage grinding, encouraging a grinding style of “fight the same enemy while being careful to not go anywhere where there might be other enemies” is not the tack I’d take.
Again, feels like a MMO mechanic where you’d be doing this not for XP purposes as much as to get a rare drop, or something, but I’m not sure that really works out in practice here. Maybe if the Bazaar system was less of a cluster.
It’s a truly terrible mechanic. It’s something that can sound fun in isolation but immediately falls over the second you think about the play pattern it encourages.
It’s baffling that a professional game designer implemented it. I don’t understand what problem they were trying to solve.
I read somewhere that Matsuno really likes fiddly mechanics. The Chain system is about on par with the Zodiac system from Tactics. It’s a thing that feels like it could be gameable, but is largely outside the player’s control and should mostly be ignored.
FWIW, later rereleases did address this issue in a couple ways:
The first, which I’m not a fan of, is that starting with the IZJS release you can get a full map of both of the Sandseas. So even though you need your map to see where you’re going, you’re not exploring and filling it in as with many areas.
The second is that the Zodiac Age has a map overlay button which lets you pop up the map at any time without entering the menus. This makes this section a lot better and actually trivializes something later in the game which I’ll discuss when this retrospective gets to it.
Ah, wandering world boss monsters. Those are always fun.
Is this one of those situations where you can take it on if you’re over-leveled? Are you supposed to come back later and take it on? Or is it only here to be an environmental hazard, and returning later just results in an unsatisfying letdown?
Taking on Entites— a kind of super-elemental— isn’t so much a question of being overlevelled as it is having a plan to deal with massive party-wide elemental damage and status effects from an enemy that can also buff itself and ignore or dispel your own buffs while instantly draining your MP and is itself immune to basically every status and every element, save the element it absorbs and the one to which it is weak.
In short, even top-end parties only fight Entites when they really mean to, and not without a plan to alpha-strike it (difficult given their high health, but doable) or resist its overwhelming damage. But Entites are actually quite rewarding; they all have a top-end elemental crystal called a Halcyon as a rare steal, which are valuable and necessary to craft a lot of very powerful equipment. The fact that Halcyons are steals and not drops means that daring or foolhardy adventurers can attempt to claim them long before they have a chance of ever defeating an Entite or even surviving its onslaught for more than a couple turns before fleeing. The other side of that coin is that even a powerful and well-prepared party may be required to endure its wrath for quite a while as you attempt to steal from it, when trying to burst it down with overwhelming offense right out of the gate would be the safer, saner thing to do.
The Entites also share a rare, high end drop item, but its only use is to craft an axe, and axes suck.
“they all have a top-end elemental crystal called a Halcyon as a rare steal, which are valuable and necessary to craft a lot of very powerful equipment.”
Man, I don’t have the patience for RNG-BS like this any more.* “Oh, you want this powerful weapon? There’s a 0.01% chance this monster drops it. A few dozen players might see it. Enjoy!”
How has this ever been an enjoyable model of gameplay?
* – I have owned Earthbound on the SNES since its US release. I have killed more Starmen than is healthy. I have never seen the Sword of Kings.
Well, of course you haven’t. That’s in the Stilshrine of Miriam.
The good news is that the Bazaar is so obtuse that you won’t know the best stuff even exists without a guide, and if you’re going to go that route then you should know that it’s absolutely possible to manipulate the RNG seed for the drops you want even on consoles.
You aren’t missing out. Imagine if your magic guy, who you never have punch people, punched 8% harder. Even if the sword was in a shop somewhere, the empty inventory slot is probably more useful.
Dude. DUUUUUDE. I thought those memories were gone forever and here they are surfacing for the first time in years.
They require being about triple the level your party is supposed to be at this point*. You’re able to kill them in endgame (and probably have to; Switchback Dungeon has them too and there’s no alternate paths there), so you’re supposed to come back much later if you want to kill this thing.
