A revolution in fleeing
Early in the month I wrote about my first impressions with Final Fantasy XII. I’ve since played it a bit more (up to 20 hours now), and my impressions have solidified a bit somewhat. For one, I’m realizing that it hasn’t been affected by MMORPGs as much as I had feared. It’s very much an engaging, epic single player Japanese-style RPG.
The one change that I like more than anything else, however, is a very minor aspect of the gameplay, yet it is such an improvement. I am referring to fleeing. In previous Final Fantasies, fleeing was a very un-satisfying affair. It was a menu choice, and based on a calculation on some values such as characters’ speed, enemy toughness, etc. (and randomness), fleeing either succeeded or it failed. If it succeeded, the monsters simply disappeared, and the characters exited combat. If it failed, nothing happened, and then it could be tried again, and again, and again, or for as long as the player’s characters remained alive.
Final Fantasy XII, however, doesn’t have separate battle screens. Enemies are encountered directly on the main moving-through-the-world screen. So fleeing is really a matter of … running for your life, with enemies breathing down your neck, hitting you as you desperately dash for the safety of a zone exit, or hope that the monsters will get uninterested after a long chase. This is how fleeing is supposed to be: it’s not succeed/fail, it’s run as far as you can get before you end up slaughtered, and God help you if the enemies have Haste.
January 17th, 2007 at 23:52
Yeah, I’m also playing FFXII. It’s a lot different than FFX and FFX-2, which are the only other FF games I’ve played thus far. I am disappointed that there is no location where the player can watch the previous in-game video sequences. In FFX and FFX-2, there was a place in a city called Luca (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locations_in_Spira#Luca) where one could watch all the previous CG movies and listen to the soundtracks.
January 18th, 2007 at 15:22
Yes, I remember the cut scene theater, and yes, it is sad that that it didn’t make an appearance in FFXII. Then again, the level of technology doesn’t appear to be as advanced in FFXII; although they do have airships, they don’t have motion pictures, which they did have in FFX.
January 20th, 2007 at 10:59
Didn’t Nethack have this, like, 20 years ago?
January 20th, 2007 at 11:06
Yeah, although to be fair, it’s not the exact same feeling. In FFXII it’s real-time, whereas in NetHack, it’s turn-based. You could spend an hour executing the perfect escape sequence in NetHack, but you don’t get such liberties in FFXII.