Final Fantasy XII

Or

The larks and japery formerly known as ‘The Anal Dreams of Lord Fenton-Smythe McWaistcoat and Chums’...

Gamers are a strange bunch: I know I am (strange, that is, not a bunch). Show me a sloped roof and I think ‘crikey, bet I’d get a mighty fine stunt bonus if I drove a motorbike off that baby!’ When I imagine the crash that would no doubt ensue I picture it in slow motion from an assortment of cinematic angles. I imagine my body flying off the vehicle and crumpling to the floor with the most squint-inducing realistic ragdoll effects, but conspicuously omit to envisage myself spending months in rehabilitation, nursing my shattered limbs, slurring my words and eating food through a straw. Why on earth do people go through all that when they can just load a quicksave? Likewise, show me a crate and I feel it both a civic duty and an inalienable right to smash it to pieces with a crowbar to get at the shiny loot within.*

In short, videogames can change the way we view the world: their logic seeps into our brains like piss soaking into my socks when I go to the toilet in the dark. Of course, one of the facts of the world that we do not need reminding of is that sometimes, nay, frequently, life can be a bit of a shitter. How shit? Has it ever happened that you’ve nipped down to the shops to buy essential groceries (Vaseline; a cucumber; some gentlemen’s magazines- all the normal provisions...) only to return to your house to find your landlord bringing your possessions out into the street?

‘But...what’s going on?’ you plead, bewildered.

‘You’ve been evicted’ your coldhearted landlord replies ‘for failing to wash your hands when you went to the toilet on 26^th January, 1989: now you must pay the price by forfeiting your material possessions and domicile!’ Thus, twirling his Dickensian villain oiled black moustache, he pours gravy into your 360’s disc drive as you look on, face contorted in confusion and horror, cucumber gripped in your hand.**

The message? What, we need messages now? Okay, it just so happens I have one to spare: it rankles to be punished for something you couldn’t have known not to do. Fair enough if you are tested in a game and your responses govern your reward: perhaps early on in a game you could be given the choice of robbing from some starving orphans; perhaps you could be promised a particularly shiny suit of armour on the condition you kill 25 disabled puppies with a screwdriver. Karma may be a bitch, but she’s far from arbitrary. Stab puppies=get penalized.

“Are we stabbing puppies now? I'll get my tools.”

Those of you au fait with the Final Fantasy universe will know that there a few constants in the mechanics, one of these being that treasure chests exist solely for the player to open. Clearly, FFXII has taken a leaf from the ‘moustache twirling landlord’ book of game design: open the ‘wrong’ treasure chests (which look exactly like all the other treasure chests) and you’ll never get the Zodiac Spear, the most fantabulous spear in the world. The only way to know about the Zodiac Spear is from game guides and word of mouth- either way you’ll probably have to start over if you covet this particular long pointy stick. It’s as though the game were made to give people something to write FAQ’s about, with the player’s enjoyment as a profoundly secondary consideration. FFXII has some stunning FAQ’s- lists of enemies, statistics, locations, spawn percentages, loot drops, bazaar items- but these barely scratch the surface. It is, as disturbingly as the following phrase could be misconstrued, an anal dream. Whether or not it wants to, the game does a fine job of being a single-player MMORPG, thus confounding the oxymoron police completely. You can go 10 hours and not progress the plot a kitten’s whisker, just leveling up and finding shiny bits of sharp metal (‘swords’) or flat, circular pieces of shiny metal (‘shields’). Sorry for all the technical terminology there, it was unavoidable.

There it is...on his back...mocking me.

So far so not so good, then. A game with a prize that everyone wants but which most people will be denied thanks to some gallingly capricious programming based around a framework of shameless, relentless grinding. And those are only the beginnings of our problems. Something that Japanese RPG’s never seem to have quite understood, but which Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect seem to have nailed, is leveling. It’s not the only mechanic of the Final Fantasy games which is balls, but balls it is nevertheless. Let us say we have a group of six characters, but are only ever allowed three people in the party at once. Chances are we’ll go with our three, assonantal, monosyllabic favourites (Vaan, Basch and Ashe anyone?) who stride nobly forth and save the world whilst the other three (angry rabbit lady, Lord Fenton-Smythe McWaistcoat and the cheerleader from Heroes) sit about back home, playing Uno and eating chocolate digestives until they’re needed to speak the odd line of dialogue in cutscenes.

You end up with three level 99 powerhouses and three helpless mewling weaklings. You can live quite safely in the knowledge that, since it’s a Final Fantasy game, there’ll be a point in the narrative when you have to split into two parties, maybe to flick two sets of switches located either side of a chasm to open a big door, maybe to make rude hand gestures to an enemy’s back whilst the other group stab his face in. The game compels you to use characters which you have no wish of using, which the mechanics of the game are mostly responsible for in being painfully underdeveloped. In a Bioware game the whole party levels up to keep pace with the player character- Final Fantasy frigidly refuses to even flirt with the idea.

