What did you hate about FF12?

Ok, so I am one of the few who actually enjoyed this game, so this topic is to tell everyone why you hate ff12, so I can come to a better understanding of why ppl dislike the game

I wanna know as well cause I freaking loved FF12.

See for me I thought the combat was pretty easy and I liked how it worked. The license board was a great way to level up, and with the gambit system, it basically was turn based, just with pre-set actions, but I understand what your saying. The thing I hated about the combat system was the summons and how they worked

The story was boring. I get it was a political story but it did nothing to so much as make me say, "that's creative and entertaining." I love a good story. Political, action, comedy based, who cares? As long as it's good. XII was Political History: The Game with 6 main characters who are so boring and lifeless I ask why I was left with these morons. FF does have it's extreme moments of Cookie Cutter characters but at least the story pays attention to them. XII didn't get that. Few moments that really intrigued me like Cid and Balthier's relationship, Fran leaving the forest, Bashe's former kingdom that was destroyed, Ashe's time in hiding. All that was barely or never mentioned and could have called some good story writing and it gives me a reason to care as playing as these characters. Darth Vad-I mean Gabranth had the most interesting qualities as a character for me and he hardly received the spotlight he deserved. There were so many things I wanted to know. Why he joined Vain, why he hates his brother. All these things are just thrown away for hours and hours of some douche sitting in a throne saying, "I'm gonna kill my dad for teh lulz, TOTALLY LAME FINAL BOSS". Same with Reddas, I wanted to know so much more about him. I was so interested in learning about him after finding out he was once a Judge and was responsible for Nabudes's (???) destruction but you're left with Veughn and Painintheasselo's in a "Who Fucking Cares?" ending.

The music didn't give me the excited feeling I once had for FF. But I understand the music in the game was a lot of remixes for the original FFTactics and now I commend that but some songs just did not sound too exciting and the band playing felt like they were not interested in playing this music. Since I used to play music, classical and jazz, I can hear lazy slurs in a lot of pieces. Like Battle on the Big Bridge was a huge disappointment. Fun boss but the music was so poor sounding.

The combat was exactly the same as the prior games. ATB gauge, wait your turn and attack. But now the game plays itself with the Gambit system so it's like you as the player put no effort into anything combat wise. You set your gambits and watch. I also did not like how I could get swarmed by monsters and get buttfucked to death in some areas because if 20 enemies are doing hit after hit that do 1000-2000 damage then your party is fucked. Then the summon system should have never been brought in. I liked what X did but that's scrapped for XII and the summon beasts are USELESS. Granted, in X the summons became useless towards the end of the game other than just unleashing their Overdrives for tough bosses but at least I had fun as playing them and I liked obliterating bad guys with the summons. The summons in XII were more of a hassle than fun because like I said earlier, you can get into moments of pure buttfucking and the summon is insta-banned from battle from one attack.

Being a voiceover I gotta bitch about the acting and whatnot. It wasn't too bad, some people sounded very good and there were some who sounded like crap but my problem was the overall quality of the voices and sound effects in normal cutscenes. The audio gives so much feedback that it's nearly impossible to understand a lot of characters without the subtitles. Then the fucking guards men not only sound muffled for the armor but now there's the feedback from the recording so I honestly thought they were speaking a different language in the game until I put the subtitles up to discover it's cockney english accents muffled. In the FMV's, the recordings were great and crystal clear. Why didn't the whole game have that good sound quality? No sense I tell you whot.


The game did have some great aspects to it. I love the sidequests and the license board was great and easily customizable compared to the disaster that was the Sphere Grid. Some of the bosses were tough and fun to fight and the visuals were pure eye candy but that wasn't enough for me to like it. I gave it 3 tries. 2 times where I quit playing because I didn't care about it and one full playthrough. It's just a game I can live with never playing again. I may pick it up again one day and maybe get a new feeling for it but not right now.

The story was good in my opinion--maybe not amazing, but definitely not dull--I thought that the characters were fleshed out decently through the game, at least we knew why they were trying to save the world, unlike half of the other ff titles. Were they all dynamic and great characters. No. I hated Vaan, Penelo was meh, but Balthier, Basch, and Gabranth were all great characters imo, and I felt like we learned a lot about them as the game progressed.

I actually pushed myself to complete this game not long ago, now the only thing standing in my way is Yiazmat and Vayne (cannot kill him for some reason).

Anyway, the story was just...hard to follow for me. I don't get into real life politics for the same reason, I'm not level headed enough to follow what the hell is going on. And since this game is based entirely on, "This side wants this, this side wants that", I just skimmed through the story not giving a damn what was happening.