*(They hit party-wide for a couple thousand hp, so you need enough to survive that and still put out damage, The small elementals are free once you get Reflect, but the big guys like this one ignore Reflect so you have to eat the damage.)
*(and even if you overlevel now, you only have the basic Cure, and the basic…Wind, I think it’s weak to? Magic is bought in shops, which means it’s based on story progression.)
*(in Vanilla version; the later ones might have more License Board hp buffs, so you could theoretically survive the fight at lower levels.)
All the monsters in this game are killable and you’ll get to the point where anything in the overworld is doable well before you’ve reached the point where you can do all the end-game sidequests.
It’s actually one of the things I find endearing about this game. In the same zone as that first monster hunt (the stupid tomato thing mentioned in one of the earliest posts), there’s also a non-hostile T-Rex. You can attack it, but…you won’t win. Eventually you’ll end up regularly killing stronger versions of it.
The Entites and Elementals are a bit more dicey because on the one hand, they’re not aggressive but on the other hand they can become aggressive so you still have to be careful around them. I like the sense of danger this brings, and it helps avoid the standard RPG feeling of the entire world being a treadmill that is all laid out in a particular order just for you.
(Also helping in this zone: You can stumble upon the Zertinan Caverns, a dungeon that spans multiple zones and that you’re absolutely not supposed to be exploring yet. There are some weaker enemies near the entrance you can kill just fine but before long you’ll see stuff that way outlevels you and think, “oh, I see” and leave)
We’ve received our first Esper; Velius, the devil. Now we can be sure that we’re the good guys.
I wish I had as much knowledge of the background story of FFXIII (wait, what am I saying? No, I don’t), but like I mentioned about 97 thousand times already the game leaves all of its interesting backstory in the datalog instead of organically releasing it little by little in worldbuilding details, so it turns it all into a boring headache if you try to read it.
That being said, even when you want to learn about the world sometimes you’ll find yourself stumped. Like, there’s no Sand Sea here but there’s, for instance, a whole area with vegetation made of crystal and at no point is ever explained is the whole thing is artificial or natural part of the world (I had to google this, but apparently the place, called the “Gapra Whitewood” is listed as a “proto-ecology belt”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean). I mean, the trees have some circuitry-like pattern, but a lot of the fauna of the planet has mechanical features and the game makes a very visual distinction between animals that look like robots and actual robots.
It’s like they designed the setting visually first and then didn’t feel like justifying it. Which is a shame, because with the proper backstory the whole thing could have been really interesting from a worldbuilding point of view. The characters never react to any of this stuff, which in a well-written story would be an indicator that they’re used to it but here only makes them sound uninterested. I really thought at the start of the game that the mechanical nature of many of the creatures would end up playing a role in the story but no, I guess someone just thought they looked cool, regardless of how much sense their designs make. Even our main antagonist turns into half-mechanical things in battles against him. If there’s a reason for it ever stated, I’ve completely missed it.
I’m not sure – everytime Rocketeer gets started on the backstory of XII in this retrospective, my heart sinks a little. Arrgh, no, too many names, too much backstory, why wasn’t there someone in charge of keeping this shit under control?!*
Which is sad, because the idea of a Dynast-King who ruled the world in the past and every country’s royal family traces their lineage back to him** is simple, elegant, and gives us a common idea that informs every place we go to.
THAT’S the kind of thing you put in the opening cinematic.
It’s actually a sequel to Mass Effect 3: Shepard just chose to kill himself via the green beam on the Crucible.
*Some kind of ‘edit-man’, or ‘story-regulator’, maybe…
**I’m tempted to say ‘like the Seanchan, in the Wheel of Time books’, but on second thought, they were completely unnecessary and contributed to the godawful bloat in that series.
Mostly I’m bringing them up to mock how they looked in the TV adaptation.
It’s because Cocoon is an artificial construct. Even outside of the codex, Barthandelus outright refers to Cocoon as a “factory”. Fittingly, everything in it is also made to look constructed in some way, even the blatant analogs of the more natural-looking Pulse monsters.
