Final Fantasy XII: Errors in Judgment
The Final Fantasy franchise is one of the best-known video game series in the world, and for good reason. The standard for Japanese-style role playing games has succeeded time and again in drawing audiences into new worlds with elaborate stories, breathtaking artwork, and consistently groundbreaking engineering.
Following the success of Final Fantasy X, Square Enix kept fans waiting five agonizing years for the PS2 follow-up (Final Fantasy XI was released as an MMORPG in the meantime). The game they delivered, FFXII, far exceeded its predecessor in scope, engineering, and artistic rendering. Yet in spite of these advances, many fans, myself included, found themselves let down by the latest installment. The changes that Square Enix had anticipated as being solutions for past complaints and tactics to draw in a larger audience failed to prove effective. As a result, we players put down the disappointing game and went back to earlier installments.
As someone who has a deep-rooted love for the Final Fantasy series and has played the twelfth volume twice through, I feel I have a fairly strong grasp on some of the issues that keep XII from taking its place amongst its more successful sisters like VII, VIII, and X. Square Enix, take notes.
STORY
As a writer, one of the first things I want to know about a video game is the story: how in-depth is it, how does it affect the gameplay, etc. Final Fantasy XII’s story differs from previous installments in its scope: it is far more “epic” than any of its predecessors. By epic, I mean the story focuses less on specific characters and more on the world at large. They achieved this by sacrificing playable characters’ backstories in favor of describing the political turmoil in which they are placed.
I think the reason they chose this broader scope is because they wanted to draw in more MMORPG players in order to increase their audience. During FFXII’s development, MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars were coming into their prime. Square Enix attempted to capitalize on this by releasing their own MMO, Final Fantasy XI. In an effort to continue attracting the MMORPG audience, the development team went with a story that focused more on the world and less on the characters.
In my opinion, this was a miscalculation. The sales statistics indeed show extremely successful sales of FFXII, but every player I’ve spoken to agrees with me on this point: XII lacks a sufficiently compelling storyline. What RPGs attempt to do is draw players into a world by creating an emotional relationship between them and the main characters. The players are supposed to care about them. But by spending so much time elaborating on the political atmosphere of Ivalice, players were emotionally distanced from the main characters. One of the methods by which Square Enix attempted to develop the political conflicts, the journal entries read by the Marquis, are also jarring for players; the excerpts literally pluck players from the story and read plot to them before dumping them back into the world.
One of the main differences that distinguish MMORPG from RPG is that in MMOs, players create their own characters that are, story-wise, insignificant to the world as a whole. In RPGs, players assume the roles of specific characters who have well-developed backstories, their own motivations and desires, and create significant change in their worlds. In FFXII, the main playable character, Vaan, is one war orphan among many whose only discernibly unique characteristic is a desire to become a sky pirate. His sidekick, Panelo, is even less thought-out. They are merely tagging along on a journey with the major players, whose personal histories are infinitely more interesting, but not as well-developed as players understandably expected. The result was a lack of connection between player and characters. When a player doesn’t care about the main characters of an RPG, the consequence is often the same as in a novel: they put it down. Sales can’t give you this information, but from all the people I’ve spoken to about Final Fantasy XII, it was not an uncommon result.
The lesson that Square Enix should take from this is to keep their RPGs and MMOs separate, at least as far as story is concerned.
LICENSE GRID
Final Fantasy XII’s leveling system, the license grid, was an attempt to give players complete freedom to customize the playable characters however they saw fit. Each character has full access to every section of the grid, and though a player might be swayed to pursue a certain class based on a character’s attributes, they could just as easily make half the characters pure magic casters, half sword-wielders, or various other combinations. The only restrictions are summons, which can only be taken by one character a piece.
