The Shrine

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Well, when Square acquired Quest (the makers of Ogre Battle), they really acquired some very important assets which they have decided to put towards the next installment of their Final Fantasy series which promises to be the best yet.

The music: It is being done as a collaberation between Sakimoto and Uematsu. Square fans were introduced to Sakimoto with the game Final Fantasy Tactics, and it was quite an introduction as Final Fantasy Tactics is very arguably the best sound track of any game so far released by Square. Sakimoto has quite the resume as well, ranging from the old Warrior, Knight, Thief, Wizard, Elf, Halfling, Dwarf PC RPG's from the 80's, to all of the major videogame console (mostly on Sega systems), and some minor ones. Somee games which some here mayy recognize which he did were: Dragon Warrior 3-6, Gauntlet, the entire Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre series (including the GBA versions), Panzer Dragoon, Super Double Dragon, Bloody Roar, Vagrant Story, Radiant Silvergun, Tekken Advance, FFTA. For those of you who forget the music, pop in Final Fantasy Tactics right now and just listen for a while, now picture how well the music will be done for a far greater project.

The Story: For those of us who have played the Ogre Battle series, or Final Fantasy Tactics, you may agree that the story (even though the most known here is FFT, and it was horribly translated, but if you have a bit of intelligence about you, then you will make sense of some very glaring grammar and spelling mistakes, and obvious translation mistakes) is quite a bit more interesting than the traditional Final Fantasy story, despite the difference of context and such, FF3j-FF10 are essentially the same story. There is much more creativity and logic involved in the OB/FFT stories, and events seem much more meaningful, and do not attempt to insult players intelligence with very silly developments. Well, the one who wrote the story for the Final Fantasy is gone, and in is Yatsumi Matsuno, best known for his work on the Ogre battle series and Final Fantasy Tactics (which is actually much more of an Ogre Battle side quest than a Final Fantasy one), I am very excited to see how the plot turns out, I completely expect it to be by far the best ever seen in a Final Fantasy game.

Battle system: Random battles are gone, and it has been replaced with an advanced Chrono Trigger style system. Fights will be much less common than before, but also much more meaningful. The battle system is very similar to Vagrant Story with multiple players, only you control only one character and give auto-battle type commands to the others; though it has been modified from the Vagrant Story system because Matsuno felt it was much too difficult for most players to get into the game due to the battle system. The character development seems to be like an advanced version of Vagrant Story, one of the best systems in any game. There will be more on this released at TGS in September.

graphics: The game is probably the best looking game that the PS2 will ever see, certainly the best looking adventure title. The characters actually look their proper gender for once. Lets just say I am incredibly impressed with the graphics.

Final thoughts: This game has the Final Fantasy title, but this game will be far from a Final Fantasy title, picture a title by Quest (Ogre Battle/Vagrant Story/Final Fantasy Tactics) with all the budgeting, equipment, time, dedication, and additional resources available for building a Final Fantasy game. That is what this game is going to be, will it be the best in series? I think that it's a fairly safe bet, one I am very willing to make. Everyone at Square Enix was surprisingly impressed at the quality of the game in development, they are all very excited about it. Lets just say I've been watching a number of videos spanning many sites, reading a TON, and I will with great confidence say that everyone here who plays it will be thoroughly amazed.


Now go play Final Fantasy Tactics! I know everyone has that game =P</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Yeah FFT's soundtrack fucking rocked.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>I'm certainly excited about it. I've recently replayed FFT and FF8 and am still in FF mode.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Quest...I now have a name for them. Yes, Quest projects have remained among the absolute highest rated games in RPG history.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I'm still reallying trying to get Shellie in the mood for the FF7:AC movie by playing FF7. She still hasn't completed an RPG yet, besides FFX.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Finally beat FFVIII, the ending was nice. But I wanted more! The Sorceress just didn't come off as the best villian in the world.</div>

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>Maybe you should let her play rather than watch you....poopy doodoo head</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I ask her first before I play myself, but I guess she's not down with the old-style combat system.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's funny, that's what I like about those older RPG's. the simple uncomplicated combat systems.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The ending was like a half hour, you wanted more? =P</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Damnit yes. :)</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>I'm a tactical guy myself, so I somewhat agree, but I like the idea of building up my materia to get new spells, etc.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "arial narrow"; text-align: left; padding: 0% 5% 0% 5%; '>Probably the best ending in the series.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>I dunno, FFX's was pretty good.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It's the best ending of any game I have ever played. So I would say the best in the series is a bit of an understatement =P</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I like to take things a step further, I like the AP systems of leveling up like they had in FF8 and to a lesser degree in FFT (FF8's system is much more dependent on it).</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Nothing I've seen on FF12 suggest it's going to be any different than the other 10 FF single player RPGs. Yeah they say it is going to be different but they say that for every one of them.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>It'd have been better if it wasn't needlessly long</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>They made Ogre Battle right? That was a very medicore game...</div>

