Tag: jrpg

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Game Ramblings #43 – Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Originally Released On: PS2

TL;DR

  • Battle system is still going to be hit or miss for people.  If you enjoy the idea of programming the AI, you’ll likely enjoy this.
  • Story hasn’t aged too bad.  Vaan being the up front starting main character is still weird.
  • Modifications to the license system for upgrades are neither a big positive or negative to me.  Still like the general system overall.

Final Fantasy XII was at the time a pretty controversial game for the series.  It came on the heals of a long gap since X, with an MMO in between.  Even though on the surface the battle system seemed hugely different, it was still an ATB-based battle system, just with some potential for automating tasks thrown in.  However, it was that change that in a lot of ways threw a players for a loop.  Looking at this again 11 years later, I’m still a huge fan of the way the game was put together, even if some of the details still leave me grumbling at times.

Back when I originally played this, I never really understood a lot of the criticism thrown at the battle system.  At its core, it’s still the ATB-style system that had been in place for a number of years for the SNES and PS1 entries to the series.  Time bar fills, action can be taken, rinse and repeat.  To me, the ability to automate what the other party members were doing, and the ability to freely run around in real-time didn’t hugely differentiate the core of the system that much.  From my perspective, the biggest change was that battles were no longer random, and simply started up when an enemy was approached.  The fact that I could program out the party through the Gambit system meant that I could concentrate on fixing things when they went sideways, and leave the obvious things up to happen on their own.  It’s a given that I’m always going to attack, when some party member’s health drops I’m going to throw Cure, when debuffs are out I’m going to use Esuna or some variant, if the enemy is weak to an element I’m going to use magic.  The system in place here let me preset the entire party to do the obvious, and simply handle jumping in when adjustments needed to be done on the fly.  By and large, that system still works fantastically, and gets you through a lot of the game.  Boss battles are where I tend to jump in to manual actions the most, but even then I tended to spend more time adjusting my Gambits to suit the needs of the fight, and having fun doing that.

However, the Gambit system does have a few noticeable gaps that the programmer in me really wants more control over.  Target prioritization in general was typical pretty poor.  While there’s a lot of flexibility in how the target gets selected (nearest, furthest, X% HP, party leader’s target, etc), there was no way to use a priority to select a target, then stay locked on that target until they were killed.  Because of this, group fights can get really hairy really quickly if I was fully automated, with targets swapping almost every attack, rather than grinding down one enemy at a time.  It would also have been nice for some sort of binary system to place more stringent conditions on target selection (Ex: If leader is dead, use nearest target; else use leader’s target).  I also wish there was a concept of group-based conditions.  I ended up placing group spells like Cura on single-target “oh shit” conditions, and just manually triggering group buff type spells as necessary.  For example, Cura was fired on my group if ANY ally was below 30% health.  Ideally this would have been in a place where I could have done something to the effect of average group health, or similar condition.

The other real big change over normal Final Fantasy with this game was the License system.  The short version here is that while weapons, armor, magic, and skills are purchased in shops, they also have to have a corresponding License purchased.  In the original release, all characters had the same base License Board layout, with a different starting point in the board.  For the International release, as well as for The Zodiac Age, this has been replaced by job-style boards.  To be perfectly honest, there’s things I like about both and ended up not really having a preference as to which system was used.  In the original release, there was a ton of flexibility as the board filled, since all characters theoretically had access to everything.  I could very easily do high melee damage white mages, or a black mage that used gun attacks, or a ninja tank.  Characters in The Zodiac Age can still do this to some extent with a primary and secondary board, but the build out is significantly more focused, and the flexibility in class layout has to be determined at board purchase time, rather than being able to swap the character style at any point.  The flexibility of the original was nice, but being able to focus on a core build throughout the entire game in this place also simplified the nature of using the License Board system, so I ended up enjoying it just as well.

All in all, I enjoyed the hell out of the original release, and I still enjoyed the hell out of it the second time around.  This is definitely the kind of game that if you didn’t like it before, it’s not going to convince you to play it this time either.  The inclusion of an always on fast forward feature also meant that getting through the game was significantly quicker, clocking in at about 40 hours for me to complete the story, as well as a fairly large chunk of the hunt and side quest content, so the time commitment was significantly lower than in the past.  End of the day, the only thing replaying this did for me was convincing me that it’s still one of my favorite RPGs, and one that has aged pretty well since it came out two console generations ago.

