entropia

I was really excited about Final Fantasy XII, but so far it’s been a let down. It seems like every few minutes you run into something that just isn’t right - whether it’s gambits that don’t work like you want or just having to stop for 2 seconds and sheath your weapons when fleeing¹. I was planning on writing a big post on all the little details that are broken, but instead I’m just going to suggest a few changes that would make the game much better.

Cut back on the randomness

In all the previous Final Fantasy games I’ve played, spells like Stone, Sleep, and Death only work a fraction of the time. If you cast the spell, the entire battle depends on the random number generator. That’s devastating randomness, and I hate it.

FFXII cuts back a little - by making spells like Stone and Death start a countdown timer, so they’re not instant kills - but it’s not enough. Spells like Sleep and Slow still only work every once-in-a-while, so the battles as still controlled by the random number generator. Whenever a spell results in a “miss”, it’s an instant Fail for the game designer. Spells should either hit (with some degree of power) or be ineffective (if the enemy is immune). There is no miss.

This is easy to fix. Instead of making Slow “hit-or-miss”, just make it effective to a certain degree. Sometimes it’ll slow the enemy down by 10%; sometimes by 40%. Same with Sleep - instead of “awake” and “asleep”, let enemies be “sleepy”. And as they get more “sleepy” they may slow down, miss with their attacks more often², and block fewer attacks.

Fix the Gambits

I love the idea of Gambits, but they don’t quite work as implemented in FFXII. I think there are 2 main problems, the first being that they’re too specific, with too many choices. Instead of “Cast fire on enemies that are weak against fire; cast thunder on enemies that are weak against thunder; etc.”, there should be something like, “Cast whatever will do the most damage to this enemy”. Of course this brings up the question of how the character should know which spells are the most effective. The solution is simply to include it in the beastiary. If you find a spell that’s especially effective, the character should take a note of it and use it again next time.

The other problem is that there’s no way to easily change gambits. There’s a nice interface, but it requires a lot of clicks. And until you spend the time to reconfigure everything, you keep using the same settings. It would be nice to be able to set up different classes of gambits - like Battle gambits, and Safe-zone gambits, and maybe even Aggressive or Careful gambits. So once you enter a battle, you switch to battle gambits, which might place emphasis on attacking until characters are especially low on HP. At the end of a battle, you’re back to the safe gambits, which involve more preparation for the next battle.

Combining all this, and taking it further, you could get rid of the list of instructions (”if A do B; else if C do D; else …”), and turn Gambits into equippables. So a single gambit that you find or buy would consist of an entire battle strategy for a single character, and you just assign each character a gambit (or a couple - one for battles and one for between battles). And different gambits would be tailored for different classes - tank gambits, mage gambits, healer gambits.

About the closest thing to gambits I’ve ever seen successfully implemented was in Ogre Battle. In Ogre Battle, you had no direct control over your characters, you just gave them simple instructions like “attack leader” or “attack weakest”, and the AI took over. This particular system wouldn’t work in a Final Fantasy game, because the battles are too different, but I think it’s something to consider. The best solution might be somewhere between FFXII and Ogre Battle.

Don’t make my characters stop

I don’t know where the idea of stopping to cast spells, or stopping to sheath a weapon, came from, but it needs to be sent back. In FFXII, whenever a non-leader character casts a spell, he has to stop for the entire duration of charging the spell, casting, and deciding what to do next (the leader can move for everything except the actual spell casting). This accomplishes nothing but annoying the player.

Fix the bosses

Maybe the worst part of the game, and the hardest to fix, is the bosses. I don’t mind a long boss battle, as long as they’re not so boring and common as in FFXII. I just spent 15 minutes fighting one boss, casting the same spell again and again, and the very next battle is another 15 minute boss. I used to enjoy the Final Fantasy bosses, but not anymore³.

Every boss feels the same. First learn its attacks and equip something to nullify the status effects it throws at you. Brace yourself when it gets down to 50% HP, because it uses a super-powerful attack. Again at 25%. And for the final 10% or so it just attacks relentlessly.

Mix it up a little. Throw in one that switches its weakness every few minutes. Or one with multiple stages. I think it was FF3 (that’s FF6 to Japan) that perfected the multi-stage bosses.

Overall, I’d say the Final Fantasy XII just feels unpolished, which is especially surprising for a game of that name. I was hoping it would be good enough to make me play the games I skipped in the series. I still do want to play them, but for a different reason: I want to see the full progression from 6 to 12. Each game in the series adds new gameplay elements, and I want to see what I’ve missed.

1. Seriously - if try to flee you have to stop and sheath while the monsters catch up to you - fleeing actually slows you down [↩]
2. I can tolerate blocks and misses with regular attacks because they rarely have such a drastic effect on the overall battle [↩]
3. I can’t remember exactly what it was about FFVII that made be stop playing the series, but it could have been the bosses [↩]