Reveal Trailer here - https://youtu.be/81NsStczT8E
Will be playable at E3, so we should see some footage fairly soon. The trailer has a little gameplay (camera is closer to the action than most folks would actually play the game with, naturally, but the textures look even better than last time I played this classic on my PC emulated).
Best FF game in my book, right after Tactics and 6 (then four,then the original).
Coming 2017.
I saw this this morning–super pumped! Mostly because a PS4 release makes the likelihood of an eventual PC port much higher. I’m really digging the FFX remaster right now, and have been thinking of hocking my XB360 and moving my XIII playthrough to PC (I basically got past the “14 hours of corridors” part of XIII and lost interest, lol). Having the full set of “modern” FF’s on one system would be pretty fab.
Ok, not bad. I’d put Tactics, 6, Tactics Advanced, 4, 5, and then XII I think, but the inclusion of Tactics and 6 means I can’t fault your list too much ;)
Oddly enough, for one of my favorite FF games, I never finished it. Actually that’s kinda a thing for me. Invariably I get to the end game, usually to the ‘point of no return’ sign, and go back to do the secret sidequests to get ultimate weapons. I keep putzing around and delaying the inevitable, and eventually fall off and never finish. How I was with XII, VII, VIII, X. Basically every mainline FF game but 1,4,5,6.
Ok, so about half of them. Whatever.
Should dust off the PS2 and finish… 5 years later.
Any mention of coming to the Vita? Oh please, oh please, oh please.
Was one of my favorite games back in the day, even though I only got like 1/3 thru it. Been waiting/hoping it would get the rerelease soon.
I actually forget about the Gameboy Tactics and Tactics 2, which I did enjoy quite a lot, but I don’t think I’d rank them higher than 6 for sure - which I just replayed on PC and it really grabbed me and didn’t let me go until the credits, so it held up really well for me.
Even owning a PS4 this is the best part of the news to me and based on them bringing the rest of their games to PC it’s more a matter of when than if. Now if only we could get better versions of the older games on Steam than the godawful mobile ports.
Nice trailer. Even though I didn’t enjoy the MMO combat in the game, the trailer did remind me that I was enjoying the story before the game became a seemingly endless series of dungeon crawls using the aforementioned MMO combat. I think I abandoned it around 25 hours in.
I used to look down upon watching games playthroughs on Youtube, but now that I’ve started watching Tom play games on his streams, I realized it can be quite fun. So if there’s any good playthroughs of FF XII on youtube, let us know. This seems like a perfect candidate for it, especially for someone like me who didn’t enjoy the core gameplay.
Assuming a PC port, definitely psyched to round out my collection. If it ends up being PS4 only, not going to get a PS4 sooooooo…
I have the original for the PS2 but it was a little too pixelated and I remember the camera controls being inverted (or at least the opposite of what I preferred and I don’t think you were able to change them) so hopefully that will be an option for the PC version. I will definitely be picking this up. If it’s at the low price of the other recent HD remasters then this is very much a “shut up and take my money” situation.
It’s really “MMO Combat” in that the enemies are visible on the map and you attack as you approach them. The actual combat is party-based, pause and play action ala Baldur’s Gate or Pillars of Eternity, with the same script based stuff you can set up as in Dragon Age Origins (in fact, Origins probably lifted that concept right from XII). I didn’t like the combat at first, to be fair, when I tried the demo out, and wrote the entire game off for a year before it came out in the US - but by then I’d watched some YouTube footage… which became a LOT of YouTube footage, of folks playing the JP version and I just got SUPER into it. By the time it came out, I was really engaged in the tactical combat, the best the series has ever offered, in my opinion. And such a fantastic tale! So many great characters, the way the game opens up and there are so many things to explore, equip, items, skills, spells, it’s huge and amazing. I’m not sure I can wait until 2017.
I have never played the original, but always wanted to, based on what I heard. This is really good news!!
OMG, that is literally the exact same experience I had with FF13. Got to the part where the game opened up and set it down.
FWIW I did the same thing. The combat got kind of tiring after awhile, but the endless walking didn’t help.
