Rating of
2.5/5
Yeah, I said it: Episode VI
Jonzor - wrote on 01/29/12
There used to be a time when a Final Fantasy game was a video gaming one-night stand. You played the game, met the characters, saved the world, and never called them back.
Now, replaying Final Fantasy III slash VI a hundred times in my life sort of destroys the metaphor, but you know what I mean. There were no more extra adventures, no "What happened next?", and no returning villains. Whenever someone said that they'd like to try the Final Fantasy games but doesn't know the story so they'd just be lost, you could say, "No, that's the thing, they're all different. New story, new characters, new everything in each game."
Not anymore. Apparently Square Enix has decided that if they can't make good games, they can at least make MORE games. So let's do sequels for every Final Fantasy game except the best one.
This time, however, instead of making another mediocre RPG/Barbie dress-up adventure, or a CGI movie follow up, Square picked a Real-Time Strategy game to deliver the adventure to us.
I have a rule about playing RTS games on a console. That rule is: Never play RTS games on a console. Now, I'll grant that the stylus and touch screen makes this a lot less console-y, but then putting it on a portable grants other issues you then have to deal with.
The biggest problem with playing an RTS on a console is lack of ability to micro-manage your units. Games like Halo Wars tried to compensate for this by reducing the need for micro-managing (also know as dumbing the entire game down). Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings hoped that having a stylus would give you more precise control. Which is does, but the problem NOW is that you have precise control over a jumbled mess. A chaotic blob mashed together in the middle of the screen created by what used to be two groups of combatants charging at each other with all the grace and precision of one of those old-timey football games with the vibrating tabletop that moved guys around the board.
You can thank the small screen for this. An RTS played on a PC has at minimum a 1024 x 768 screen (and more realistically something like 1280 x 800) to draw all this action. The Nintendo DS has a whopping 256 x 192. It's just not enough space for an RTS. There are some panels at the top of the touch screen you can use to select a group of units and eventually a single unit, but sometimes that's just not good enough.
Because the game doesn't plan on you taking that much time to do things. The heat of battle moves quickly enough that having to do that much work to select something you want (in the event you can't just poke it with the stylus) that it gets frustrating. Each of your main characters has a number of special abilities, many of which are pretty useful, but firing them off in battle gets hard because by the time you call up the ability, the window of maximum usefulness may have passed.
The gameplay isn't a complete loss, though. You'll pick 5 characters to take into battle, and during the battle you'll be assigning a variety of monsters to each character. After the level is over, new monsters are unlocked by gaining points as you complete missions, then spend those points as you choose from several available monsters. These monsters range from run-of-the-mill monsters you'll encounter a hundred times to powerful summoned monsters you're bound to recognize like Ifrit, Shiva, or Odin. Sadly, you're only limited to one of these more powerful monsters on the board at a time.
Before battle starts, you'll see the enemies you'll be facing and their stats. This allows you to plan ahead of time to maximize the effectiveness of the roster you'll have to set before battle starts. You'll be limited to 5 monsters for any battle, and you can mix and match between all the available monsters. The game has a paper-rock-scissors system for ranged, flying, and melee monsters, and then elemental strengths and weaknesses to keep in mind as you set a roster.
On that note, what's the deal with RPGs lately and "recruiting monsters"? Is this still from the Pokémon thing? What makes developers assume that instead of developed, fully-realized characters that the story gets me to care about I'd rather have mindless drones I've picked up off the street and outfitted with shock collars?
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
Final Fantasy XIII-2
That's just what I came up with in 30 seconds. I'm sure there's more from the past 3-4 years. The real question would be "How many of them will be sequels?"
Oh, you know what's great? You'll have a character WITH lines and a story who wears a shock collar in this game.
The main characters will level up and learn new abilities as you complete missions, and you'll find new equipment as well, so some familiar RPG mechanics are there, though they're simplified because this isn't just a straight RPG.
There is a fair number of side-missions to play during the course of the game. Your central hub has a board of odd jobs to be taken care of, and selecting a task simply warps your team to the area and the mission begins. It saves a fair amount of aimless walking around to have all these missions consolidated in one place. Finishing these will unlock other, powerful monsters or special attacks for your characters. These are more than likely needed to finish the game anyway, since some levels are fairly difficult. Whether or not that's due to the poor controls could be debatable. Some extra content isn't beatable until you're around level 99, which I didn't get to because doing nearly all of the game's content (my final completion was 88%, according to the game) put me around level 56, and that's WITH probably 10-12 hours of JUST level-grinding to beat some more difficult missions. Woe to the person sad enough to GRIND (because that's what you'll be doing) about 40 more levels up to level 99 so you can complete 100% of the game.
The story in the game was... pretty good, I guess. Fairly standard fare for Final Fantasy. Ancient evil, a few plot twists, blah blah blah. On the whole, I felt like it suited the game pretty well, it just didn't blow me away. It was nice to see the gang from Final Fantasy XII get back together, but I think if I hadn't played that game before this one I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much.
The final time on the game came in at around 30-35 hours, which is pretty long for a portable game. Probably a tad too long for my taste, but that's due more to the mediocre gameplay than anything else. Which is essentially true for probably any of the problems this game has. Between the poor gameplay and the watered-down RTS and RPG mechanics, this game suffered from either being ON the DS or the fact that the developers decided since it was on a portable they wouldn't try and flesh out the game. It's like being on a portable actually caused them to lower their standards. I get that lower horsepower means the graphics aren't as good... but not EVERYTHING has to get thinned out just because the game was on a portable system.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is the first game I've ever played that was significantly held back simply because it was on a portable console.
Yeah, I said it.
