The Shrine

Since FFX remastered version I figure this is a good time to revisit it even though I'm still waiting for it to go on sale. FFX, FFXII, and FFT are all games where you do not necessarily play someone important to the story. Compared to FFXII where the main character's involvement is so irrelevant or FFT where Ramza's far too detached from everything (it's said his name was either forgotten or erased from history, but honestly it didn't look like he ever wanted to anyone to even know of his presence given his lack of interaction with anyone important), FFX is probably the best attempt at someone who is more of a chronicler of the story as opposed to an actual participant. Well, Tidus obviously does participate in the story, but there's no reason to believe his role is any more involved than any of the other tagalongs. I don't think the story of FFX is that great, since it's basically just going from Temple A to Temple B and so on with Seymour occasionally showing up to make things slightly interesting, and in this respect, the whole "Listen to my story, this may be our last chance." kind of loses its appeal when the story Tidus has to tell isn't actually anything really exciting. It's a shame since FFXII and FFT had a considerably more interesting background that could've told a good story from a chronicler point of view, but the viewpoint you were in was someone so uninteresting that it just didn't work. And then there's the fact that both game didn't really explore much with the story. Ramza, as far as I can tell, just traveled all over the place killing anybody that got in the way without so much as leaving his name behind. Olan, who didn't even join your party, likely would've a more interesting story to tell, since he was close to Delita and Ovelia, who are actually important to the plot. You don't even get to find out more about Agrias, Alma, Meliadoul, or Orlandu. Given Ramza's utterly uninteresting class and stats, I sometimes wonder if the point was that Orlandu and Agrias did all the work and Alma showed everyone why the Beoluves are supposed to be living gods and beat down Altima with her staff while Ramza was cheering everyone up. I mean, Alma comes with a Ribbon on the final battle, which is usually the best accessory you can possibly get in a FF game and especially so in a status attack heavy game like FFT.

FFXII had a point of view that was utterly uninteresting and irrelevant, and probably had dragged out everything way too long to the point that it's hard to care about what's going on with all the endless auto battle you've to do, and again that's a shame. Balthier, Ashe, and Basch all had interesting stories to tell.

FF12 was an unfortunate mess that could have been something spectacular. There was a great original vision behind the game, but then stakeholders dug their fangs into it, pulling out elements, shoving other elements in. Halfway through development they stuck another guy in charge of it to finish up a game that hit the stakeholder wishes, but was ultimately an exercise in mediocrity.

FF12 is one of those games where the characters of Vaan and Panelo really don't feel right because they weren't supposed to be there to begin with. There are large portion of the game that are empty that really felt like something more was supposed to be present; and it just screams of a scope cut in order to make something else fit in some other place. This is first really apparent in the Skycity of Bhujerba where there are areas in the town where the environment art was completed in certain sections, but then they might just have one character saying something pointless, and nothing else. There were lots of big empty boring areas in the game.

In other words, I don't think FF12 was meant to have that kind of protagonist, the game got stakeholder staked.

FFXII could have 3 major characters (Basch, Ashe, and Balthier) and you have the important NPCs join you for longer period of time (Vossler, the prince, the judge). One thing I thought that was done well in FFX was that there's a lot of random chitchat in the actual fights. For example as Tidus if you hit the armored guy, Wakka will tell you let Auron handle it. This kind of stuff goes throughout the game, like even at Zanarkand you'll have Rikku going 'Ohhhhh, is that edible?' on a Dark Flan. I think if they did that during the whole mess of random encounters you fight in FFXII that could've at least fleshed out the details some. Ideally there should be more happening in these scenes beyond just fighting stuff, but FFX's solution was surprisingly well done. Even on something minor like how characters sometimes have a battle cry when they take out something versus not is a good touch that makes it feel like you're part of the team. It's particularly relevant in these games since if you're Cloud Strife maybe you don't need to have small talk in battle with the other guys because the whole story already revolves around you anyway, but when you play the role of an observer, the little stuff matters because the observer guy isn't really that involved in the main story.

Picked this up on PC, playing it @ 4K Resolution, looks gorgeous. Somebody is apparently working on a 60FPS Mod as well since the game is locked @ 30.

I'm hoping FFXII gets remastered and ends up on PC somehow, it's the only FF game I didn't really put any time into, the combat system threw me off so hard I dismissed it and never returned, might give it a 2nd chance if it gets updated.

I probably fell asleep while grinding stuff in FFXII. Until you get something like MP 20% -> Charge which is only possible at the very late game, you can't really auto it because stuff hits way too hard and eats up your MP right away so you got to manually recharge or you'll just die. Even then, you don't have a good way to macro steal until you're way stronger than the enemy because the easiest way is probably like enemy HP 100% -> Steal, but then that usually means whoever is your stealing guy just keeps on steal from the second enemy the whole time while the rest of your party focus fire on one guy. Well, you could just not steal stuff, but there was a whole mess of random ingredients that you need from stealing. I don't think I ever made anything useful out of them but still fell compelled to maintain the inventory, especially since the game is actually pretty hard.

Of course the whole 'if you open the first treasure chest you see in the game you can't get some special weapon' is unbelievably dumb. I don't think I was ever anywhere close on the license board to get all the special weapons but it still felt stupid.