Which ties to the concept of a designed, safe environment that at the same time stifles growth as opposed to… MWAHAHAHaaaa, no, sorry, I cannot. I mean, for the record, the theme is kinda there, just the game doesn’t do anything with it other than shrug and wave noncommitally in its general direction.
I mean, for all the mean things I would say about FF XIII’s plot I would admit that they committed to this particular feature of the setting. I’m playing through Mass Effect 3 now and at least FF XIII occasionally acknowledged that dynamic occasionally rather than outright contradicting it.
Y’know, just once I’d like to go visit an ancient tomb ruin to steal the ancient magotek divine relics and discover instead that it has become a tourist attraction after the locals sold it to an Englishman in 1904, and the treasures are now located in the British Museum.
What?
Sadly not true in the Zodiac Era version – now when you beat the second Demon Wall, you get still access to an optional area – (which feels pretty cool, you’re running around off the edges of the map) and if you go through it you’ll eventually find… a single consumable item – basically a single cast of one of the more powerful area-of-effect spells in the game.
It sounds like the original prize here was maybe too good… but I think they could have done better, still. I found significantly better loot exploring in the sandsea (an accessory that doubles LP and one that doubles EXP), and that wasn’t behind a miniboss.
(Not that the Demon Wall is particularly hard – this is still the section of the game where firing off Quickenings makes a lot of the boss fights fairly trivial)
Quickenings were such a strange concept, they completely trivialize the early game since you could really easily chain them, I remember stumbling onto a really high level area of the game early and killing a bunch of enemy with quickening and becoming obscenely overleveled. But late game they’re barely even worth using (not that esper, the other use for quickening, were worth using either.
I’m honestly not sure what the idea behind them were, surely it would have been trivial to tweak the number so they’d be useful throughout the game without being broken, but they never did.
Even if they fixed the balance… they’re just so boring. It’s just a super-basic QTE combined with the same boring mini-cutscene over and over, each character’s is identical, they’re boring to charge (the original game just used MP, now it’s a separate bar… that still fully recharges at every save crystal), boring to execute, boring to watch, and not well balanced.
Like this is what it looks like in action – it’s a three minute clip where 90% is watching the same three characters do the same three attacks over and over, and the only part it’s missing is where you switch in the other three characters in your party and do it again.
Another case where the FFX version is just… a lot better where each character’s overdrive had unique mechanics and wasn’t a huge pain to execute.
I never used Quickenings, as I found them boring and cheap. Even (or especially) as a last-gasp finisher, I didn’t like the idea of blowing all my MP on an attack with wildly unpredictable damage, possibly leaving me in the lurch with my healer scrambling to recover MP while the boss is at its most dangerous. This was before they moved from MP bars to Mist Charges, mind— or rather, when a mist charge simply was all/half/one-third your MP.
The confounding thing about quickening was the whole reroll system and the concurrences. What lunatic said, “Let’s combine all our best mechanics into our limit break system: randomized slots, GF Boosting from FFVIII, and skillchains/magic bursts from FFXI”? I guess I don’t mind the idea of adding some kind of bonus for combining Quickenings, even though I have mixed feelings about rewarding an all-in expenditure of all your resources with even more power on top. But certainly not the way they did it.
I’m not as confident it would be easy to balance. Or I might say, balance might not be as easy to achieve while making the system fresh and interesting. The easiest thing to do would be to have Quickenings scale with character level, which would put them on a predictable curve of usefulness throughout the game and remain relevant for each character regardless of how you build them. But that’s also the problem; I feel like in FFXII, it’s always been your cleverness with gear, magicks, technicks, and gambits that are supposed to form the core of your strategy, not raw level-grinding. The devs seem yo agree after canonizing the old 122333 challenge with Weak Mode. You could then change the power of Quickenings to scale with equipment-modified stats, but what stats, then? Choosing any particular stat for each character further reinforces the push to pigeonhole them into specific jobs or builds, when something I like about FFXII is letting you make a successful party with any character in whichever jobs you want them in regardless of the nudging of their individual stat growth, as long as the jobs themselves are well-synergized— again, privileging system mastery and cleverness over vital statistics derived from levels derived from grinding.
