Never played this game on PS2. Found it for switch, and decided to give it a shot. What were your thoughts when you played it? Is there a way you recommend to best enjoy this game?
You first.>But I haven't even played it...Exactly.
>>4068921as long as you are playing The Zodiac Age version, then you're good to go.
>>4068925I am. Were there different versions? It seems to be set in Ivalice. I loved FF Tactics, but this was s going to be much different
>>4068937>Were there different versions?Yes. The original release was in 2006 for the PS2.Then there was a JP-only re-release in 2007 also on PS2 called International Zodiac Job System, or IZJS for short. The game is broadly the same, but they specifically reworked the license board (a.k.a. your skill tree) to make you pick from one of 12 different, more focused license boards ("jobs" as per the title) for each character, instead of letting everyone eventually unlock everythingThe Zodiac Age is the subtitle of the 2017 remastered release for modern platforms. It's based on IZJS in basically every way, except that it now lets you unlock a second license board for each character later (essentially dual-specs), and also has a few handy QoL features like speed up, orchestral music, and so on.There's basically no reason to play anything other than TZA unless you're a one-job-only IZJS purist, and even then there are mods for the PC version to re-implement the IZJS limitations.>>4068921>What were your thoughts when you played it?It's my second favourite FF, but that might be a rare opinion around here. I eat up the beautiful environments, great soundtrack, for-the-time unbelievable character animations, and most of all an impeccable English localisation, which IIRC was by the same translator as FF Tactics even. It's like Star Wars by way of Shakespeare
>>4068998Also my second favorite. It was #1 until XIV took that spot by doing everything I liked about XII, but better
>>4068921my thoughts are that i genuinely did not like a single thing about it, but i hope you enjoy it.
>>4068921>Is there a way you recommend to best enjoy this game?ye, on PC with mods, as most things people dislike about it are retarded decisions the devs put in to sell you two different guides.It is otherwise one of my favorite games, if not the favorite, i was one of the few tards that said it was a good game back when it released on PS2 and everyone was hating it and i keep going back to it basically every 6 months or so. Even now i'm playing it, just beat Enkelados
>>4068921i wish every game with ai controlled party members had a gambit system of sorts
TZA allows you to get absurdly OP thanks to how it handles jobs, etc. For normal gameplay, there really isn't much you need to worry about. Maybe you can google some recommended Gambits to get inspiration, that's about it.If you're doing Hunts though you're probably going to need some sort of a guide eventually unless you want to bang your head against the wall for awhile.Either way, absolutely terrible story but some of the zones are kinda neat. Gameplay, again because you eventually get OP if you start doing Hunts, is pretty braindead after awhile. If you can get into the story and look past the automated combat system, I think you can get a lot out of it.
>>4069305>TZA allows you to get absurdly OP thanks to how it handles jobs, etc.you get op immediatly because of how MP scaling works in TZA. in original you had to get 2 quickenings to double your base mana and then a third one for triple. in TZA your mana pool gets so large so fast you can just spam heals right out the gate.
>>4069305>absolutely terrible storywhat do people actually mean when they say this? Like i get feeling like the main cast is not all that (mostly Vaan and Penelo), but i don't see what's supposed to be bad about the story
>>4068921I hated it at the time for being so MMO-derivative when MMOs were at the peak of their hype as the future of games. I replayed it much later and think it's pretty mediocre on its own terms too. It's too self-important to be a royal road work yet not smart enough to be interesting like an FFT.
>>4069344>what do people actually mean when they say this?NTA and it's obviously a matter of taste, but for me it's that it doesn't find a good place between being "universal and mythic" fun like a Star Wars 1977 and being intelligently political, e.g. they set up a portrait of a concrete imperial society and then have a pure fantasy macguffin ending. I guess FFT does that too, but the frame story of the game being revealed apocrypha carries it. And if you don't naturally care much about Ashe and take her problems seriously there's nothing there on a character level for anyone else.
