#i just have been overwhelming myself with nostalgia over old mmos i used to play

[columbidaehypoxia]

Hoes what's our fav rpgmmos we're into these days?

[thesteadydietofeverything]

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is a welcome update to an overlooked series highlight

I played Final Fantasy XII, a bit, when it originally came out in 2006.  I wasn’t playing games much in general at the time - as a junior in high school, it was the start of several years that lasted probably up until I graduated college where my experiences playing video games were few and far between.  Still, the impact the Final Fantasy series had on me just a few years prior, when I put a thoroughly unhealthy amount of time into playing VII-X, roughly between the ages of 9 and 13, meant that I at least felt the need to check this new game out, as I have with every new single-player entry in the series.  At the time, my reaction to it was even less enthused than  my more recent reactions to XIII and XV, both of which I played for around 20 hours, essentially enjoying myself for that time, but being put off enough by their flaws to abandon them well before completion of a full playthrough.  I probably didn’t even get past the first five hours of this game before giving up on it to retire to my room and listen to Pavement records and read anarchist literature, or whatever it was I was doing at that age.

I don’t remember many specifics as to why I quit so early, but upon returning to it over ten years later with the newly released Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age for PS4, it’s not hard to imagine.  This game is a thorough departure from what the series had been so far - battle is no longer a random JRPG-style menu clicking affair, but a more streamlined approach not too unlike MMOs of the time.  Not only that, but the main way that battle is done is through the game’s innovative and weird Gambit system, which allows the player to essentially program characters to perform a number of actions in particular situations by assigning them simple if-then statements.  When your gambits are set up correctly, the game practically - as a number of critics at the time complained - “plays itself.”  Grinding through the overworld or a dungeon can sometimes literally be as simple as pointing your party leader in the right direction and letting your well-trained team take care of the rest.  At the time, such a system must have felt like a removal of many of the things that made Final Fantasy what it was to me; looking at it now, I can’t help but admire the daring deviation in a series that, for whatever flaws it undoubtedly has, has proven itself to be consistently unafraid of twisting its formula in unique and bizarre ways.

My newfound appreciation for this overlooked series entry, however, is not just a result of time and distance.  The Zodiac Age changes the way the game plays in a number of really quite significant ways.  One of these changes is with its License Boards - the means by which the player spends earned experience to learn new abilities, use new weapons and armor, gain significant amounts of HP and helpful skills buffs, etc.  Though I never played the original game enough to remember how these Boards originally looked, they’ve now been modified to lock each character into two “jobs” of the player’s choosing - one at the beginning of the game, and another a few hours into it.  Again, my lack of experience with the original prevents me from true comparison, but considering how open-ended and overwhelming these job-based Boards can be, I’m happy to not have to deal with the truly open approach of the original.

A much more clear and obvious difference in this new addition is the inclusion of a dedicated fast forward button.  Literally.  At any point while not engaged in dialogue or the menu, the player can simply tap R1 to make the game play either twice or four times as fast as its normal speed.  This seems like a bizarre option at first, one that I wasn’t particularly keen on utilizing in my first couple hours of gameplay: the characters move at a decidedly silly, Benny Hill-esque pace at these speeds, and when just getting acquainted with combat, actions happen at a rate too fast to properly comprehend.  But I soon came to realize that for large sections of the game, double time feels like a perfectly natural pace to move in, considering the size of some of the maps in the game and the rather laborious pace of the normal speed.  Some of the more labyrinthian sections of the game can take hours to fully explore - the final dungeon, for example, took me nearly five hours to get through at double speed, and while navigating my way through such a massive and rewarding space was possibly my favorite sequence of the game, I imagine that if it had taken me practically twice as long, it would have worn out its welcome long before I had finished it.

The Zodiac Age, of course, also sharpens and clarifies the graphics of the original in a pretty impressive way - it’s not that it doesn’t still essentially look like the PS2 game that it is so much that it accentuates the striking potential still being squeezed out of the aging console at the time of this game’s release, mere months before the launch of the PS3.  Additionally, the entire gorgeous score has been re-recorded.  Despite my initial misgivings about this game being the first FF I’m aware of to use a composer other than Nobuo Uematsu, Hitoshi Sakimoto wrote truly some of the most lovely and iconic video game music I’ve ever heard with this game, and to hear it expertly performed in high quality audio is something that never failed to propel me through the several dozen hours I spent with it.

Lastly, one of the more subtle, but very important additions of this new version is the inclusion of an autosave feature.  Again, sometimes I’d go an hour or two in double time between save crystals, and it wasn’t unusual to occasionally die in that time: the game contains these enemies called “Elementals,” eerie floating orbs that look not unlike something out of the new season of Twin Peaks and can utterly devastate your party in the early hours of the game.  With autosave, it was easy enough to simply start a couple minutes before I encountered said Elemental and do everything that I could to avoid it, but if I had been forced to go back an hour or more to the last save crystal, I likely would have set the controller down for good out of utter disgust for a game wasting my time like that in 2017.

