And as for XII, it was neat, but the story was poorly paced, poorly written, far too sparse for its massive size, ect ect. Also the music was not noteworthy at all. You'd think a first-time composer had done it, not one with as much experience as the composer had.
Holiest of shits!
XII story is by no means a poor one. As I already wrote in a thousand topics, it simply has a change of scope. Instead of putting you in the center of the universe, it puts you as a single piece of a larger puzzle, in which, as a single piece, you naturally can't simply "grasp" the whole, as it is with other FF's. It's not that it is poorly paced and too sparse, the thing is that you do NOT have the eyes of an omnipotent watcher, your party is NOT in the center of the whole plot and it is NOT just your old "Messiatic" group trying to rid the world of your world-threatening calamity.
I sincerely love this change of scope, simply because the "normal" FF way of storytelling has been simply becoming saturated with every new version of the series that has come out, like it was already pointed out in a previous post.
And the soundtrack is excellent. Not as great as Vagrant Story's, but still very remarkable. Once again, it has a completely different style from Uematsu's scores, but hell, great thing they change things once in a while.
It is truly sad when people go over an experience with a pre-idea of that it will be just like every other, and then it simply doesn't.
Meh, I don't even feel like saying anything else. I just keep writing the same things over and over. How lame of me.
Actually, I agree with you. I've not finished FFXII... I actually only rented it, and played it for 50h in 10 days. But that aside, so far as I got, it was majestic. Of the FF games, I've played VI, VII, X, and now XII, and I'd say it's the best of all these. Only VI comes near, and somehow I got a similar feel from that game.
In all honesty, I found XII one of the best RPGs I've ever played. I didn't expect it to be nearly so good as it was. But it was. Alright, maybe one of the reasons is the dialogue. Granted, a lot is melodramatic and cheesy, but there are some very good parts, and extremely good turns of phrase that I simply did not expect in a game like this. The quality of the diaolgue and writing is, in all the RPGs I've ever played, probably only beaten by the Knights of the Old Republic games. And the pronunciation of the voice actors! Really, I couldn't get over the fact that they pronounced Ifrit not ih-frit but ee-freet, or Ivalice not eye-vah-lisss but ee-vah-lease. Or the Jagd pronounced Iagd, like the German from which it comes, not some English derivation. It gave it a far more powerful cultural feel. In fact, in these regards it struck me in the selfsame way that the LOTR movies did, with their precision in language and pronunciation, which is unexpected in fantasy movies. I'd not expected this in an RPG. So, while FFXII is cliched, and has some very bad parts (really, I loathe the character of Vaan, and haven't touched him or Penelo since I could first remove tehm), it has some very good parts, and even characters (I mean, Balthier is an incredibly good character. Much like Setzer from FFVI, I must say. And I simply loved Fran's way of speaking. And Ashe's character has come across way better than it could have.)
So, basically, what I have to say is this. Square redeemed themselves in this, I think. In fact, I'd be willing to go so far as to say if it's this sort of thing that's delaying the Chrono games, alright, that's fair.
