Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age (2017)

More impressions:

-I don't hate any of the party members so far but I'd easily trade any of them for a moogle party member. Always kills me when the world is full of intermingling fantasy races but your party has to be almost completely humans or humes in this case. I know every game can't be Breath of Fire but c'mon. Also why does Ashe's hair and clothes remind me so much of Lighting from FF13?

-The game still doesn't explain a lot of stuff well if at all. It's wild to try unlocking things on your license board and having no idea what they are or how to find out, and it's weird how long it feels like it takes to simply gain class/license specific skills or techs.

-I also don't haate the combat system and the idea of Gambits, but from a JRPG game design philosophy it seems like the wrong direction to go in. By making this system to program your characters actions, it feels like the vast majority of battles are so simple they don't require input from the player. I'm generally much more of a believer in the opposite approach of quality over quantity when it comes to battles in JRPGs. I'd much rather sweat it out over every encounter with the options available to me and have much less of them, than have so many that the game is designed with auto battling at the forefront of the battle system.

-Behind just setting Gambits, having to purchase what you can target via a Gambit, and needing to get permission via Licenses to use equipment is still annoying and from a worldbuilding stand point still doesn't make any sense to me.

Getting into this over my winter holiday break. Some initial thoughts and impressions:

-The introduction is a bit drawn out on giving the player a lot of information about the war, political figures, and dynamics of the conflict. Giving you control of Vaan's brother for the tutorial was fine and didn't drag at least, leaving the player with some intrigue before the segment ends. Not as engaging of an introduction as FF6, 7, and 9, but I think it's still better than 8's or 10's at least.

-I like the character designs though the color scheme is a bit on the darker/drab side. I wish I could have a Moogle or Bangaa party member, love their designs here.

-The camera angle, job mechanics, and battle system do give me a very MMORPG outline, which tracks since this is right after Final Fantasy 11, but I'm not vibing with that choice so far. Job systems are great, but it hurts to have to dump points into being allowed to use equipment. Want to wear this hat? Kill 20 monsters first.

-There's also some clunky ways in which mechanics are rolled out. Penelo briefly joins me and explicitly states that Gambits are available and that I should use them, yet they don't appear in any menu for me to adjust them. I had to look it up and apparently Gambits don't actually become available to setup until later which is confusing.

-Vaan seems like an idiot, and I think this has to be intentional. He's a rash and reckless youth who will be reigned in by cooler heads who join the party later I'm guessing. I don't mind the main player character being in this archetype especially if it's more of an ensemble cast and I'm not expected to solely identify with Vaan for the duration of the game.

-The early areas being an expansive confusingly laid out town, an open plains and desert areas, and an awkward sewer dungeon aren't the hypest or most interesting places to start an adventure, but it's not a deal breaker by any means.

Holy crap, the Yensan Sandsea maps are huge! Just the first half (Ogir-Yensa Sandsea) took me over an hour in-game!! Although to be fair I took the loooong way around to grind the characters. I didn't even need to move out and back into an area as I'd planned to, and I effortlessly got all of my characters to Level 16-18, so.. good? I got the occasional harsh reminders that I'm not OP during unexpected encounters with Elementals and the Wyvern that killed most of my party when I didn't notice that it had flown in to join my battle against the cute little Alraunes.

This game is a nice reminder of how challenging game mechanics used to be; grinding is so necessary here... and it's grind extra because non-party characters don't gain EXP. It's been so long, I can't even name the last game I played that was similar in those aspects.

Man this is so good. I think that I am somewhere over 2/3 through the game, since I'm at like level 37 mainlining the story, and I saw a spoiler-free guide suggest to be level 47 for the final area. Already, it's easily in the top half of the nine FF games that I've sunk significant time into, and though it probably won't get in, it's knocking on the door of the top 3.

It's like someone sat down and cut open turn-based JRPG combat, and intentionally took only the interesting parts into this game. The in-battle strategy, deep systems of stats and equipment, preparedness, flexibility of a large set of playable characters, these are what's cool to me. Not just manually telling each character to Attack or Heal at the right time, over and over.

It's not as enjoyable as FFVIIR's action-strategy hybrid, but it's a really neat approach to the JRPG to allow the player to automate those tasks and define strategy ahead of time.

The system is so open-ended that I wish they took another shot at expanding on it. If you were allowed to do more branching conditions and set up a deeper strategy of dozens of rules to basically program your own party AI in game, I would find that so amazing.