Impending_Doom66
[09] Warrior
Underrated or not FFXII is one of the worst Final Fantasy games from the main series.
People can argue against it all they want, but Vaan was still the protagonist. The story may have centered around Ashe's quest for revenge or whatever, but it was from Vaan's eyes. If people want to start the arguement that Vaan was just a way to tell the story then we can easily make some other FF characters the protagonist in the same way. Take FFX for example, of course Tidus was the protagonist, but the story, from beginning to end, was about Yuna's journey to destroy Sin. FFVI is a box that I am not even going to open.
I'll admit this was a plus.
I thought the battle system was stupid. Magic was just screwed up. It is dumb how there is not a wait time for attacks, yet only 2 spells can launch at once or 1 spell if it is a high level spell. This allows you to also take advantage of crap design by using 2 characters to stall the boss by backing up his spells with your own. While this is going on you can have another character attacking over and over with almost no cooldown.
Then we have FFXII's take on limit breaks, the quickening. Quickings were another crap design, because in the beginning of the game they are broken and in the end they are worthless. For 3/4s of the game all you have to do against a tough opponent was start a quickening chain, and viola one hit kill. Of course with the damage cap at 99,999 this becomes worthless later on since you can easily deal this damage with physical attacks without losing all your mp.
I also think it was ridiculous that you could not cancel an action. Say you put a wrong action, well the only way to fix it is to stack the next action. This was dumb since everything except physically attacking has to wait before the action is launched. The battle system was somewhat fun, but it had a lot of flaws.
I thought the story was boring as hell. All the characters except for Ashe were underdeveloped, some much worse than others. Plus the way the game ended was just bad. The final dungeon took me by complete surprise. When I finished the Pharos I didn't know the story was at it's end. There is no conclusion or anything. It's just Bahamut BAM!!! gameover
The hunt system was good, but most of the side quests all felt the same to me. Also the rewards, for the most part, were crap.
I didn't care for the judges' designs, but the monster designs were great.
The summon acquiring system was good, but I never felt any reason to get summons. For the most part summons are completely worthless. In general they are weak, and some of the requirements to use there special attack are just ridiculous. The final summon (I forgot his name) requires you to have gradual petrify or something stupid like that to activate.
Quickenings made most boss fights one hit kills. This was lame because if you did do this then you miss story elements that take place during the battles with the judges. Later on in the game there is a pretty lame attempt at making bosses difficult by introducing one of the worst ideas ever, the palen or whatever it is called. So basically this shield of sorts makes the opponent immune to either phsyical or magical attacks for a certain amount of time, or in the final bosses case it makes him invinsible. What made it annoying was that these bosses were all easy, and all the palen did was drag out the battle for no reason. The only boss that gave me any trouble was the final summon.
Some of the music was good, but not best in the series by a long shot. I would say FFIV-X all had better soundtracks.
Way to many flaws to warrant a perfect score.
