Random Curiosity

I just played the FFXII demo, and wow, it was pretty good. I hesitate to say really good because I’m still not a huge fan of the FFXI style of play on which this battle system is based. You get to run around in a free environment, no random encounters where all the enemies are on the map. Engaging them is actively done, there’s no separate combat screen to go to. The controls are intuitive, the camera is adjustable however you like, and gameplay is fairly fast paced and lots of fun. The demo is separated into two missions, both where you had to kill a certain/number of monsters and then a boss monster. Vaan/Penelo/Basch weren’t too impressive, but their surroundings, a tropical beach, were pretty. Conversely, the Ashe/Balthier/Fran team kicked several levels of ass, but ran through a standard dungeon setting. I was quite happy with Ashe being a melee character (she carries a large two handed sword!), but I guess that stems from the fact that I thought Ashe was going to be another white mage type caster. The demo didn’t take too long to beat (less than an hour), but it left a very positive lasting impression. It also carries with it the full trailer, and an additional trailer (that I haven’t seen before) after you’ve beaten both missions. Honestly, I hadn’t been looking forward to this game (just because I hadn’t been hyping myself), but this demo has made its case for me to go buy the game when it comes out next year. I don’t have any screenshots to provide you guys, so you’ll have to check out GameSpot’s screen archive.

Kaspar pointed out to me that the RSS feed was loading way too slow for certain clients/browsers because they needed to get all of the images. I’ve changed the settings so that the feed now shows only the excerpt (basically the same mini-entry you see on the front page). There should still be a “Read On” and “Comments” link for you to click and see the full entry on the page itself. Leave a comment if you have any complaints/suggestions/whatever. 🙂