I think the developers felt that the license grid would be an exciting evolution in the leveling-up process for players because they were given nearly complete freedom in customizing their characters. However, I think the license grid is too open-ended. Instead of players coming to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of a more flexible class like sharpshooters, the player could just as easily scrap that entire category and have multiple swordsmen. These kinds of decisions might make battles easier at the beginning because you can choose classes that hit harder, but later on, you might reach a point where long-range weapons are a great advantage. If you didn’t train someone in gun-wielding early on, you would lose that advantage when you really need it.
The grid also contributes to distancing the player from the characters, as set classes are an important tool in characterization. By naming someone a healer as opposed to a warrior, certain assumptions can be made about that character’s personality. The open-faced license grid, however, takes away this association.
To compare, the sphere grid system in Final Fantasy X is a great example of using limited flexibility in leveling to ensure a more balanced combat experience. At the beginning, each character is limited to a set path, so you have the full variety of classes at your disposal. But when you reach a higher level, the system becomes more flexible, allowing you to choose how your characters’ attributes and skills develop from that point. This system is better because you ensure that the player is familiar with all the available classes before giving them greater freedom to customize their team. I believe that the sphere grid gives the gamer a more well-rounded and enjoyable experience than the license grid.
GAMBIT SYSTEM
One of the defining characteristics of the Japanese RPG genre is turn-based gameplay. It is also one of the biggest grievances players have about the genre: mechanically pressing “Attack” each time a character’s turn comes up quickly grows old and can suck the fun out of even the most entertaining games.
In order to break away from the turn-based battle system, the XII team attempted to make the battle real-time, so instead of being transported from travel into a separate battle screen, a player simply aggros the enemy and the fighting commences. In order to facilitate this play style, the team thought up the gambit system, by which players can pre-program their characters to react to certain situations with predetermined moves. For example, I can set one character to keep Haste cast on everyone in the team, and another character can be programmed to attack all flying enemies.
From what I have read, the gambit system is one of the primary reasons that FFXII took so long to develop. The team spent an inordinate amount of time creating this system, which they felt would help solve the turn-based issues and make the action more streamlined.
Granted, they solved players’ grievances about the turn-based system. However, the gambit system presented players with a whole new set of frustrations. At first, the gambit system seemed like a convenient way to manage the playable characters so that battles went as smoothly as possible, but over time the action began to feel too scripted. After a player achieved a sufficient number of gambit slots, they could sit back, relax, and let the computer play itself. This “hands-off” experience completely contradicts the purpose of a video game: to get the player involved in the action. The gambit system went beyond solving the initial problem and replaced it with a new one.
Considering how much time and money was spent developing this “improvement” in FF gameplay, I would say that Square Enix made a mistake trying to do away with the old system. Rather than scrap it and start anew, their resources might have been better spent trying to improve upon the turn-based system so it seemed more fast-paced while keeping to the traditional gameplay design. Thankfully, it seems that this is exactly what the Final Fantasy XIII team has attempted to do; I’m anxious to see how they used what they learned from the failed experiment of XII’s gambit system to create a more exciting turn-based system in XIII.
CONCLUSION
Final Fantasy XII was not a terrible game. The art was exotic, the graphics were top-notch, the enemies were varied and challenging. But Square Enix’s experiments with an MMO-style story, the open-ended license grid, and the gambit system failed to produce the results they wanted, and instead of fixing past complaints and increasing their fan base, the team disappointed fans who had waited five torturous years to play their game. The story focused too much on the big picture and not enough on the main characters, so players felt distanced from them. The license grid further distanced players by erasing an important element in characterization, and it gave players an easy out early on that they may have paid for later in the game. And the gambit system left players snoozing while the characters played out battles on auto-pilot. Thankfully, previews suggest that the next game, Final Fantasy XIII, will follow more closely in the footsteps of its classic predecessors, like Final Fantasy VII, in gameplay and story. Whether it redeems Square Enix in the eyes of its fans is yet to be seen, but this fan dearly hopes that it does. No more MMO-wannabe games, please, S.E. Stick to what you’re great at.
