{"id":1146,"date":"2007-05-15T11:00:14","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T16:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1146"},"modified":"2007-11-03T08:53:11","modified_gmt":"2007-11-03T13:53:11","slug":"final-fantasy-xii-level-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1146","title":{"rendered":"Final Fantasy XII: Level Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are two aspects that most people talk about when discussing Final Fantasy games: The story, and the gameplay. In my previous<\/a> posts<\/a> I said I was unhappy with both. I’ve started the game over, and I’m still not happy with the story, but this time through the gameplay is really working for me. <\/p>\n

In previous FF games, I’d march straight through the game, occasionally taking little half-hour leveling sessions to level up a bit past the monsters and ease my way past the occasional bossfight. This usually worked well. I was doing that here, and wondering why the game was so murderously hard.
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\nFor those that played the game: I was level 14 when I reached the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea. I was sort of surprised that the game gave me a level 18 NPC to travel with, and I was even more surprised to see that even with his help the journey through the Sandsea was really hard. Then I had a sort of forehead-slapping “duh” moment and realized that the little bits of leveling I was doing were falling way, way short of what the designers intended. <\/p>\n

Final Fantasy 12, a 101-zombie-killing chain.<\/td><\/tr>
We just killed over a hundred zombies. Are you guys bored? I’m not bored. I could do another hundred if you wanted.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Now on my second attempt at the game I’ve done some treadmill leveling. In the Lhusu mines I found a nice spot that generated endless foes at a steady pace. I cranked up the combat speed and ran around, slaughtering those foes for a couple of hours. Later I found myself on an enemy airship with laser tripwires. Crossing them would sound an alarm and cause bunches of guards to emerge from the woodwork and throw themselves onto the end of my sword. We were careful to set each and every one of them off repeatedly. The process sort of reminded me of this<\/a> Penny Arcade comic.<\/p>\n

The gambit system makes it pretty easy to automate most of this, so I was reading blogs and writing posts while I nudged the analog stick and kept the process moving. Yes, I realize how absurd it is to look for ways to amuse myself while I’m playing a game. It’s like going to a concert and listening to your iPod the whole time. In the end, this silly behavior paid off. This time around I was level 24 by the time I hit the Sandsea, and it’s like I’m playing Final Fantasy again. <\/p>\n

Now, I disapprove of this mandatory level-grinding for the most part. I think XP farming should be optional. It should be something risk-adverse gamers (like me) do to get ahead, not something everyone should be forced to do in order to keep up. Having said that, the game is so much more fun now that I’ve invested the time to get “ahead”. <\/p>\n

Final Fantasy 12, $20,000 for bone fragments?<\/td><\/tr>
I don’t know why people are so excited about bone fragments, but after I killed all those zombies people were willing to pay a lot of money for this stuff.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>And now that I’ve done it, further grinding is pretty painless. My crew can wipe out most foes in just two or three hits. Whenever I find an area dense with foes, I run around and slaughter them for a bit. The constant killing has yielded a lot of loot, which fixed the money shortage problem I was having. In my earlier post I complained that high-level foes were mixed in with lower level ones, just waiting to kill unwary players. Now when I meet these things I can actually survive long enough to run away, instead of getting insta-killed. I even managed to beat one, but just barely. (It wasn’t really worth the time it took to bring him down, but it was sort of amusing to try.)<\/p>\n

The other thing I did which added to my enjoyment of the game was to look up the layout of the license grid. The game really, really needed to make the contents of grid squares visible ahead of time so the player could plan ahead. Opening abilities via blind luck sucked a huge amount of strategy out of the game, and using this<\/a> “cheat sheet” fixed that and made the game a lot more interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are two aspects that most people talk about when discussing Final Fantasy games: The story, and the gameplay. In my previous posts I said I was unhappy with both. I’ve started the game over, and I’m still not happy with the story, but this time through the gameplay is really working for me. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-1146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-final-fantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}