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Game Ramblings #40 – I am Setsuna

More Info from Square-Enix

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Vita, PS4, Steam (Windows)

TL;DR

  • Despite the story being thematically similar to FFX, holds its own well enough to make the game worth playing.
  • Battle system was well done.  Easily possible to break the game with certain skill and gear combos, but the positioning additions to the ATB system were well placed.
  • Doesn’t do anything egregiously bad, but there’s some obvious flaws in most parts of the game
  • Game in general showed signs of being either incomplete or rushed to completion, but the core that is there is really strong.

I am Setsuna is definitely a JRPG that points back to the kinds of games Square was releasing back in the 90s and early 00s.  It directly uses a very Final Fantasy styled ATB battle system, uses a very Final Fantasy styled story, and has the same sort of mage/healer/melee/assassin character archetypes that the Final Fantasy games used.  While there are some definite places where the game has some pretty major flaws, the base that is there shows a lot of promise for the next title by Tokyo RPG Factory, Lost Sphear.

Since it’s realistically the thing that any JRPG spends the most time in, let’s talk about the battle system.  If you’ve played anything between about FF4 through 9, you’ll recognize the ATB system in place.   The battle runs in real-time, filling a meter.  When it’s full, that person can attack.  Faster characters attack more often, rinse and repeat.  In general the system has worked fine for 25 years, and in this game it’s no different.

The big things that I am Setsuna really does well that are kind of atypical usually have to do with positioning.  Rather than being fixed on one side of the screen, both friendly and enemy characters can move around the play field.  This allows for some interesting setups in hitting multiple enemies at once, whether it’s with AoE magic, melee swipes, or pass through projectiles.  This also means that party buffs, healing, and more can also take advantage of the AoE nature in order to optimize spell use.  There’s also a number of combo skills with multiple party members that take advantage of this, allowing you to line up multiple enemies in one go for much larger damage.

However, the battle system also shows one of the biggest signs of lack of polish in the game.  In general, the boss fights were a lot of single mechanics.  Put on the right gear, find the right party members, and you’re guaranteed an easy victory.  Because skills are equippable, the amount of flexibility is astounding, but can lead to some extreme breaking of the game’s difficulty curve.  For example, the Counter skill blocks ALL physical damage, so phsyical-only bosses revolved around one party member doing nothing but staying in Counter, one party member casting a Taunt skill on the Counter person, and a third party member being there to grind out damage.  It got so bad that by the end of the game, I was using three very specific party members for everything.  The title character Setsuna had a skill that did massive AoE damage + AoE Heal.  I equipped her with MP drain on damage taken and MP drain on damage dealt passive abilities, effectively meaning she did everything at next to no cost.  The second character cast a party Protect spell, and the third just did damage.  It made the game trivial, but it also seemed like what the game was balanced for given the incoming damage numbers.

The game’s presentation was the next point where there were some big highs, and also big lows.

A normal view within the I am Setsuna overworld.

For one thing, the game is astoundingly gorgeous.  The overworld takes on a very painteresque feel, with billboarded mountains and trees over a simple 3D landscape.  The main problem here is that there are no battles in the overworld at all, so you’re just running through from point A to B as fast as possible.  The little details as you walk around in the environment, from the snow falling out of trees to the trails you leave in the snow are also always well done.  However, that’s the big problem; EVERYTHING IS SNOW.  There’s effectively no environmental variety, so the towns all look similar, the forests all look similar, the caves all look similar, and they are all frozen over.

In a nice touch, the snow trails fade over time as you wander through the environment.

The soundtrack was also a bit of a mixed bag.  While the piano-only focus of the soundtrack works fantastically well in emotional moments, high tension moments lack any sort of depth to the soundtrack, with a high pace and high volume piano not really ever being enough to carry through.  The fact that the battle music adds in a bass line and some light percussion makes this even more frustrating, because they clearly put at least some thought into expanding out the landscape of the music they were writing.  It definitely didn’t need to be fully orchestrated, but adding a bit more depth in places to the music would have greatly benefited the game’s exciting moments.

Having a pixel art styled developer thanks island was a nice touch in the end game.

The little details were the last place where things were a bit of a mixed bag.  Once you get the air ship, you can run into a developer island that shows a clear nod to the team’s past games.  It’s entirely pixel art, with classic 16-bit music and visuals.  However, there’s a lot of places where things seem like they were left unfinished, with numerous empty houses in the overworld, bath houses with no meaning, and worst of all, gaining a new party member quite literally at the door to the final boss room.  There’s also a number of high level dungeons and scattered encounters that would be great to fight post-game, but can be a big pain to get to due to some of the traversal back through long linear dungeons. I hate to say the game feels unfinished, but there’s some things that definitely give me the impression that the team’s budget couldn’t quite match their ambition.

