Better late than never #28

Continuing with the RPG run that having I have decided to take a look at another Final Fantasy title but this time look at one that I haven’t played before in Final Fantasy 12 – The Zodiac Age.

Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age Box art

This is one of the many Final Fantasy games which I have never even looked at and as such going into this I didn’t know what to expect but was willing to give it a go as I do enjoy an RPG and if one company do it well it’s Square.

Interestingly I didn’t really get too into the story on this one as the combat in the game was truly awful, each character you pick up has a choice of 2 of 12 professions and while not required you can and probably should try to mix it up so you have different strengths for each one as while it would be easy to cheese your way through the game if you set up everyone as white/red mages with a side of mele it’s a shame not to see what each one offers.

As mentioned the combat sucks and there is little guidance given in the game on how to get yourself set up for success, you figure it out as you go but still some help would have been nice. In essence you unlock 12 commands for each character and these work as logic commands which if met will result in your character performing a certain action i.e. I had a command chain set up that if I came across an enemy that had a weakness to fire then I would use a fire spell, the problem being there that if I didn’t have mana then my character would do nothing so I would have a follow up command that would attack enemies if there was an enemy in range. However I can fix that first problem too so I built a command that would check if my mana was low and if it was it would use an item to recover it and that was the biggest draw back, there were over 100 conditions you could track but only 12 could be put into commands so you didn’t have enough commands. To me it almost felt like the AI programming was a bit too complex for the PS2 and so Square said fuck it, make it the players problem.

I ended up going for the platinum on this one which ended up taking well into 100 hours of gameplay and by going for the platinum it almost trivialised the final fights in the game as I got so powerful that the last 4 bosses was absolutely destroyed and represented no threat at all however there was a trial mode that was 100 stages fighting harder and harder enemies and the last 10 stages of that, even being level 99 on most of the characters, was very near impossible, especially as there was no respite between fights so if you lost 3 people in the previous fight, they were still lost to you in the next.

I am glad I played the game and got to see what it was about but don’t think it is one I would ever go back to.

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