I finished up Final Fantasy 12 the other day. As I’ve mentioned before, I was kind of late to the JRPG party and still have several old games I plan on eventually playing through. 12 has its problems, but one thing it did was get me invigorated like never before to play all these older titles I have been more or less putting off. Ten or fifteen hours in and I was already thinking about getting FF9, Chrono Trigger and Kingdom Hearts to play next. I’m still eager to play these other games, in fact I picked up Kingdom Hearts yesterday, but about halfway through FF12 whatever had me engaged fizzled out and died.
FF12 has a pretty boring combat system, but what got me interested initially is the same thing that gets me into all RPGs, the rich vibrant world. There is a new place, a new set of rules, and a new epic storyline waiting to unfold. 12’s story was decent enough, but there was a distinct change in its pacing right around the halfway point. Coincidentally, or more likely not, this is the same spot I used as my example when I claimed JRPGs are too long. I looked up Wikipedia’s plot synopsis for this section of the game. It consists of three sentences:
Now unable to use the Shard, Larsa convinces Ashe to seek Gran Kiltias Anastasis, who lives in Mt. Bur-Omisace, for his approval of her as queen of Dalmasca. Vaan and Penelo travel with the entourage, which includes Basch, Balthier, and Fran. On the way, the party rescues Fran's sister, Mjrn, who was possessed by manufactured (artificial) Nethicite in the process.
These three sentences describe over five hours of time in the game. After that there is a dungeon, and then another five or so hours of nothing but traveling before getting to a very short dungeon. After that, there are two very lengthy dungeons in quick succession followed very promptly by the end of the game.
What I’m getting at is that the last half of the game time-wise is primarily filled with plot irrelevant traveling and grinding. It’s very hard to stay engaged in a story when there are multiple five hour gaps in between something important happening. Pacing of story is incredibly crucial to keeping players immersed in a huge game world. No matter how clever the combat system is, and they usually aren’t, they will always start to feel stale after 40+ hours of using it. FF12’s pacing very clearly dive bombed at the halfway point and I’ve never been so aware of a developers attempt to artificially lengthen a game as I was while finishing this one.
To make matters worse, 12 didn’t even have a remotely engaging combat system from the beginning. By about a quarter of the way into the game, I had enough Gambits (macros) and common sense to make my party almost entirely self-sustaining. They buffed themselves, healed themselves, resurrected each other and even attacked the same enemies in unison. All I had to do was run into the first guy in a group and make sure I removed debuffs put on me in a timely manner. After awhile I could have even set them up to remove debuffs, but I figured I should at least leave something for me to do. Some of the boss fights could still be challenging, but the monster grind was essentially non-interactive. I’m also fairly certain that with a few minor tweaks I could have taken out the final boss without ever touching the controller.
Without the well paced storyline, 12 had essentially nothing to keep me interested in completing its main quest for several hours at a time. If not for my absurd perseverance and need to see the credits roll before I can deem a game finished (a trait most gamers do not have), I would have stopped before ever reaching Mt. Bur-Omisace. I’m glad 12 rekindled my waning interest in JRPGs (not sure how it did that), but the last half almost extinguished it. Here’s hoping for FFXIII….
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