In general, I am Setsuna is a game that JRPG fans should at the very least check out.  There’s better out there for people new to the genre, but for folks looking for an ATB-system throw back, this is a pretty solid one.  For a game that’s regularly under $30, you can do much worse.  However, don’t expect a perfect game.  It definitely has its flaws, but for me it was worth overlooking them to experience what had been done here.

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Game Ramblings #38 – Ray Gigant

More Info from Wikipedia

  • Genre: JRPG
  • Platform: PS TV / Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows (Steam)

TL;DR

  • Decent battle system, a few changes not typical of the genre w/ move cost and HP regen made battles feel a lot more impactful
  • Battle animation was a clear focus for the visual needs of the game
  • Outside of the battle system, the game is significantly more average
  • Story works, but not much to write home about

Ray Gigant is for the most part a pretty standard first-person dungeon crawler JRPG.  It’s got a normal mapping system that generates as you wander around the dungeons.  The battles are for the most part a standard turn-based affair.  The visual-novel styled story hits a lot of points that are by and large not unusual for a sort of post-apocalyptic games out of Japan.  However, there are a few things that it does that are at least of note, even if they don’t really elevate this to anything more than average for the genre.

The biggest problem that I really had with this game is that it didn’t really do much with the dungeon crawling aspect.   The environments that I was walking through had occasional puzzles (forced teleports, one way entrances, etc), but they were never that challenging.  The art and enemies used for each story arc was the same the entire time, so once you did the first run for an arc, you knew what you were seeing.  The lack of being able to draw on the map was also a deterrent compared to 3DS games like the Etrian Odyssey series, where I could directly put traps and notes on the map as I progressed.  In general it was pretty clear that for as simple as the first-person dungeon crawling was, it was also the area that received the least amount of love, so by the end of a story arc, I was typically doing what I could just to rush through dungeons to get to the good parts.

Since this is a JRPG, the core of the gameplay is in its battle system.  This is where they really do some of the things that are less standard for the genre.  There’s a pretty basic elemental system, as well as differentiation between ground, air, and undead enemies, giving a nice amount of flexibility in how you take advantage of each character’s move set to get through the battles as quick as possible.  This is backed up by everything being based on an Attack Point value, rather than a more typical mana cost.  The AP regenerates by either waiting a turn with a character, or by taking damage, so the harder battles had an interesting play between preserving AP, using heals to keep the party going, then going all out in an attack pattern to get your bulk damage in at once.  The system also resets all HP in between fights, so each fight feels more impactful, rather than becoming more of a resource-management slog that a lot of dungeon crawlers fall into.

The visual treatment of the battles is also worth noting.  All the characters have pretty decent idle animations, both the player and non-player characters.  While it doesn’t extend to the basic attack animations, it adds a nice flourish to the battle while you’re setting up your turn.

This also extends into the Slash Beat system used for a generally boss-only massive special attack.  For reasons known only to the development team, the game turns into a rhythm game at this point, but it works out shockingly well as a distraction in the middle of larger fights.

The core leveling system also takes a bit of an unexpected turn.  There’s no XP to be had at all in the game, and tied to that there are also no distinct item drops.  All fights drop one of three types of core resources, ones used for upgrading gear, ones used for purchasing skills, and ones used for purchasing character levels.  Since these drop from any fight, there’s a really quick feedback loop between the fights you’re engaging in, and the upgrades the characters receive.  It also ends up allowing for highly flexible team builds.  Taking too much damage and need defense? Spend resources into the character’s shield upgrades and get better gear, or use the skill purchase resources to get damage mitigation.  Need more attack damage? Spend resources into the character’s weapons or purchase character levels in physical damage.  Rather than being on the fairly preset path typical of most JRPGs, this feels a lot closer in style to more western RPGs, where gear builds are typically more fine grained.

However, the little details start to show where the game lacks the polish of larger budget titles.  Aside from the environment art repetition mentioned above, the story itself leaves a lot to be desired.  It pretty much follows most character tropes (broody male that doesn’t want to interact with people, airhead girl that doesn’t pay attention to things around her, obviously evil older mustached guy, etc) without going into any interesting territory.  Although there are three distinct story arcs, each one is over within a few hours, so the characters don’t have the time to grow, even if they had been written to do so.  There’s also a subsystem in battles called Parasitism that activates periodically, changing attack cost from AP to character HP.  In general it activates at inopportune times during boss battles, but can be immediately cleared with a Slash Beat attack.  It seems to serve no purpose other than linking into the story and being annoying.

Overall this was fairly average, but a nice distraction from what I’ve been playing recently.  It definitely doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and there are far better dungeon crawlers out there for people being introduced to the genre.  However, it scratched the itch for me without getting heavily in the way, and at least had a few nice surprises for me along the way.