>>4068921When i first played it on release i hated it. I won´t bore you with an explanation but damn this game was the definition of wasted potential. IZJ fixed it a bit by introducing job system so if you know even the basics of party roles the experience is much better. Zodiac age, the third and more definitive version of the game, introduces a second job system which allows for interesting combinations and finally make it a somewhat proper JRPG. Make sure you are playing that version. The game is still flawed in the sense that the party has little agency on story events, some times you can spend 20 hours or so in between story events and more than half the areas and espers are optional and not plot related in any way. At the time this was a big departure from how mainline FF games used to work and felt closer to a single player MMORPG. Still, now that you have two job systems you no longer cap at lvl 30, you do 30 lvls of job 1, another 30 lvls of job 2 and by then you should at the 3rd act and progression shifts to become equipment related. Also, best way to enjoy the game is to understand Vaan is irrelevant. He is just there as a newcomer for the sake of exposition. Ashelia is the real protagonist and Basch and Balthier are the main party members. If you know that from the go things are less frustrating story wise.
>>4068921I love this game it genuinely feels like a big adventure. My favorite final fantasy game along with 5 and 7
>>4069003>>4069661I am hearing more praise than I expected for this game, and I am wondering why we don't see more ff12 threads.
>>4068921Great villain, great dialogue, great voice performances. Basically doing the faux-Shakespeare thing before GoT made it popular>>4069344>>4069367pic related
>>4070090I have to pick a license board for Vaan now. How useful is the steak command? I was leaning toward Archer, but I'd steal sucks, I would go with something elae. Any advice there?
>>4070202Tbh Steal is one of the most useful actions in the game. Since you don't typically get gil from battles, most of your income will be selling enemy loots, which you can double dip on by stealing and killing. Some bosses even have real good gear to steal. It's really easy to automate too; most of the time, just slipping a "For HP = 100% -> Steal" gambit at the top of your party leader's list makes it a cake walkAlso, IIRC Vaan comes with Steal by default regardless of which board you pick
>>4068921Extremely boring. Decent gameplay but was really lackluster and the main reason fans call this the dropping point of the FF franchise.
>>4070090this is a bit reaching but i generally agree with it. I'll add that there's nothing wrong with having characters just riding along like Penelo, especially given there's a good numbers of cutscenes where she just talks and jokes with Vaan (and Larsa) in the background. Which is sometimes used specifically to show how the "main characters" are talking about war and shit and then they look at them in a "what we're fighting for" kind of way, especially when by their own words they're so focused on the resistance that they forgot what normal everyday people are like, or what would be the actual best thing for themI guess the issue, if you really want to look at it that way, is that the guests should've just been main party members, especially Larsa. Maybe it would've drowned out the feeling that the main cast is "useless"
>>4068921TZA is the definitive edition. However IZJS which is what the game's basis is wasnt balanced around two jobs, so treat that as an optional easy mode.>What jobs should I use?1. Melee DPS (Knight or Uhlan is heavily recommended)2. White Mage3. Black Mage4. Remedy Lore 3 Bot (Archer, Machinist, Shikari)5 and 6 are purely personal preference based on what you want to fill.ALWAYS have a IF HP = 100% then Steal gambit on your team. You will not be able to afford or make 95% of the shit in this game without it. Try to get the Monographs unlocked as early as possible while you're at it.
>>4068921Felt like I was playing a worse world of warcraft, so I quit early on.Came back months later and enjoyed the setting and story.
>>4070432I've noticed so far that the towns have a bit of MMO feeling. Did this have MMO capabilities? It could be that this game just landed between 11 and 14.
A game where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. A unique mostly open world that lets you explore a lot of it whenever you want, customizable party AI, tons of options in how you want to play or build, characters are all at least fine, and side content and secrets out the ass. Too bad you add all that up and it becomes a slog of a game to actually play.
>>4070572Naeh no mmo capabilities.I heard something about a recent coop mod in the works though.For me it was not just the towns, but out in the world fighting stuff and seeing respawns fade in. Like tab targeting and autoattacking in and mmo and then you see mobs respawn.Kinda funny, I know a guy who came from ff11 to ff12 and he loved it, because his computer couldn't handle ff11 and he was psyched to play a singleplayer mmo.
>>4070712Open worlds are impossible to pull off. I think a lot of people want to like open worlds. I seldom if ever see them successful. They ruined the Zelda franchise (yes, I know not an rpg).
