Yesterday saw lathany and me reach the end of Final Fantasy XII. She's written a review of the game, but I have a few things to add from a game design perspective.

Short version: OMG, what a total mess !

Long version:

For those who haven't played it, there are some major changes from previous Final Fantasy games. The most immediately noticeable is that there is no "battle screen" anymore. You explore the world by running around the environment and if combat happens it happens in that same environment at the point at which you encounter whatever it is you fight with. The other big change - much hyped by the gaming press - is the "gambits" system. Essentially this allows you to program your party to take certain actions under certain circumstances. The idea is to remove some of the "busy work" from the combats (which is a good thing).

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I'll start with a run through of what I consider the good aspects of the design:

Improved mid-combat party substitutions: You have a party of six characters, but (as usual with FF) only three can fight at once. In FF-X there was a mechanism for swapping party members in and out during a fight. XII improves on this a lot by allowing you to bring your reserves into combat even to replace characters who have been KO'd. This might sound like a small change, but it makes a significant difference because it means there's a real difference between slow, controllish play (trying to keep all your characters healthy and powered up) and aggressive play (going all out to deal damage). It also allows monster attacks to be more ridiculous because the player doesn't lose if you completely hose every character in combat.

The only slight flaw in the implementation is the "red" mechanic. The designers decided it was necessary to prevent the targets of spells and attacks from being swapped out before the spell or attack had actually resolved. This is done by marking the target's name in red. The trouble with this being that certain kinds of monsters are quite capable of keeping the whole party on red the whole time. There should at least be a window of opportunity between enemy actions to exit the fight. It also leads to a particularly silly situation where you often want one of your own characters to die, because corpses can never be targeted by anything and are therefore never red and so always swappable.

Items are faster than spells: Traditionally in Final Fantasy, Items produce spell-like effects but can be used by any character. The drawback of Items being that they are one use only. This time the Items are substantially faster than the corresponding spells, making them much more interesting.

Better range of spells and abilities: There are an awful lot of spells and abilities in the game, many of which provide genuinely unique effects (ie. not just another flavour of damage).

Licences are a cool idea: Rather than gaining spells through experience and weapons through finding them, the game now has a rather clever system for balancing advancement. Experience gets you points which you spend flipping tiles on a square grid. Some flipped tiles give you abilities directly, but other give you licences to use certain spells or weapons. You buy the actual spells and weapons from shops separately. This is actually a very clever balance mechanism. It doesn't really shine in the game because of problems with equipment (see below) but in theory it's a great way to give the party interesting treasure without breaking the game. Yes, you find an awesome magic ring, but you can't use it until you've amassed enough EPs to buy the required licence.

Hunts work well: You can go out hunting special monsters on behalf of various clients. Track them down, defeat them and you get a reward. This is classic subquest stuff, but with the added advantage that you can simply choose when to do it. Particularly great because it takes some of the pain out of level grinding. Need to detour from the main plot ? Go and do a hunt !

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Now for the bad. There's a lot of it.

Broken MP System: Magic points now regenerate slowly as you walk around, which leads to endless running in circles - sometimes literally for ten minutes or more. I pointed this out to ao_lai and he correctly noted that previous FF games didn't let you regenerate points this was at all, so this was just like all characters having "MP Stroll" by default. True, but this is a disaster. The problem being that because it's now possible to get your MPs back it is effectively compulsory (obviously you are able to go into fights without being full strength, but it means you are choosing to cripple your own effectiveness which you can only viably do if the fight was not challenging in the first place).

Worse still, MPs are the new HP in this version. If a fight is even close to winnable you will almost always lose it by running out of MPs (and thus being unable to heal) than running out of HP. This is due to a worsening of a longstanding problem with many RPGs wherein monsters have disgustingly large HP totals compared to PCs and PCs are expected to compensate for this with a constant stream of healing during battle.

Powerups are a Curse: The absence of a battle screen may seem at first like a purely cosmetic change, but it causes big problems. One particularly bad problem is that it turns powerups into a curse. You have the ability to cast Protect on your party members ? Lucky you - now you have to keep Protect up at all times. Previously it was impossible to cast it before combat. Now that you can, doing so is compulsory, because it saves actions. Same goes for Shell, Haste, Regen, Bravery, Faith... OMG, this could take all day !

Even worse, powerups on party members not currently selected do not deplete. This means that you need to ensure at all times that all your reserves are fully powered up too, ready to swap in.