I think a simple stop gap measure would be to simply tie the quickening power to strength from weapon, and then maybe making esper tied to magic stats, so that both playstyle would have something going for them.
A better version would be to give every character there own unique quickening system, a la FFX, with some of them having special effect beyond pure damage. It doesn’t need to pigeon hold the character, the attack could simply scale from their strongest stats no matter which it is. It would help differentiating the character since, as it stand, the only difference between them is which weapon they suck at using, and even that’s pretty minor.
On the one hand as soon as you differentiate characters balancing them becomes hard. Look at FFVI, VII, VIII… Dragon Age sometimes only makes the difference of one unique ability tree and everyone will tell you the characters are not made mechanically equal.
On the other hand if you ask for my opinion I’ll take more diverse characters (in terms of visual, personality and mechanics) over boring photocopies any day.
Quickenings were really good for one thing in the late game: dumping a big chuck of damage all at once to skip the invulnerable phase of later boss fights. The “okay, you’ve steadily chewed through 90% of my health, now I’m just going to be immune to everything for a couple minutes before I allow you to start hurting me again” phase, which I absolutely hated as a mechanic. It’s not harder, it’s not fun, it just makes you sit and wait until the boss decides to take damage again. So quickenings (also not a great mechanic) at least bypassed that.
Is there really nothing else? I knew the Demonsbane sword had been replaced by a Scathe Mote, but I couldn’t make enough sense of the treasure table to confirm there wasn’t something else worthwhile in the optional areas. Usually, the bigger long-term benefit of defeating difficult optional enemies and accessing areas early is a chance at rare, later-game non-repeatable loot for earlier bazaar sales or earlier access to harder enemies for much the same. But the optional Demon Wall has bad steals and no drops, and I remember the optional area being devoid of enemies.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything else there. It’s not devoid of enemies, but the enemies there (Tallow) aren’t unique to that area either.
The wiki also lists two spells, Vanish and Dispel in treasure chests of the same area, but I’m pretty sure those are both in the normal part of the map, not the secret part.
This brings up the strange idea of impermanence in ostensibly-complete games. Two people can experience the same game in very different ways depending on small but potentially invisible differences. Whose experience is the “right” one, and how do we even communicate about when multi-billion dollar companies can’t be arsed to document changes half the time?
Oh, good, we’re almost to the part where I quit the game, I think.
I was going to ask why they didn’t just fly the airship across the sandsea, but knowing that the Imperials violate the rules of worldbuilding is very frustrating.
And based on everything that’s come before it, I’m going to bet that the game never justifies or explains how their airships pulled off this trickery.
In fairness to the game: this is both immediately explained next entry and remains an important plot point.
One of the reasons I like FFXII is that I am a completionist. (Except with FFX, because I could not win a single game of drownball or that damn chocobo race, and knowing I couldn’t get all the ultimate weapons made me lose motivation to beat all the bonus enemies in the zoo and the Dark Aeons (not to mention that w/o Tidus’s and Wakka’s ultimate weapons, your best option for those fights is Zanmato, and while I generally have no shame regarding exploits (I cackled with glee while “fighting” Don Tonberry), even I thought that was a bit much).)
Where was I? Oh right, completion. Anyway, FFXII is a game where I felt that my compulsive need to fully explore every area was thoroughly rewarded. Most of the time, your reward for that kind of thing is a treasure chest, which is great, but in FFXII, it meant, for example, exploring the complete Zertinan Caverns (a place to which the main plot, if I recall correctly, *never* sends you (though there are a couple of hunts there)). I got a whole area of multiple screens to explore that had nothing to do with the rest of the game, and the fact that the caverns connected to many other locations (including both sandseas) gave the game world an interconnected feeling.