Aside from the hard to follow story, everything else was utterly stupid to pretty decent to me. Voice acting was a lot like Dissidia, a few awesome roles while all others were mediocre to just plain white noise. Music had some nice mixes to it, but like Cap said, it didn't get me pumped up for an epic fight.

Characters were probably the only thing I really hated about XII after playing it. Probably due to the fact that the main character (or lack thereof), Vaan, had absolutely no development whatsoever, he goes from a wannabe hero, to an actual hero without once thinking he couldn't. Everyone else was the same except for Balthier and Gabranth to me. Balthier had his funny moments and was voiced by Gideon Emery (Ronyx J. Kenny, come on!) and had what would have been an awesome back story had it been focused on. Gabranth was the only character to really grip my attention, though. His back story was mearly hinted at even in the final 'confrontation' with him, but aside from that, he was a character I liked. Good voice, not great, but better than Keith Ferguson by a mile, intimidating design, and a character you might fear after hearing that he's willing to frame his own brother for his country.

The battle system used to give me hell till I started from scratch and figured out I was doing everything wrong. Now, I view it as something that you would do only to waste time, and as slow paced as it is, you can barely do that without feeling utterly bored. I prefer battle systems that absolutely REQUIRE your attention to even survive, with XII, you can set your gambits up, go into a boss battle, go away and fix yourself a sammich and you'd win by the time you got back. Slow-paced is, to be blunt, boring and isn't epic in the slightest. XIII had a much more girpping battle system than XII.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

That is one of the biggest aspects that I disliked about 12, that summons...however I never found the story all that hard to follow, and I enjoyed the combat system, where I could level up, and walk away, rather than grinding for four hours to get a couple levels, like the classics and ff13--im sorry, but 74 hrs in I should be fully leveled up, im sooo tired of fighting the same fights over and over...

Well, I actually liked the summons I always used them in the end of a fight when my characters were wounded and they're just pretty to look at xD (some of them).

The story was good too, in my opinion. It was maybe a bit hard to follow, because my English still kinda sucks, haha.

I just disliked the maincharacter who wasn't a main, Vaan. He had good things too, but like most people said, he had no development. And it was a weird one..

@Zack, come on, man, where's your sense of GRINDING!!!! *grits teeth*

^Adremmalech, I think. He was a fun fight, that was around the time I started actually using magic, never needed to till that point.

The Summons were pretty fun fights, but like you guys said, I just never felt the urge to use them. My characters were much stronger on their own, anyway.

Anybody else notice that the monsters designs were recycled...a lot? Even the cameo monsters were just retextured versions of other monsters. Even the Ultros Mark was a flan, he had the weird, stoned eyes, but he was still unoriginal. And Deathgaze was one of the bird-dragon looking things.

ur talking about monster designs, being recycled....in a Final Fantasy....i should just slap u for that...seriously

Also the only useful summon was Zodiark..cast stone/petrify/w.e it was called on ur self, summon, and insta Final Eclipse

@nemo, I know what you are saying, I was disappointed with that as well, all of the wolves looked the same, humbaba was simply another behemoth model ,etc..but look how much better the monster design was for ff13. Still that was a minor detail imo for ff12, not that big of a deal

They recycled it for all the marks, they could have given the marks their own design, especially the cameo ones. Other than that, I'm well aware of the recycle tradition.

Well FFIX actually had little to no recolored enemies throughout the entire game. Seriously, the only recolors were the Vices and Goblins and there's only 2 of each. VIII was pretty good in the recolor department too. There were a couple repeats but they were hardly noticable.

X was pretty good on recoloring.texturing, they'd recolor some and others, they would alter the actual texture and sizing of the monster. Although, some of the creatures, you wouldn't be able to spot a difference. Bosses were all original, though and that was cool. Till X-2 was made, and they recycled ALLLLL the textures from the first game and just gave them different names. >_>

Anyway, anybosy here taken the time to fight Yiazmat? I really don't have the motivation to fight him, because I don't want to sit there with a slow paced battle system for two hours.

ya, I finished him in about two days, just systematically fight for a while, go save, and come back and continue when I felt like it

I heard from multiple people that he gets stronger each time you exit the battle.

Finished him off in and hour and a half...

but then again I nerd out FF games -.-;

^Nah, you just get hardcore into it. I, however see no reason to fight him.

Anyway, we're talking about why we hate XII, not why the secret boss has really no reason to be there other than wasting time.

he's there to get the final weapon of the game..that can have huge combo's when equipped with a genji glove...more than any katana.

The thing I hated about XII though, character developement...only Gabranth and Balthier seemed to have any

And after you beat him, there's no point in using it. Getting the strongest weapon in the game after beating the strongest enemy in the game is pretty much pointless.