Final Fantasy

I've finally sat down to play through Final Fantasy XII. I bought the collector's edition the day it was released. I played about 10 hours into the game, until I got stuck and gave up on it for a while. When I tried playing again I didn't quite remember the controls or the story. With that dilemma I've put the game on the back burner for a while. This past month I decided I would start the game over and push through it before XIII comes out.

The game play was something that had to grow on me. When I first played the game I hated the game play. I would get frustrated with it. It was one of the main reasons I stopped playing the first time. The second time around I started to get the hang of the game play. Now I'm really enjoying the battle system.

The story is good, but slow. Before I got the game I didn't go crazy looking into the details of the game or watch all of the trailers/videos I could find of the game. I watched a few trailers and read a few articles, but I tried not to go too in depth in the game. While playing the game a lot of the shocking moments were already obvious. It was information that was already given to you in the trailers or in the few articles I read. The first 40 hours or so of the game you are left with your average FF story and very few exciting moments. Some of the main characters aren't very interesting and are very generic. Luckily the game play was enjoyable enough and there were enough interesting side quests to do that made things bearable. Afterwards the story began to get interesting. Now I'm at the point where I'm looking forward to the rest of the story. It took a while for that to happen.

The story and characters are some of the most important parts of any RPG (to me). Most of the later FF games have great, in-depth characters with intriguing storylines. The main storyline in FF games are basically the same, but the events that lead up to it can vary greatly. I wonder if the increasing length of games affects the flow of the story. FFX and FFXII were very slow to start and took a while for the story and characters to grow on me. In FFIX, VIII, VII, and VI I was interested earlier on, if not immediately in some cases. Those games were a lot shorter. If you have a game that's twice as long how do you still keep the story going and interesting without throwing too much at the audience. I suppose that could be a difficult dilemma. It may come to a point where games turn into more of a TV show. You have your main storyline, but you also have side stories that can occur.

The trailers can give out too much information. A trailer is suppose to entice someone to watch/play something. You don't want to give out too much or it ruins the enjoyment you get out of watching/playing the movie/game. It kills me to see an awesome looking trailer for a movie and then when you go to see the movie all of the good parts were in the trailer. Sometimes that can make me not enjoy a movie as much. This can happen with games too. I stopped watching the FFXIII international trailer because I felt like I was being given too much information. If you know secrets from the beginning, it can make the story less enjoyable. In some cases it can be more interesting knowing from the beginning, but usually not knowing keeps you wondering. That makes the story more exciting and makes you want to keep going forward to unravel the mystery or you get shocked by something you didn't see coming.

Speaking of FFXIII I'm going to talk about that now. I'm really looking forward to it, despite knowing somethings from the trailer that I wish I didn't. I love the look of the characters and the world they live in. Once I play the game I'll know if it's really as good as it looks. When I first saw FFXIII Versus I was hoping you would be paying the game over again as the bad guy. (In the first trailer, the first guy you saw looked like a baddie). Unfortunately that's not the case. It would be pretty cool to play a high profile game over again as the bad guy. We'll see how it plays out. Hopefully FFXIII turns out great so that FFXIII Versus can compliment it.

That's enough about Final Fantasy for today. I feel like too much of a nerd talking about it for this long. I need to talk more about other games. Maybe in my next post.