And also, I got my ass kicked by that damn Archaeoavis. That monster was nowhere near that tough in the PS2 release. I had to spam Wither and snipe it with my invisible bows from a spot 1 step away from the area boundary. (I mentioned I have no shame about exploits, right?)
From the ffwiki:
I’m also a veteran completionist, although it might be more accurate to say that I’m an immensely covetous player that loves exploring and challenging difficult enemies. When I, like you, realized that I was holding back from engaging with games I would otherwise greatly enjoy because I was too daunted by the absurd completionist shit that a 100% playthrough would entail, I had to give myself a reality check and reiterate the purpose of these activities as one of many means of getting the most enjoyment out of a game and not necessarily intrinsically valuable goals in themselves.
Partly in answer to Hal’s question of why people would put themselves through grinding for rare drops, completion/collection goals, self-imposed challenges, and developer-implemented explicit and implicit rewards like items and even achievements are often less valuable in themselves than they are as a direction or framework for continued engagement with a game you enjoy for the sake of its world, systems, or kinesthetics. In many such cases, the rare shit isn’t as much a goal for which to strive but the signal that it’s time to hang it up and move on.
Yep, I have mostly given up on 100%’ing games unless it’s something I find fun on its own (I did catch every single fish in FFXV, including the one you can catch only by baiting it with a smaller fish already in your hook). So I am never going to 100% FFX because drownball suuuuuucks, but that wouldn’t stop me from taking a(nother) run through Spira if I happen to feel like it.
I actually really like the Sandsea section even though it’s ridiculously vast and has like 1 enemy. It gives the game a good sense of scale, and the ruins hint at backstory to the world.
Dunno if you’ve ever played last remnant, but it was absolutely maddening game for people who like to do most of the content as they play it normally. The game actively punish you for fighting normal battle trough an incredibly convoluted EXP system that boil down to making every enemy much stronger if you fight too many normal enemy, combined with rare monster that may drop extremely rare crafting material and incredible difficulty spike with end game content.
The reward is rarely worth the completion in game, I still remember as a little kid being super proud of killing the emerald weapon in FF7 but I cannot remember what the reward was, anyway it didn’t matter, if you could kill it, nothing stood any chance of stopping you. But I do like when the reward is some fun eastern egg, like the developer room in chrono trigger when you kill Lavos at the start of the game.
Follow up question: When you find yourself building a macro-enabled Excel worksheet with vlookups galore in order to maximize your gains from the Bazaar, is THAT the time to stop playing?
(I may or may not have an entire folder of Excel worksheets to enable min-maxing and completing games.)
No, finishing your spreadsheet means you can finally START playing, duh. Why wouldn’t I use my complete Stardew Fishing guide to make sure I got at least one of each kind of fish before the season ends?
If this comment appeared in one of the main articles it would surely be one of those times where people who didn’t play the game think you’re exaggerating or atypical. Well, okay, if you’re writing macros then you probably are atypical, but not by as much as the uninitiated would expect.
I exaggerated on the macro part, but that’s only because I finished (by which I mean 100%’d) the game before I finished perfecting the final Bazaar tab of the spreadsheet (there was a tab for hunts, a tab for sidequests, etc.). I really did write some vlookups to allow me to quickly figure out what was safe to sell, though.
What I would have liked to write was a clean UI to let me pull up info quickly without having to scroll around the tables (I had both an ingredients table and a loot packages table) or use filters, but that was definitely reaching the point of too much time invested in an admittedly silly activity, so I just got the Tournesol and called it good.
and I was always broke throughout the game.
For the first part of the game, yeah, but in the Zodiac Age version that ends as soon as you get your first Cat-ear Hood (basically, clear 14 hunts, save 50k gil, buy it from the clan provisioner in Rabanastre). It converts license points to gil, it works on reserve party members, and you can buy more with your newfound surplus. This adds up very quickly.