Friends of mine keep their levels even across the board through continuous and judicious switching in and out of characters in their party, but in doing so they have discovered one of the few things that can make hours of tedious grinding even more boring. So...yay for them? The superiority of the Bioware system is surely demonstrated by the fact that one rarely thinks about leveling in their games, whereas one is constantly fretting over levels in Final Fantasy games in much the same way one constantly frets over gas bills and the police.

Clearly, evidently and demonstrably I hate the game. Curse the blue shiny disc and all the data imprisoned within it. I’m off for a draught of Lethe water, and eagerly anticipate the blissful ignorance which will mercifully follow.

Score 4/10

Well hardly. For a game that makes me want to kick passers-by in the shins at times, I must’ve poured at least 200 hours into the shitting thing. Damn and blast these loading screens which show you how many hours you’ve been playing for- why would I want to know that I spent seventy nine wholly non-refundable days of my life playing Morrowind? Couldn’t it just lie and say 8 minutes? Anyway, the plot is great. I think, I mean, I didn’t really understand all of it at the time, at least purely in terms of what was going on and what was said by whom, and who people... were. Technicalities and minutiae like that. But I liked what I understood, and clearly some effort had gone into it. Political wrangles are under-represented in games, largely because, as I so amply demonstrated through my own wandering thought processes, a large proportion of the audience doesn’t pay enough attention to make it worthwhile. Yet FFXII is indomitably confident that the annexations of provinces and the moral implications of primogenital inheritance are better than sex.

Which, of course, they are.

So maybe my brain wasn’t up to the task: something less cerebral is clearly needed. Well shit and heck, FFXII sho’ is purty! The whole game is certainly a lot prettier than you have any right to expect from the system. My housemate’s PS2 sounds like it’s going to do its very own Firaga impression when I play it- poor old thing practically needs a sensual massage to even boot up (the PS2, that is, not the housemate: he’s always ready to boot up). At no point during my play time did I think ‘oh sure, it looks fine. If only it were in a higher definition, though, my life would instantly attain a new level of eudemonic significance.’ I guess I’ve not quite come to terms with the Next-Gen mindset yet. So, it’s a looker then, with a technical and artistic flair that we’ve come to expect of the series: a flair so typical of the developers that it gets summarized in a perfunctory précis as essentially axiomatic and happily dismissed. It’s not only what these pixels look like which has been renovated, for much has been said in praise of the combat system too, apparently ‘new’ and allegedly ‘improved’.

Now before we all drop on our knees and give Square Enix a massive collective fellating (dibs on Yasumi Matsuno) let us consider the system it’s improved from consisted of three people, maybe four if you get lucky, standing in a line taking it in turns to hit each other. ‘You’re saying they’ve improved on that?’ you may well ask, voice wobbling uncontrollably with barely concealed incredulity. It tips the scales of the absurd, to see Cloud Omnislashing some unlucky fucker and then just stop, strolling back into formation. ‘Why can’t he just do that all the time? Keep hitting him! Why are you taking turns? Are there medals for good manners?’ FFXII provides a rather more real time system, although in truth it isn’t so much the timing which mixes shit up as being able to see your opponents coming. Suddenly enemies have a presence on the field, and it’s a welcome piece of logic that you no longer have four Tyrannosaurs and a dragon leaping out at you from behind a flowerpot as you go about your business.

What really catches people’s attention is the Gambit system. Minimise micromanagement by semi-automating combat: how very kind of them. They didn’t put it in there because they love you though: it speaks volumes about how much grinding Square Enix were expecting people to do in the game, so really it seems the least they could do. Get a good set of gambits in place and you could practically play one handed, one set of fingers manipulating your left analogue stick and the other...well, you can do whatever you like with them, as long as you don’t make me watch. Hopefully we can extrapolate these improvements being carried to future installments, culminating in FFXV being entirely automated: just turn the PS4/5 on, stick the disc in, and leave the game to get on with itself. What an auspicious future for computer gaming!

Ultimately I’m going to have to give the game a score of 1/10. Not because I hate the game, but because I hate the notion that a computer game reviewer can really accurately assign a number to a concept as profoundly subjective as ‘quality’, and anything I can do to undermine trust in that system is time well spent. It’s also my New Year’s resolution to knock off 8 points from the mark of any game that features a section where the player’s character is captured by the law, imprisoned, then makes their escape before miraculously finding a treasure chest containing all their confiscated possessions. And since this happens in every Final Fantasy game I can remember playing, the series is already well into negative numbers- it’s just getting old is all, and I’m not getting any younger. Now I mention it I think one of those ‘don’t open if you want a Zodiac Spear’ chests is actually found among those containing your possessions as you leave the prison. That’s a low blow, Matsuno: no mo’ fellatio fo’ yo’.

*I was trying to remember when the last time I actually saw a crate in real life was- not recently, certainly. What I did see last week was a red, explosive looking barrel sitting underneath a rickety scaffold. Looked like a physics tech demo in the making.

**Joke’s on him: I’ll wager it works a whole lot better full of Bisto.