The White Hunter said:
Ahahaha, really? FF12: the shiny game with not a single likeable character, plot so boring it has no twists a la ff8, no "holy shit did he really do that" moments a la ff7, terrible sluggish combat that prefers to involve the player as little as possible, across-the-board terrible voice acting (with notable mentions to both Vayne and Larsa Solidor, who were the only two VAs to not make me want to cough up blood), a mediocre upgrade system not on par with even ffx's bloated mess of a grid? Come on, man. Even comparing the combat systems *alone* ff7 blows it out of the water. Materia allowed a mind-boggling amount of freedom in terms of individual and team builds, and TBC was at its peak during that era. Ditching TBC entirely for a world-map-monster-fighting-arena with massive cooldowns between abilities was a huge joke, and severely lowered the game's fun factor. Yahtzee likes to rail on turn-based combat a lot, but when you replace it with a system EVEN MORE BORING, you have failed on a whole new level.
FF12 was very superficial. It looked nice (sort of, ps2 etc), and had a few "wow" moments - the main one for me was Vayne's speech in Rabanastre. His voice acting combined with his animated motions were nearly flawless, and I felt like I was being lied to by an actual politician. A+ job on that cutscene. The entire rest of the game, however, was far worse. It opened with an "epic" story about war between nations, the heroic sacrifice of a noble for his country after just getting married, etc and then... it scales down to absolute joke level, with vaan the "why-am-I-even-here" (only saved from the label of NPC because, yknow, youre forced to control him) and penelo the "vaan wasn't interesting enough to be alone, so here I am to follow him around doing nothing." It takes *hours* to meet actually interesting characters, and dozens of hours to get to a point where the actual interesting bits of the story intersect with vaan's quest to be the blandest protagonist alive.
Then the game was marred with entire sections of really repetitive, boring and grindy filler material. Pretty much everything early on around Rabanastre, the entire trip to Bhujerba, etc. #1 most annoying section is easily the village of the bunnygirls, all of whom have ridiculously obnoxious accents, and because Fran is one of them (and shares their fucking obnoxious accent) she gets a lot of screen time to run around being retarded. I don't mind fanservice females being added in just to get ass shots (I mean, Miranda Lawson even got some backstory behind her fabulous ass) but damn, that bunny village took entirely too long.
After 20-30 hours sunk into that game, I put it down and never returned. I was maybe halfway into some jungle somewhere, on a trek from someplace where we had done nothing for far too long, running around doing nothing in the jungle for far too long, to go to a place where we'd inevitably do nothing for far too long. The game had simply become too painful to continue playing. The one-dimensional characters with stock archetype backstories, the annoying voice acting, the lackluster plot that took entirely too long to kick in, the sluggish, disengaging combat system and the lack of airship all combined to make the first Final Fantasy game I could simply not finish. Haven't played anything after since - watched Let's Plays of Final Corridor 13: Linear Corridor Exploration and said "welp, definitely dodged a bullet there." But honestly? 12 wasn't much better. You get shepherded around boring areas for boring reasons, going through a constantly immersion-breaking game simply to get to the end.
FF12 was surprising to me. After having played every previous final fantasy, even the "basic" simple ones like ff1 and ff3 which hardly had a plot at all, I couldn't imagine getting most of the way through one and just not caring to end it. They were too engrossing for me to just "quit," y'know? Then the later installments put in great story and plot hooks - even Kefka "I'm totally joker but don't tell anyone I don't want a lawsuit here" Palazzo actually *showed you reasons to hate him* on screen. It wasn't told to you after the fact, it wasn't assumed you would hate him simply because he was the bad guy, you SAW what he did. Sephiroth's now-famous scene with Aeris, combined with all the other backstory concerning him and Cloud, resulted in a nearly flawless build-up to a final confrontation. 8's greatest weakness, by far, was its story; after FF6 and FF7 knocked it out of the park, 8 was pretty fucking weak in comparison, with the actual villain not revealed until well past halfway into the game. But the rest of the game was still great! The GF/junction system afforded just as much freedom for builds as FF7's materia, the triple triad game was a great timesink, and the non-Rinoa characters were all pretty great (Rinoa was about as annoying as Fran though).
But compare those stories to 12. What does Vayne really *do* to make you hate him? By the time the story's even begun, your country lost. Most of the "atrocities" are committed by judges or other members of Archadia. The most shocking thing Vayne does is kill his own high council (all bad guys, to the player) to prevent a coup. Does that make me hate him? Na... not really. It's a logical step. Vayne is basically presented as a calm, collected militant leader and that course of action fits in perfectly. Then, out of character, he goes banana nut-butters and tries to re-start the war he already won, but before he can really do anything else, you kill him. #welp?
Kefka literally destroys the entire planet, scorches the continents with a magical laserbeam from atop his god-fortress. Sephiroth emotionally manipulates the majority of the party throughout 7 to his ends, even exerting limited mind control via Jenova cells to get what he wants several times. That and "the aeris scene" mark him as the clear villain, and gives every character in the party reason to hate him and work against him. 12 doesn't have... any of that, really. Ashe and Basch have motive, but the rest... don't, outside of alliances of convenience. When those kind of conflicts become seriously lethal, most of that party would have split, Balthier included. I won't even get into all the problems presented by having Vaan exist at all, let alone be the "focus" of the story, despite the actual story revolving around Ashe. It was a disjointed, chaotic mess.
Anyway... na. 12 was nothing on 7. 12 was nothing on 6 or 8 or 9. I'd posit it was worse than 10, even, given 10's fairly coherent anti-established-religion plot. With some work making the characters, both good and bad, a little deeper and with meaningful histories, I could have totally dug 12. But since that didn't happen... the end product was a Final Fantasy game so boring I couldn't even finish. A first for the series. That's something, at least?
