I lost track of the numbers of the FF around 7, which one is XII, is it the one that starts with a musical concert?

You mean the Japanese pop music? That's X-2.

X-2 had great gameplay but you have to play it with your TV muted to enjoy it.

It annoys me that Final Fantasy still sells despite how gutwrenchingly awful it's been since pretty much the PS2-era. Atlas do JRPG a thousand times better than Squeenix in their Shin Megami Tensei games, yet people still slurp up FF shit because brand name.

No, that's X-2.

From what I've heard, XII isn't considered as bad as it used to; a lot of people have mellowed out about the controversial design choices since the game came out. As I gather, people disliked the rather high-brow nature of the story, and a lot of people felt that there was too much fiddling with minutiae during battles; a lot of jokes were made about the game playing itself. Also, Vaan got a lot of hate for being perceived as a spotlight-hogging bishounen; I personally don't see what the big deal is, even if his character arc peters out halfway through the story and doesn't get picked up until Revenant Wings.

It's probably also my favourite Final Fantasy game, but I can see how the shift in gameplay perplexed a lot of people. I would personally love to see more games in the Ivalice Alliance - the English writing was fantastic.

Just some of the things I didn't like about it for personal reasons:

License board made no sense, it's been awhile but why could you not wear a leather cap unless you had learned the license for it?

Bosses (especially Esper fights) had stupid amount of hp, they would just eat everything you threw at it and ask for seconds and thirds and so on and so forth

Quickenings, what better way to force you to manage your limited MP pool than to tie your limit breaks to it, and even then the usefulness of the Quickenings were a crapshoot - sometimes you'd get a good go and just get string after string of moves, other times you would be lucky to get a 2-hit combo out of it.


Honestly, I thought XII was pretty, and I played it a bit back on the PS2, but I can't get back into it now and even back then I didn't get further than the first Judge fight before stopping cold turkey for other games.

The last good FF I played was 9 (excluding that online MMO). I Played X and XII and while I did finish X I only played it through once and never looked back. As for XII I couldn't get into it and just dropped the franchise all together. FF hasn't been the same since PSX and I've played pretty much all of them from 1-12 (or at least tried 12). My favorite(s) was or still is FF7 and Tactics.

The combat system is horribly boring. (I do like the gambit system, but I don't think it could be incorporated in a battle system I would like as a whole)
The story is dull.
Most of your party members have little to no connection to the plot.
I don't like the license board - in party based RPGs, I prefer to not be able to make every character a jack-of-all-trades.
It was too liong. (This might have to do with it being overall dull and boring)

Loved it, but I loved 13 as well....

*note to self....root out 13-2 from the attic and play it ffs >.<

It's not bad but it has bad main character (so plain and gay). And it's really different compared (battlesystem). I still have it in PS2 and works fine with emulator. It's fun and all.. It's prob much better than 13. It's hard though. or what..12.. Yeah it's that game. =)

Oh, shush. They've released XIII, XIII-2 and XIV since then; what with XIV being an online game, I daresay it doesn't quite count. I personally had a lot of fun with XIII and XIII-2, although XIII-2 had some very annoying characters. Why couldn't we have a game where Sazh saved the world?

It's important to split the "I hate it" and the "I hate it because its not what I want" groups apart - a lot of people who "hate" things do so not because of the thing itself, but because the thing isn't quite what they expected it to be. Final Fantasy, as a highly variable release each time, is something that many people get very up on a high horse if its not going down the path they want it to - which blinds them to viewing the game itself on the merits which it does have.


Sadly I couldn't get too far into FFXII mostly because my PS2 broke :(

That said from my playing 2 things stood out as, less than stella displays:

1) The skill tree, whilst (in my view) better than the Sphere grid or magic junctioning systems (which could be complicated and confusing at times). However the downside was that they gave each character the same skill tree and the same starting point - which saps their identity as a character when they can all do the same thing (that suave shotgun carrying buccaneer - can be the high mage)

2) The lead character wasn't an enabler of the story and was more just sort of blown along by the wind. Other characters were really pushing the story whilst the "lead" character wasn't. It's that odd situation again that we see where youv'e all these highly experienced and powerful people around the hero who is just a kid - and suddenly everyone is listening to the kid :P

Most other complaints are that its a JRPG Final Fantasy game and not the next edition of Baldur's Gate.

1. How is the combat more boring than the classics turn based combat, espectially getting interrupted by the random encounters which 12 finally adressed.

2.To each its own, but I find the story really good, you just don't like the political side of things while I do.

3. in a way final fantasy 6 7 8 and 10 did that already, for example everybody can learn Ultima in 6 by giving them the ragnorok summon and grind points.

4. So are most final fantasies PS1 and above also 12 in a way is non-linear, you can do other stuff to get better equipment and level up and do other quests.
I never found Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid that bad and not that complicated, and it gives more incentive to fight monsters in the random encounters.

FFs in general are kinda dull... you don't travel across half the globe to score fishnet stockings for a character, while milking every cow in sight. Neither do yo get to watch a gay wrestler whack enemies on the head with a mini-submarine, while a princess of the Russian Empire takes some pictures of the action. Nor does the endgame involve killing multiple gods to re-make the world as you see fit.

Its Atlus by the way, and they did publish Demon's Souls so......yeah.