FFXII Impressions

It's finally here, in my hands. Went to Future Shop after work to get it, and didn't see any on the shelf (*gasp*). Maybe they were trying to scare me on Halloween. Good thing Keith warned me about this, so I asked a salesperson to get a copy from the store room. Don't let the price fool you, it was actually $10 cheaper (another good tip from Keith).

After booting up the game, an intro movie comes on, which consisted of scenes from the game paired with a musical score that sounded like a medley of all previous final fantasy games. Wasn't quite the intro I expected, it lacked a certain "oomph" to it. But my disappointment was soon forgotten once I started the game. The "real" intro made me feel like I was watching a movie, in fact, it had a Star Wars prequels feel to it (in a good way). And I've read reviews saying how good the dialog and voice acting was, it's really hard to believe until I actually hear it for myself. You can really tell they have made tremendous effort in this area to make the localized version of the game sound authentic. For the first time, I actually felt that the English dialog fitted a Japanese game. The European-like setting also helps in this respect.

Moving on to the new battle system, it will sure take some getting used to. It's a step towards (but not quite reaching) the battle system in Star Ocean 3, which I liked. Since you only have to choose an action once and the character will continue to perform that action, battles become largely an exercise of moving your character into range of the target, and selecting a new action on a new enemy once you defeat your current target (although I imagine the latter won't even be necessary once gambits come into play). It's still too early to tell whether I like this system or not.

I am now in the city of Rabanastre, and I have to say it totally blows away the tiny towns and villages in FFX. It's not fixed angle so you are free to look around and marvel at the grand scale of the city. However, this also brings me to one of my nitpicks of the game. When I want to look right, I instinctively push the analog stick to the right. This actually swings the camera to the right of your character, hence you see what's on the left instead. It's not so bad once you get the camera swinging, but I trip over this everytime I start to look around. It's opposite to most games out there. It seems reasonable to have a setting to reverse this, but unfortunately there's no such option.