All of this puts me in an interesting position, considering that the last review I wrote was for the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, in which I struggled to grasp the point of a remaster/remake deviating from its source in a way that fundamentally changes one’s experience of the game.  There are a few obvious differences here.  First of all, when it comes down to it, this is still technically the same game.  The N. Sane Trilogy was a bizarre exercise in attempting to completely remake a game from the ground up in a new engine, while attempting to give it as much fidelity to the original as possible.  In practice, though, lazy or insufficient design meant that the game just didn’t feel like the originals, despite its obvious visual similarities.  The Zodiac Age, on the other hand, is a more traditional remaster, but with a whole lot more: the additions and modifications may change the game in significant and meaningful ways, but the core game is exactly as it always has been.

Probably even more importantly, these changes actually improve the game.  Granted, my limited experience with the original means that any nostalgia or endearing feelings I have for it are mostly relegated to a general affinity for the series rather than specific memories of my first time playing it.  This is as opposed to, say, Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, which I unequivocally played the shit out of as a kid.  Still, the changes seem to stick to objective improvements: the ability to control the speed of play and the autosave feature make this game immeasurably more accessible to modern players, including those who, like myself, don’t necessarily want to devote the 60-80 hours of gameplay the original demanded in order to experience what the game has to offer.  I imagine that even adventurous devotees of the original will be thrilled at an old favorite being given such a graphical and aural overhaul, not to mention the new play styles offered by the modified License Boards.

But all of these tweaks and improvements would mean little if, at the core, there weren’t already a great game worth revisiting here, and as a fan of this series, it’s a uniquely satisfying feeling to discover that this 11-year-old game is, indeed, great.  While not exactly exempt of typical JRPG bullshit, it’s the strange, fascinating, and (relatively) mature game one would want out of a collaboration between Hiroyuki Ito (director of my two other favorite games in the series, FFVI and FFIX) and Hiroshi Minagawa (director of two other classics of the genre whose complexity precluded my appreciation at the time they came out: Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story; maybe it’s about time I revisit those as well). 

It’s worth noting at the mention of Minagawa that this game’s setting of Ivalice puts it in the same world as his other games.  The story, for as indebted as it is to Star Wars (and, unless I’m projecting, Game of Thrones, which is at the least interesting to note, given the exceptional pop culture phenomena that series has become since the show debuted five years after the release of this game), is engaging in its political intrigue and subtle character dynamics, especially compared to the melodramatic bombast of most of its PS2 JRPG peers, including Final Fantasy X.  While all of these games, toward the end, are going to boil down to needing to save the world from some megalomaniacal evil and mystical jargon about crystals, and this game is no different, it at least boasts some of the best characters that have graced the series.  Of particular note is the relationship between Balthier - think a demonstrably more suave Han Solo - and his partner Fran, a Viera (yeah, the sexy rabbit ladies) who has a mysterious connection to the magical Mist of the world.  It’s hardly an original pairing - this game, as most games of its genre do, utilizes reductive archetypes - but through a combination of solid writing and particularly strong voice acting for the time, it just works.

What also works, and works shockingly well, is the aforementioned Gambit system.  Though conventional wisdom might suggest that reducing the actions needed to be taken by the player decreases the player’s engagement in the game, the opposite, as it turns out, seems to be be true in this case.  In other Final Fantasy games, typical combat transports you to a different game screen where the player, more often than not, continually taps the action button to attack until all enemies are dead, a marginally fun exercise that can become mind-numbingly tedious upon repetition - and if there’s one thing you can expect in a game like this, it’s repetition.  By keeping me on the map and allowing me to assign rote moves to characters to do themselves, the game actually kept me focus on the more fun aspects of these moments - the Diablo-esque satisfaction of filling out a map and collecting loot, the colorful character and enemy animations, and tweaking my Gambits to make sure that I really am doing all of this as efficiently as possible.  Very few games make grinding as gratifying of an experience as Final Fantasy XII.

Of course, as abnormally gratifying as that grinding is, there’s still a lot of it, and even with the fast-forward feature, the game still takes quite a while to get through - my final time was right around 45 hours.  This was with doing a good amount of the side content the game has to offer, including many of the optional monster hunts scattered throughout the world (while I declined to do several of the late-game hunts, I wholly admired this system, which drove me deeper into dungeons I had already explored, revealing whole levels that I never previously realized existed); still, I’d imagine a more straightforward playthrough would only shave that time off by a handful of hours.  

Even I, under different circumstances, would have likely gotten bored with this if I hadn’t played it at the time that I did.  This game happened to be released toward the beginning of the summer session at the school that I work at, where I’d typically work twelve-hour days throughout the week.  As it turned out, after coming home exhausted and yet oddly wired every night, putting a couple hours into running around this vast JRPG world was exactly the kind of meditative release I needed to relax me before going to bed and doing it all over again.  I can pretty definitively say this game helped me survive the most stressful time of my work year, and as a result, I’m all the more happy I never discovered this game’s idiosyncratic charms until now.  Now I do have a well of good memories associated with a particular time and place wrapped up in this game, and I have a new top-tier favorite in a series I will never be able to help but love.

8.5/10