I swear to god, if I buy one more Japanese game with inverted camera controls with no option to reverse them, I’m never going to buy another game from a Japanese company. This lack of customization seems to be very Japanese game specific. Not all, mind you, but enough. Almost all North American games have options for camera inversion. At the very least, I can’t remember one in recent history that didn’t give the option. And FFS, there’s no reason not to include the option! None! It’s one of the primary usability issues in games, and any developers who don’t offer support for it should be ashamed of themselves.
I’m looking at you Nintendo, and you, Final Fantasy XII.
And just to spell out the technicalities, there are two types of camera movement. Camera relative controls, and view relative controls. With camera relative controls, moving a stick left causes the camera to move left, thus causing your view to move right. With view relative controls, moving the stick left causes your view to move left, thus causing your camera to physically move right.
And that’s not even getting in to up/down reversal.
This shit should be an options, always, EOD.
Also, if you are on the fence about FFXII, if inverted camera controls (right moves view left, up moves view down) rub you the wrong way, you’ll want to take a pass.
You get used to the controls after about half an hour. Sure it’s annoying, but it would probably take less time for you to acclimate to the controls than it did for you to write this post.
I think Charles’s point is that it’s an incredibly basic control customization that should be bog-standard by now…only it isn’t. Which is really annoying.
Except after two hours of playing, I still can’t get used to them. There’s a fundamental disconnect between what my brain wants the camera stick to do and what it actually does. It probably comes from playing first person shooters so much. But right is right, left is left, up is up unless you are flying a goddamned spaceship. edit: And even that requires an actual joystick.
I’m sure I’ll get used to them in time, but then all that does is fuck me up when I start playing normal games. Doesn’t change the fact that it should absolutely be an option and it’s pathetic that it isn’t.
Work required? Add a menu item that sets a global motherfucking boolean, and that boolean controls a motherfucking multiplication by -1. Now unless they are sitting on the world’s largest house of cards there’s no reason why they couldn’t put that in, ever. Short of just poor UI and user-friendliness.
I found it very annoying myself (I prefer inverted for up/down, but normal for left/right) and am baffled why it isn’t an option, but by the time I entered the desert in FFXII, it was no longer an issue.
My main complaint with the camera control in FFXII is that I can’t configure the vertical axis of the camera stick to behave like I have it in FFXI.That’s more than two-and-a-half years of habit to overcome. :P Everything else is the same, so it’s just close enough to be mildly exasperating. I was astounded to see there was no option to change it.
No kidding, it’s seriously annoying, especially since it’s such a simple setting. I still found myself fumbling with it enough to be annoying even after a good 2hrs or so. Was getting more used to it near the end, so hopefully it won’t be a problem too much longer.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying to skip the game over it, though, unless you absolutely can’t get used to it.
What’s the deal? Is there some movement to standardize the control? Or does everyone at Square just so happen to have the same preference?
Charles, I don’t yet own this game so I haven’t played, it but I don’t get why this is as big a problem as it sounds like it is. Don’t read that as an accusation or a ‘suck it up’ comment - it’s intended as a serious question. If FFXII were an fps I would absolutely not buy it if there weren’t an inversion option, but how much is camera manipulation required in this game?
Considering the camera is completely manual, the answer is: Lots. To see enemies, to find NPCs, to look around in the 3d world and see where you have to go. This isn’t a traditional camera-on-a-rail rpg. It’s a full on 3d game.
Yea, forceful conditioning has made the camera a bit less bothersome after hour 6. The horizontal axis drove me batty early in though, every now and then I still find myself swinging the thing incorrectly, but whatever.
What’s the deal with the useless target lock though? Holding L2 swings the camera right to ground level directly behind the character blocking all the action. Very worthless.
Also a way to add some sort of zoom function would be nice. Not a fan of spending most fights against big baddies staring at their feet and not seeing the damage numbers clearly. Sure I can sort of go ‘overhead’ by pulling down on the stick, but it’s still no good. It’s almost like the game puts the giant boss health bar on screen because it knows you can’t see shit otherwise with this camera system…
For whatever it’s worth, and I acknowledge that it may not be worth much, about all that FFXII and FF VII have in common is a general adherence to RPG conventions and the name “Final Fantasy.” XII is (at least so far) a very different beast from the rest of the games in the series. You may still not like it, but if you’re avoiding it because of VII you may want want to actually play a bit of it before writing it off.
I’m with Charles on this. I can’t get used to games with inverted horizontal controls. No matter how much I use it, I still have to take a moment to think about reversing it in my mind before actually moving the stick.
I agree with Charles as well. Not only is it annoying to have to retrain myself every time a game like this comes down the pike, but it is SUCH a simple option for the developers to implement that not doing so is like walking up to players who can’t stand inverted cameras and kicking them in the balls.
Thank God I already know I don’t really dig JRPGs, the totally immersion-breaking world-switch whenever entering combat really turns me off. But God, if I did like JRPGs, that would cure me.
