Final Fantasy XII - The Zodiac Age

[Jimboxy]

Found that tomato bastard, but had to turn it off as someone came over to talk to my whilst I was on my break. 

[bellow]

I like the hunts in this, done about 6 so far, but a bunch of cockatrices have just kicked my butt out of the desert. Should have went in with bigger crew.

[bellow]

The good news is, I love this game. With the caveat that I'm only 10 hours in, I love the world, the combat, the characters, and the initial narrative set-up. Everything, in fact, that I found so flat and uninspiring in 10. 

 

Even the graphics are pretty decent, considering. It just fits for me, because it's largely a mash up of the last 3 great JRPGs I played. It has the beautiful backdrops of dragon quest 11, the fast paced combat of XC2, and the deep, customisable systems of Octopath.

 

These are first impressions, of course. It wouldn't be an FF game if there wasn't something waiting around the next corner to kill the vibe.

[Maryokutai]

The last five to seven hours kind of kill the vibe but everything else is really damn good all the way through. 

 

Glad you're enjoying it though. It's funny because FFX was this new, cool thing back then that everybody loved and has some serious nostalgia for to this day while FFXII was kind of the black sheep of the series (until the more recent outings) that barely gets mentioned whenever people are doing "top FF games" lists. I hope the re-release allowed the game to get some new fans because there's really no reason for it to get overlooked this much compared to IMO inferior fan favourites.

[one-armed dwarf]

Well the thing is that Zodiac Age is such a stunningly good update to a game that was kind of problematic, so it puts the entry in a really weird spot.

 

Not that it isn't unproblematic in ZA, the story kind of forgets to involve you a bit at times and often feels like it was supposed to be a single entry in a longer saga about Ivalice. But I've seen it get a long overdue reevaluation in lots of other places too, mostly on account of the revisions in this version of the game

[bellow]

I'm not going to talk about Vaan 'raising his notoriety' in the city of Bhujerba.

 

I just don't want to talk about it.

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't really remember the character of Ondore but I do hear you shouldn't believe his lies.

[bellow]

Now that I've got more than 3 characters on board I've decided to rotate them constantly for general battles, so no one gets left behind.

 

Feel free to explain if this is a bad idea, and that I should just pick 3 and power them up.

[one-armed dwarf]

Its definitely not a bad idea in this game as some characters are going to be extremely useful based off their jobs

 

Also if someone dies in a fight you can sub another in

[bellow]

Without reviving the kO'd one first?

 

I didn't know that possible. I did try to switch characters during a battle once, but there was a red cross next to the name of the active one, so I thought that wasn't allowed.

[one-armed dwarf]

Actually tbh I dont remember too well, I think you can though? It was FFX that banned you from corpse swapping I think.

 

XII does have an annoying thing where you cant swap a character who is being currently targeted. It's hard to work around cause they could be targeted more than once too.

[Maf]

I just beat the first boss in the sewers and am starting to dislike this game a great deal very quickly. Firstly why does the game not understand less than 50%? When Van has 200+hp why do they wait until he has less than 50hp to heal when their Gambits are set to less than 50%? At first I had it set to less than 30%, but it was basically the same deal where the AI waits far too long and the actual casting of it takes forever. Even when the meter is full the actual casting takes 5000 years. 
 

Also one of the characters got poisoned in a fight, so I manually commanded Van to use antidote and he just didn’t do it. It took me a second to realise he didn’t do it so I had to command him a second time, but I don’t know what stopped him first time. Then I spent so long doing that he just fell over dead and I’m like guys, all 3 of you are set do some kind of healing as your first priority when an ally is less than 50% HP and I’m the only one being attacked. How the fuck did that happen? 
 

That made me so mad. 

 

And also I’m really not in to this license board at all. The idea of being anything less than absolute optimal really annoys me in games so I had a brief glance online and the first thing I saw was you should select the right job that are suited to characters stats. It’s like, man. I didn’t even think of that. Yes, it is kind of obvious, but I was spending time thinking about what jobs would even be good mind about it would matter who has what one. I just thought you would pick a job and then a characters stats would gradually grow to fit that role as they levelled up.
 

I don’t know. I don’t know if I don’t like the license board or I’m just mad that the license board is so easy to get wrong. 
 

But that Gambit stuff is driving me mental JUST DO THE FUCKING THING. How stupid can they be. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Share your gambits (take a screenshot)

 

Also I dont know what thing you looked at but theres pros and cons to lots of job selections in this game. Basch for instance makes a great white Mage in spite of having bad magic. Cause he's got loads of HP. But his heals are worse.

