You know, to see if time had been kind to this RPG oddity, and if my tastes had changed since 2006. Should I have stuck it out and given the game a few more hours to warm up? Should I have approached it with a more open mind in regard to the sudden gameplay changes? I always figured that I'd get around to playing it again so I could answer those lingering questions, so when Square Enix announced The Zodiac Age remaster, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to jump back in. Honestly, I'd be shocked if I was even five hours in when I threw the disc into storage.įinal Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age Credit: Mitch Wallace/Square EnixĮver since, I haven't been able to shake the nagging suspicion that maybe I was missing something. Blame it on the post-op pills or my potential lack of patience, but after the first few missions, I simply couldn't maintain interest. The cinematics were up to the usual Square Enix standard, but the story felt thin and unimportant, a string of dull events tied together with boring characters, convoluted nomenclature, and bad dialogue. It all felt noticeably devoid of the usual warm, relatable Final Fantasy vibe I'd come to love. While filled with the standard deluge of rambling NPCs and eager merchants, towns and settlements somehow felt blandly empty, with most locations projecting as drab and strangely sterile. The battle sequences were obviously the standout difference they retained bits and pieces of the old-school turn-based mechanics but abandoned random encounters and leaned hard into a foreign, real-time feel. I can remember there being a fair bit of backlash from longtime fans regarding these changes, but I simply figured that developers needed to change with the times, and the times were calling for open environments and more action-oriented combat.īut as I really dug into the game while I was on house arrest, it quickly became apparent that this installment was deviating from the tried-and-true formula slightly more than I was ready to accept. What 2006 video game reviewers were getting at with their careful critiques was that Final Fantasy XII had more in the way of MMO elements, especially regarding the battle system and meandering maps, than previous -and much more traditional - Final Fantasy games. I'd completely skipped out on the latter because a) I didn't have a PC powerful enough to run it at the time and b) I didn't want to splurge on the requisite hard drive bundle for PS2. Less VII, VIII, IX, and X and much more XI, the online-only experience. Now, prior to starting the game, I'd read that Square Enix's newest entry was somewhat different than the previous Final Fantasy efforts.
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