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>It was a fantastic game. complex as hell for it's time and very high quality. but I defer to your opinion now</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Step aside then and don't waste your useless remarks in light of superior intelligence?</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>What was wrong with it? I thought it was a pretty good game, maybe not the holy grail of games, but certainly above mediocre.</div>

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>Yeah right you cocky ass hole</div>

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>everything is mediocre. unless it's everquest or fate.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Every boss can be killed by using 20 offensive Tarot Cards in a row and you don't even get penalized except on a few rare battles. The branching conditions are not obvious, and half of them require you to move units to cover every square of the map to find a secret portal somewhere. Not that it matters since all the good endings are more or less the same anyway (Tristram leads instead of the Valkyrie girl for example). Most of the bosses are not remotely fair fight which leads to the aforemntioned Tarot Card beatdown problem even when you're supposed to only use one party (like the general that was weak against Fire, the only way I can see him dying in one battle is if you've 2 Liches casting fire spells on him, and surely that death is with honor like that guy wanted).

Despite considerable customization ultimately most of the party setup is completely irrelevant. You can have melee_attacker_1 or melee_attacker_2, and you can range_attacker_1 or range_attacker_2 on the backrow (though in the end you just have all Valkyrie or Sorcerers on the backrow) but the difference is minimal. As long as you toss in a cleric in there you can't possibly lose unless you're going up against a Tiamat, Lich, or one of the boss clones in the 2nd to last stage. Ironically for a game that you're supposed to be liberating people from the evil empire, all the good units like Slyphs and Seraphs (which only gets one attack with Jihad/Missile, which is worse than a Sorcerer's normal spell) are completly worthless when you could've a Tiamat or a Lich instead, though at least Valkyries/Clerics/Paladins are decent, but still can't even compare to just a good old Sorcerer covered by undeads. Besides boss battles the only thing that you can possibly lose is against a Lich, Tiamat, ghosts (if without a cleric), or the boss clones in the 2nd to last stage.

The tediousness of the game can be forgiven if you can save somewhere during the battle, but you can't. The other SRPG during the time of Ogre Battle were Shining Force, Langrisser, and Fire Emblem, and all of them you can save in the middle of a battle to offset the tedium of battles, even though Shining Force and Langrisser had significantly shorter battles, and Fire Emblem 4 is longer but each chapter is more like 4-5 small battles and you're free to save whenever you want. It's true that SRPG don't even remotely pretend there's a strategy part in it so I don't hold that against Ogre Battle, but the lack of battle save compounds the lack of innovation in a much worse way. If you ever actually fail on a mission, you have to slog through another 2 hours of fighting the same old worthless stuff that you can't possibly lose to, scavenger hunt every square on the map until you have found all the secrets (and sometimes just enough money to upkeep your army), and then try to fulfill whatever condition you're supposed to do on the boss (it's hard for me to imagine actually dying on any boss in this game given the power of Tarot Cards, except on Diablos perhaps).</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>He IS being cocky, never seen that side of Don. It's kinda cool. lol. :)</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>or perhaps FF8 which has EXP, but is based around AP. In FF8 the only purpose of levels are that the higher your level, the more difficult random battles are, but also the greater ease it is to win rare and valuable items from enemues.

As for the plot, the plot details all make it out to be a similar style to FFT/Ogre Battle, in that there will actually be quite a bit of development compared to other FF games.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The second Ogre Battle game addressed all of the complaints that existed with the first. You can save in the middle of battle, classes behave like Fire Emblem and there aren't overpowered weapons/items, just over-powered characters that are difficult to get anyways.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>I'd kill if I could get my hands on the N64 version of Orge Battle.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>How much are you willing to pay? There's a copy at my local EB. If it's not still there, I have one that while I love it, I doubt I'll play it again.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Just breajk down how I can get the money to ya.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The status effect stuff doesn't even work on bosses (e.g. head critical won't silence them) and regular enemies rarely live long enough to matter, so it becomes just looking at what element and what type of attack an enemy is weak against and then balance your attack frequency with the RISK meter. Although the enemies are on the same RISK system they attack way to infrequently for it to matter at all. I think the highest RISK I ever seen an enemy is Guildenstern after doing a Bloody Sin and it's like 15?

Though at least unlike most games it's actually pretty challenging. The multi-hit moves sometimes can't even be survived at full HP so you need to rely on avoidance gems and combat skills to survive.</div>