FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE

I'm glad I finished this game despite there being multiple places where I felt compelled to stop. I loved the world of this game. It's laid out almost in a quasi-MMORPG type fashion with decent interconnectivity and just a huge sprawling mass of diversely themed and presented zones to explore. Individual map design is shoddy, with gratuitous use of invisible walls and flimsy and contrived boundaries funnelling you into highly constrained spaces, with the vast majority of what you can see being mere set dressing. But when you get past that, and meet the game world for what it is, it's quite engrossing. I enjoyed the story well enough, although I can't for the life of me understand why certain character(s) were even included, as it seems certain to me that the overall narrative would've worked much better without them... Some miscellaneous criticisms: It's clunky and annoying and entirely unnecessary that your character comes to a complete stop whenever a mob engages him or when he blocks an attack, when trying to run through mobs Sometimes during fights against especially large mobs, much of their model remains outside of the screen, owing to the incredibly limited camera controls, and being unable to zoom out very much at all The fact that there's no permanently active targeting window that you can rely on becomes vexing, given that you therefore need to select Attack and completely stop the fight just to see the target window displaying the effects on the mob at that time Another terrible thing about the UI generally is how you're never able to observe all the effects that are on any given character at a single time, but except the name of each effect quickly cycles through and then displays the next. There are multiple points throughout the game where it struck me that certain kinds of feedback are incredibly poor if not entirely non-existent; one instance I recall is when fighting large flying enemies in the Steppe, when they do a kamikaze attack, or sometimes when they just die, given much or all of their model is outside the screen, and there's no perceptible visual/auditory consequence of their dying. It just feels bad The gambit system was interesting and there were times that I enjoyed it greatly. But there are also times when combat in the game was generally frustrating. It seemed that it often oscillated between being almost painfully dull to being almost unbearably implausible. I'd race through an entire area killing every mob in 1-3 seconds flat, and then suddenly come up against a brick wall with a boss that would suddenly do something that I hadn't encountered in any way shape or form, and for which I could find no information regarding, e.g., a boss that instantly drains all of your Mana so you can't heal at all; or instantly increases its DPS 5-10 times at low health; or repeatedly puts Reflect on itself so that every point of damage you do to it heals it. These sorts of events come off as gimmicks. Either you happen to already know how to counter them (and often times there's an incredibly small number of very specific counters) or you don't. These aren't bosses that are fluid expressions of a player's developed skill and mastery; they're simple knowledge checks. And oftentimes these bosses occur in places where there had previously been no hints/clues/indications to the player as to how to learn that particular thing. So basically a player in this situation has three options: (i) look it up online, or (ii) GRIND IT OUT ELSEWHERE and come back when you've gained 5 or 6 levels and a bunch more abilities. Neither of these options is ever tremendously satisfying. One thing that makes the aforementioned scenarios particularly aggravating is that the game is horrendous at giving the player himself the tools he needs to learn about the mechanics that are obstructing progress. It often obfuscates or occludes information, or simply doesn't provide it. For example, when you read the description of Esuna it says that it removes harmful effects. Yet it doesn't remove nearly all of them. And from mid-late game you'll run into some effects that will almost definitively mean death if you don't know how to handle them. So firstly I was just confused. Why isn't esuna working? I don't have any reason to believe that esuna shouldn't work? I couldn't figure out whether it was some weird bug, or whether I was misinterpreting what was happening, or there just happened to be some exception I was missing. So when this sort of thing first happened I'd just throw myself at the mob half a dozen times, give up, and look it up. And I really do believe that's what most players in this situation do their first time. And it's not satisfying at all. The game was made in 2006 and it really shows. Again, these situations aren't tests of skill or mastery or strategy/tactics. They feel like arbitrary obstructions put there to make up for an inability to produce more engaging combat scenarios; once you learn the magic piece of knowledge the challenge disintegrates, but until that point you're at an absolute roadblock, and again, having to look something up just sucks. E.g., one detriment that will wipe you out with basic 100% likelihood requires a single spell to reliably remove (an alternative method can't be used for all classes, and can only be used for viable classes after learning certain abilities), and the only place to get this is in some random place in some random zone with a 1/4 drop rate...And if you don't look this up online, there's a pretty decent chance you'll never find it. And this sort of thing happened to me at least half a dozen times.