Taking the 'Play' out of Role Playing Games.
Cons: tries to force MMORPG gameplay into a RPG. You basically sit back and watch the game play itself. The plot and characters are very poor. Magic is surprisingly weak
Speaking graphics wise, this is in the same boat as FF9; there’s nothing revolutionary here, it’s really just stretching out the capabilities of a system that’s past its prime. Fluent animation, high detail, blah. Pump enough money into a project and give it enough production time, and you can make anything look good. In terms of sound, this franchise just hasn’t been the same without Uematsu at the helm. The music is nothing special and mainly just fills in the background as opposed to driving the scene. Although, I must say, that if there’s one thing that this game has going for it, is the quality of the English voice acting. This is much better than I’d expect from a Japanese video game- or any video game for that matter. The characters are each equipped with their own range of tones, afflictions, and accents. In short, it sounds nothing like a poorly dubbed anime. I’ll even go so far as to say it almost sounds Shakespearian. Which, come to think of it, turns out to be a double-edged sword. As many of the characters (particularly the high ranking figureheads of the Empire) speak with such a high vocabulary, that I have trouble understanding what their saying. Having to pause and look up words that I don’t understand.
But my real gripe here is the whole reason why we play games instead of watching movies- the gameplay. For whatever reason, this seems like the Final Fantasy that tried to take an MMORPG experience and adapt it to an RPG game. I won’t go into detail about the battle system itself, as it is just like that you’ll find in an MMORPG, which is a big problem. An MMORPG battle system is set up so that the player is free to type messages into the keyboard without loosing a handle on the battle. But there is no need of that here. In order to adapt an MMORPG battle system with use of a party of characters; you have at your disposal the Gambit system. Which is a very, very, very basic programming language that directs your party’s action in battle. This way, each character will act accordingly in battle and you won’t have to micro-manage each one. Although you are able to do so by opening a Final Fantasy style battle command window (which pauses the gameplay, but you can adjust it so that it doesn’t) and tell the characters specifically what to do. The Gambit system is based on a “if this happens, do this” system. So, for example, “if a party member’s HP drops below 50%, cast Cure on them”. Now, I found two major flaws in this. Firstly, you have to buy or find almost all of the “if this happens” statements in the game and the real useful ones don’t pop up until the end. And second, there is no “if, else, and” statements to specify the commands. Such as “If party member is Blind AND self MP