 

Only exception is Balthier and the gun job. Dont give Baltheir the gun job cause his animation timings are longer. The gun guy is bad at guns

 

Also the license board for each jobs will give stat bonuses corresponding to the specific job, so your character will eventually fulfill that role but be stronger/weaker at certain aspects. Then when you come to choose your second job you can choose to cover that weakness, or emphasise the strong parts more. The difference between party members isnt the be all end all

[bellow]

@MafThere is an action bar that needs to fill, so things that you manually input mightn't work straight away, or you could pick a character to do something who has a near full action bar. I chose 'wait' in the options so that the action freezes while you decide what to do.

Plus your character might have reached 50% health when everyone's action bar is depleted. So, obviously, you'll have to wait, and probably take another hit while you do.

[one-armed dwarf]

It's hard to know what's going on without seeing a video or something. I dont really recall how the actions get queued but the AI is something the player themselves control. If characters are tardy at healing then often it is good to have one character who has like a less than 70% gambit for a spell cast (so you ate anticipating more dmg will be taken by the time it lands), then give a less than 40/30 whatev to a melee character to throw an instant healing item on someone.

 

Basically to not have a bunch of them all just healing at once, cause that's overhealing which means mobs live longer cause you arent hitting them and they do more damage which means more healing etc.

 

I mean I main a healer in XIV so I'm pretty good at this ?

[Maryokutai]

Generally speaking the Gambits don't mess up. If you think you set someone up to heal party members who are below 50% as their first priority and they're not doing that then they're either dead, turned to stone, don't have any MP anymore or you made a mistake setting up the Gambit. There's no other explanations. If they can heal and are set to heal, they heal. It's black and white.

[Maf]

It was happening all the way up the first boss battle where Vaan would get to like 15 or 12 hit points before people started healing so I had to jump in and just use potions manually. Then when I was in the boss fight I don’t know what happened with the antidote, but everyone again just kept waiting too long and while I was preoccupied fucking around with menus Vaan just dropped and it’s like guys. Really.

 

The sewer bit after that was bullshit as well. Despite having gambits on I just had to use Vaan as a healer because switching characters is so clumsy in this game, I just kept using potion after potion in fights until I realised that MP in this game is restored by running around so every time the gimmick wasn’t happening I just ran around in circles and then used my healer to juice everyone up. Also in the sewer you get lumbered with this incredible liability until he picks up a sword and then he becomes a god and the sewers were a breeze. Once you have 4 characters that can attack it was back to easy street.

 

I haven’t picked jobs for anyone yet, but I started just spending Points in Vaan’s board because I’ve already picked it so he might as well start getting extra health and defence boosts. I’m gonna eat and then look up a character building guide and just follow that because I don’t really care at this point. The first 2/3rds of playing it today was really annoying and the second was really boring. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Your gambits are set wrong because none of that really makes much sense. The gambits are a binary system. It's all boolean logic, true or false

 

Or you are underlevlled from not spending points for that fight and are going from 90 to 30 % hp or something.

[Maf]

Oh, so I should add the girl who casts cure I changed her Gambit to <70% and she started going nuts and non stop healing all the time. That is what made me realise MP is regained from running around because she burned all her MP in a fight and I was like well that sucks. And then when I was running to the next bit she cast cure on someone and I was like what. 
 

I then turned her back down to <50% because I got bored of running around in circles after every fight but then had to resort to using potions again. 
 

Also the fact that they don’t seem to realise “ally” as “self”...like, yeah, literal meaning is only heal allies but c’mon. Heal yourself as well. You are an ally.

 

EDIT: Also, also. Why Vaan’s automatic attack keeps switching targets I can’t work it out. I don’t want to have to press buttons, I’m to disinterested to get involved I just want to walk him in to enemies and he deals with it. But I was fighting these Flan things and my party was doing 8hp damage at max so they were kicking our ass. And instead of concentrating on one guy until he was dead Vaan just constantly changes targets all the time. Do 8hp to this guy, do 8hp to that guy, back’n’forth. I know it’s because I’ve got his gambit on attack nearest enemy but the only other solution is to have it set to attack the enemy I select and I just can’t be bothered. Just pick one and auto attack it

[one-armed dwarf]

Huh, looks like Bellow was the pro gamer after all

 

Because I'm a helpful dwarf check this shit out @Maf

 

 

(Almost) all of these gambits will target one target consistently because it is based off of hard coded stats and not variable parameters like how far away they are

 

Here you probably want lowest defense so you can kill things more quickly, or highest attack so you can mitigate damage to the party or something  like that maybe.

 

Or maybe just set it to lowest current HP, if it's all a bunch of flans. But flans need to be magicked away anyway.

 

The gambit system is a perfectly expressive tool that will do whatever you want it to so long as you take the time to learn its language*. You cant just brute force this system

 

 

*except steal macros. It is impossible to write the perfect steal gambit ?