Why should I play the Zodiac edition, rather than just playing the normal PS2 version that lets you unlock everything?
>>4070918zodiac has a bit more content, plus it fixes some retardation (keyword some) of the og releasealso, you can just play zodiac on pc and install mods that give you the PS2 license board back
>>4070918limitations of jobs is more interesting than having everyone just know everything
>>4069450This. you are not the main character, Ashe is. People always fail to recognize when a game does this and get mad at it for being “boring”
>>4070572The “offline mmo” design was just a thing in jrpgs at the time. This and Xenoblade 1 both did it
One think I like about 12 is how negative status effects matter this time. Bosses hit you with so many that’s it’s impossible to cure them all, so you actually have to learn how to deal with them.
>>4070918If you mean the Japanese only International Zodiac addition, it also adds speed up which was a plus, made summons useful. Summons were flat out pointless. Or it might be Quickenings(a type of limit break), its been forever since I last played the PS2 XII>lets you unlock everythingWhat thing? If you mean having all the classes, all the characters ends up being the same in the OG version. Its not like FFX where every character at least had some kind of path in the sphere grid. The Job system at least gives you're character something to do. I know it sounds limiting but honestly the game was a hot mess. They just shoehorned a job system and kept changing it every time the game got re-released>can only have 1 job per character>ok you can now have 2 jobs per character>ok you can just change to any job wheneverAt the end of the day not even square knew what the game wanted to be. The main reason you would want to play the remaster is because it follows up with a ton of QoL fixes some of which came from the PS2's limitations. tl'drContrarianism is why people prefer either PS2 versions.
>>4071021I guess younger millennials then zoomers don't really get how obnoxiously ubiquitous and overpraised MMORPGs were for a while. They were the "this will be the new gaming" of the time like Fortnite shit now.
>>4070090>before GoTSorry to tell you, but Alexander O. Smith confirmed in an interview that one of his biggest influences for the way XII sounds in terms of the writing style was the GoT novels, as he and others on his team had been reading them since their original releases.
>>4071354The tv show
it does make me wonder if ff12 was localized by people who didn't have their heads up their own asses, would people have understood it better
>>4071364The accents made it good
>>4071266>What thing? If you mean having all the classes, all the characters ends up being the same in the OG version.not true. what you equip on the characters dictate their capabilities. just because all characters eventually unlock all licences it wont make heavy armored character perform the same as mystic armored one.
>>4071366it wasn't just the accents. it was the script in general.japanese:>press triangle to open the menu, then add us to your partyenglish>30 second long monolog that doesn't say anything
>>4068921>What were your thoughts when you played it?its the only honest attempt in the FF series to tell a story thats not either complete made-up fantasy gibberish, or some shit about a crystal. its an actual political intrigue story more than anything else.the VAing is the best i had ever heard in vidya up to that point and prolly still is.the gfx and cities made it seem rly big and impressive. every time youd get to a new town thered be tons of new quests and items and gambits. then you could just keep going, usually in several directions. it just felt rly fucking big compared to nearly everything else i had ever played.its got some cool challenging content and seekrit bosses, and i think the license grid was the coolest lvl up thing FF ever tried that wasnt FF5s job system>Is there a way you recommend to best enjoy this game?ass party>ASShe>penelo>franashe is the actual main character anyways
>>4069450You are right that Ashe is the MC but you're wrong about Vaan being irrelevant. The thing with him is that his overt plot contributions finish "early". Basch/Balthier also don't really do all that much compared to Vaan even if you really want to stretch it. For example, later on in the game when they make a big deal about Balthier's dad, Doctor Cid spends more time focusing on Ashe and he practically just ignores his own damn son so the connection is a big load of backstory with no real bearing on the plot.
>>4068921Play TZA with only one job.FFXII is a political story first and a character driven story second.Ashe is the closest thing to a main character among the cast. Everyone's role is to either support her development or to help flesh out the world.Basch was never meant to be the main character, don't listen to that garbage.
>>407221612 is more like "what would a story be like if the main character dies in the intro" subversion
>>4072583That's wrong though.
