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moonwiseOK, I'm late to the party, but I have FFXII.
Am much enjoying the small resemblances to Vagrant Story, especially Vaan's spellcasting move (though, come to think of it, Squall did the same thing) and the little sparkles surrounding the spellcaster. I have noticed one glaring deficiency, though: NO ASS PANTS. We need a male character with Arseley-brand ass pants.
I'm not very far along in the game yet - don't even have Gambits yet - but it seems from many of you other players out there that Gambits seem to allow you to walk away from the game if you set them right. That's not very exciting. It seems like a complete 180 from FFX-2, where if you were not Button Masher Supreme, the monster would eat you before you got your Super Duper Mega Pretty Pretty Princess Attack off. (Though I am ashamed to admit that I spent a good portion of yesterday working through the FFX-2 Chocobo dungeon.)
Husband asked whether it's hard to go from a game where you have many of the good powerups back down to a game where you're still a rookie, and whether it was more fun to be the rookie. Nah, it's fun to have the powerups.
Am much enjoying the small resemblances to Vagrant Story, especially Vaan's spellcasting move (though, come to think of it, Squall did the same thing) and the little sparkles surrounding the spellcaster. I have noticed one glaring deficiency, though: NO ASS PANTS. We need a male character with Arseley-brand ass pants.
I'm not very far along in the game yet - don't even have Gambits yet - but it seems from many of you other players out there that Gambits seem to allow you to walk away from the game if you set them right. That's not very exciting. It seems like a complete 180 from FFX-2, where if you were not Button Masher Supreme, the monster would eat you before you got your Super Duper Mega Pretty Pretty Princess Attack off. (Though I am ashamed to admit that I spent a good portion of yesterday working through the FFX-2 Chocobo dungeon.)
Husband asked whether it's hard to go from a game where you have many of the good powerups back down to a game where you're still a rookie, and whether it was more fun to be the rookie. Nah, it's fun to have the powerups.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 06:13 pm (UTC)Gambits DO NOT let you walk away from the game, at least not if you want to go on doing anything. Gambits are just a series of IF-THEN statements which allow you to make your characters do stuff automatically. IF an enemy is within your range, THEN attack. IF a character gets poisoned, THEN throw an Antidote. IF a party member's HP falls below 30%, THEN cast Curaga. That sort of thing. And you have to buy all the IF parts - like "Ally: Status - Poison" or "Ally: HP < 30%" And although it means that if there's an enemy within range, your character will approach it to attack, it does not mean that it will seek out enemies to kill.
Further, there are a limited number of gambit slots, and you can only get 10 maximum for each character. Not everything you'd need to do on a regular basis can fit in the gambits. So most of the time, you decide "I want this character to be mostly a fighter" or "I want this character to be mostly a healer" and skew the gambits one way or another. You can wander around easy areas and never move your thumb except to use the directional joystick, much as in past RPGs you can wander around easy areas just pushing the same button over and over to "ATTACK". However, boss battles and normal battles in more difficult areas frequently require either changing your gambits around completely, or manually inputting a lot of commands to each individual party member to interrupt their basic set of gambits. (And quite frequently, pausing at the battle menu to go "OMGWTF!!! What just happened and how do I keep that from happening again?!")
So basically, if you walk away from the game, your party will stand there and do nothing, unless an enemy wanders across your path - or, if you have, for instance, an Auto-Haste gambit, someone will cast Haste when it wears off from the last time. In the case I posted about, it was a situation involving an extremely hard to find monster that constantly summons undead in a very small area, and a carefully created set of gambits that caused the party members to attack the summoned undead but not the monster summoning them, and to revive each other when they got Doom cast on them. As far as I know, that's the only place in the game you can walk away and come back to your party members still doing stuff more than a minute or so later. And that's only if they're high enough level and have enough gambits. ;)
I had someone on my friends list post about how they were never going to play the game after reading my post about this, because they like to play their games, not sleep through them! Me too, this is why I don't bother doing stuff like this on my save file. :P At any rate, anyone who can go through the game with only gambits, or even MOSTLY gambits, has almost certainly spent a lot of time becoming overlevelled for whatever area they're in.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 07:17 pm (UTC)Nothing among the males, though one of Basch's outfits sure has a battle wedgie. More like Hardin's pants than Ashley's.