Of course, as with MPs you can always say "Ha, I don't do any of that !". Fine, of course. But again you are weakening your party on purpose, so the game cannot provide any kind of strategic challenge because if you can almost beat it without full powerups then you can easily beat it when you are fully powered up.

Gambits are Crap: Not the worst problem with the game, but possibly the saddest. The much-hyped gambit system is almost useless. The basic problem is that the trigger conditions for abilities don't have anything like the versatility needed to describe any strategy worthy of the name. So, for example...

* Cast cura (cure all allies) if two or more of my party are wounded, but use cure if only one is wounded.
* If the enemy is attacking mostly with magic, do not bother renewing Protect when it lapses. Otherwise do so immediately.
* Choose Raise to return a dead party member only if the enemy's typical attack damage will not re-KO them before I can heal them. Otherwise choose Arise (raise with full HP).

...are all impossible. And god forbid that you actually want to do anything clever.

And again, you can rely on Gambits if you like, but you're substantially weakening your party if you do so. (Same issue as the MP problem and the powerups problem again.)

Poor Save Point Distribution: Game designers really should have learned this one by now. Let players save ! There is a legitimate debate to be had over whether Doom-style (save anywhere) saving or fixed save points are suitable for a given game. However, one thing which is never, ever OK is to space save points so far apart that you inconvenience players who for real-world reasons have length limits on their gaming sessions. I got to bed an hour and a half late last night because the game's final sequence contains save points in none of the three places where I regard them as compulsory. We played continuously from 21:00 until 00:10 without seeing a single save point.

Broken Chests System: For most of the game I was thoroughly mystified as to why the chests (and barrels) in the game all seemed to contain utterly pitiful treasure. Then at last I worked it out. The game respawns all the chests whenever you return to a region. So they were forced to make the treasure incredibly pathetic because you could pick it up and many times as you wanted to.

Very poor design decision. If this was designed to make save files smaller, it was a price not worth paying.

Dull Equipment/Treasure: Treasure in a fantasy game should be an exciting business. When you explore some hidden location, you want to be rewarded with something cool and interesting. When you defeat some scary beast, you want a cool and interesting reward. FF-XII seems to have completely abolished this.

Instead, pretty much everything you find in the entire game will be stuff you can buy in the shops in the last settlement you went to. Or, if you're really lucky, in the next settlement you come to. Even the rewards for hunts are mundane.

Only a handful of monster types: This isn't exactly a game design choice to be fair, since I'm assuming it was for cost reasons that they made the choice. But whyever it was, the game has far too few distinct monster types. No, really, far too few. By a factor of at least 10 and probably more like 20-30. The non-boss fights were really, really dull as a result. Seriously, I'd rather do the washing up (and frequently did).

Dull Boss Mechanics: The bosses are much more interesting and diverse, but only in a visual/flavour sense. The combat mechanics are - with a few exceptions - profoundly disappointing. Long-time fans of FF will be familiar with the "demi" problem. Demi is a gravity-themed magic which deals damage to an enemy corresponding to some fraction of their HP. The catch is, bosses are aaalways immune to it. And since they're almost the only things worth using it on the power just sits there on your spell list being rubbish.

Now as I mentioned earlier, FF-XII has loads of exciting new spells. The catch ? Almost all of them suffer from the demi problem. The vast majority of bosses you meet are immune to very nearly all non-damage magics. And they're usually big. So almost all the fights just turn into hack, hack, hack, hack... <ten minutes pass> ...hack, hack, hack, win ! Very dull.

Even worse, one of the major ways they've tried to improve bosses is to give them two modes. When they hit some smallish fraction of their initial hitpoints they shift to their second mode (or cast some special spell). And in most cases what this actually does is to give them most of their HP back, or give them so much armour that it's as though they have most of their HP back. Or in some cases they just become deadly attackers and kill you, meaning that you actually never stood a chance in the first place but have wasted ten minutes finding out.

I could go on, but that's probably enough.

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In conclusion: a total mess. And clearly avoidable too, which is the sad thing. They had a winning formula and they broke it.

FF has been a tradition here since FF-VII. We always pick up each new one early and play it through together for the first run. Well, that ends here. There is no way I'm playing FF-XIII.

Oh, and special frowns of disapproval to the various gaming websites I read. It's their job to point out disasters like this before I waste nearly 100 hours playing them. They failed.

(Defence of FF-XII in comments is perfectly acceptable, just don't expect me to agree !)