Bullets on FFXII, 6 Hours In

--The game touts the fact that the license board allows you to heavily customize your characters, but I'm getting the sense, because you can only reveal certain spaces after revealing other spaces, that most of the characters will be pretty same-y. Maybe some will have more magic than others. I'm still scratching the surface, but it doesn't seem like it'll be *easy* to create customized characters as it was in, say, X-2 or 5 or something like that. I much prefer when the character is pre-defined. I'm not into micromanagement.

--I am six hours in and nothing has really *happened* yet, even though there have been loads of cutscenes. By this point in an FF game you at least have a goal, if it's not your ultimate goal; oftentimes that goal is handed down to you by an entity higher up than you (VIII is a perfect example of this) or your character is tagging along and helping another character's goal (X); ultimately one of the major narrative thrusts is the character claiming the quest as his/her own and making decisions. At this point, Vaan is still floundering and wandering around trying to find out why he's the main character. I trust that there'll be more important things happening later on, but at this point even though several big things have happened, none of them felt major--it still feels like I'm at the first act waiting for the plot to come into focus.

--When "Amalia" opened her mouth, I expected to hear Hedy Burress as Yuna coming out of it...and was pleasantly surprised to hear a commanding, deep voice. I thought Burress's portrayal of the character was wonderful, but I've spent two games with that character and want someone a little more active. Kudos to the casting agent.

--Same with Vaan's voice. I am not a fan of James Arnold Taylor's performance, and upon seeing first screenshots, was expecting more of the same. While I can't tell if I like Vaan or no, I like that Square's giving the characters different personalities now (if not different looks.)

--If only Fran had been played by Bjork.

--They must be doing something right beacuse I find myself looking for hunts and sidequests. I ordinarily hate sidequests and the obscure things you need to do to trigger them (FFX, I'm looking at you.) So far the hunts you more or less pick from a menu and then get to questin'. I like that. It's much clearer than dodging lightning 100 times in a row. Perhaps there will be inane quests like that later on; I kind of fear that.

--I want to hear a Moogle in a cutscene. I want to know what a Moogle accent sounds like. There was one cutscene I saw where a couple Moogles squeaked at the party, and I nearly died of cute, but I'd like to have a conversation with one.

--Why does Square insist on putting a stupid Stealth level in every game that they make now? Their engines are simply not set up for it, and while the levels are never *hard* they're always *tedious*. Even friends who are fans of stealth gameplay hate these levels. Why keep them in?

Bullets on FFXII, 3 hours in

--I bought the limited edition which comes with a bonus DVD in a tin case. It looks pretty, except for the fact that the disc holders are the kind that refuse to let the fucking thing out. I'm terrified I'm going to crack a disc while taking it out. And then I'll write to Square for a new copy.

--There is a featurette on the History of Final Fantasy on the DVD. I personally dont' like the narrator. It's kind of ironic: the narrator has a very deep and soulful voice, very masculine, and yet the heroes of Final Fantasy games are traditionally very twinky guys. I'm actually surprised that they didn't get one of the FF voice actors to do it--the guy who plays Tidus or Vaan would have been natural choices for it.

--As far as the featurette itself, it's oddly cursory in many places. In so many ways it's made for the fans of the series--they go into very brief explanations to the effect of, "Magic and espers are controlled using Magicite," and that's the entire explanation. If you don't know anything about the game, it won't make any sense to you. And yet they skip over so many things that fans would have loved to have seen. They talk about FFVII without even so much as touching on Sephiroth. His name isn't even mentioned.

--There's a series of developer interviews. An old PR trick for interviews is "answer the question you'd like to be asked"--if you've got a crisis you're trying to cover up, what you need to do is not ignore the question but ask a slightly different version of the question so you don't *exactly* admit to a mistake or whatever. But this isn't a nuclear power leak; this is questions about a videogame. Most of the people they interview don't answer the question they're asked. "Tell me what you like best about Final Fantasy XII" is an easy question to answer, and yet several of the people say things like, "Final Fantasy XII is a new game that we made, and we spent a lot of time working on it." One guy in particular didn't even touch on anything remotely related to the questions he was asked. Granted, the interviews were translated, and it's possible that there's a language issue here. Still, it was funny.

--The starting city, which I get the sense I might be spending a lot of time in, is huge. Too huge. Square has not realized that games can be made without load times, and if I'm on one end and I have t do something at the other end, I've got a long walk and 2-3 loads ahead of me. Granted, they're only a couple of seconds, but that's more than what needs to exist. Even pulling up the map takes an extra second or so to load, and since you use it a lot, it's extremely annoying to have to wait so much.

--I was about to get annoyed at the fact that about half of the cast has British accents and half has regular American accents, and my initial reaction to that was, "Can't they keep it consistent?" I mean, what is it about fantasy fare that screams "British accent"? It wouldn't be as bad if they got genuinely British voice actors, but they always seem to grab Americans that can't fake the accent convincingly. I was about to get annoyed, but I'm realizing that the American accents are from one country and the British from another. That's actually a really nice touch. If only they didn't make the actors playing the soldiers try to butcher a Cockney accent I'd like it more.