As I recall FF XII had the most promising open of any of the games in the series, But because the CD left in the middle of development, it seems they let the story fall to pieces in the middle of the game. After a while NPC conversation was little more than “go to the next dungeon now” after a first part of the game that had all kinds of fun character interactions. The combat mechanics weren’t bad despite the simulated-MMO feel, and the world was good too, but I thought that like the other recent FF games the character development system was poorly calculated, because you could complete the important part of grid about 2/3 of the way through. It’s of course traditional in JRPGs for some optional paths to be hard or even impossibly hard to follow. But in this game I think I recall it was essentially impossible to take even the first step on the hunt system without a guidebook because to invoke that first monster you had to stand motionless on a particular patch of sunlight in a cave with no hint that this would be necessary. I only went through a tiny part of the optional content before finishing the game, but that was enough to make the final boss battle a joke because its best attack was doing less than 10 points of damage. So I thought the game was terribly flawed even though it had plenty of nice features.
On the other hand if they did just a little rebalancing in this version that might have addressed most of these problems apart from the negligible story after the midpoint.
I’ve played this twice and I don’t know of any point where the story stops being impactful or interesting. YMMV, I guess. It does have the same “the game world is wide open do what you will” after the second half the series had since the beginning, so if you are prone to ignore story elements in favor of side content, it could certainly feel that way, I guess.
Yep, I felt really guilty about it, because as I recall, I was actually digging the worldbuilding, characters, and combat. But after feeling stifled and put-upon by the super-obvious railroad for a dozen hours (I mean, the opening 1/2 of FFX is just as guided, but due to the much wider open maps and optional “fucking around empty areas instead of going where the arrow’s pointing, if you really want to do so,” it felt so much more open), I actually was a little overwhelmed by the sudden shift to wide-open possibility. I really need to go wrap it up.
I really hate this about games when it crops up. FFX has some shit like that (whole systems or techniques or areas that you only really know about–especially with enough “notice” to do anything about it), and I just can’t figure out why–in games that already have every third NPC spouting shit like “Remember to go to the Gambletorium and press Square to get Chocobo Juice!”–they can’t ellucidate all this stuff more clearly and not make you follow along with a guidebook to “finish” the game completely. Stuff like the legendary weapons in FFX, the monster hunting in 12. . . I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t let it bug me so much, but I don’t actually like playing these games with a Guide cracked open on my second monitor to make sure I don’t miss the Gizmowidget XX in the fourth screen of the game without which I’ll never be able to complete the main character’s skill list, or whatever.
Mind–stuff that requires thorough exploration is one thing (say, the “extra” Valefor Overdrive in the opening city of FFX), but a lot of it just requires arcane, unexplained metagame knowledge and really bugs me. I recall this goofy fucking chest in FF12 where, if you didn’t open any of the first, uh, 73 chests in the game, but did open that 74th one (or whatever the numbers were), you’d get a super awesome spear for one of your characters. With no in-game indication of the limitation on chest-opening, or anything to mark that particular chest as special.
There are 4 specific chests you do not open to get the spear, the Zodiac Spear. Some are tucked into side rooms, but there is one in a group of chests on the beach. You can open all the others except this specific middle chest. Literally the kind of thing you could only do with a guide. There are a few tricky items, but most are requiring you to do some arcane thing, instead of not do a normal thing.
I never was overly worried, there are plenty of nearly as good weapons. I’ve always taken this to be the kind of thing that is indicative of the differences in the Japanese and American audience preferences. Apparently this kind of thing is popular there.
As far as the game went I did a bunch of the hunts, and never remember having overly much dependence on guides. Sure I looked up a few things, but I played it at a time where looking up tips on GameFAQs was no big deal to me.
Eh, I love stuff that’s discoverable–but difficult to find. It makes me feel smart, or thorough, or “good” when I come across it. Like a great timing window in a strategy game, or an awesome ability combo in an RPG. But undiscoverable “Do these 17 unrelated actions for 14 different times in 6 different locations only found in our handy dandy $20 Prima guide in order to unlock Doomdeath Megatron” kinda shit is just maddening.
I mean, I get it–design for your audience and all–but bah -.-
Oh I’m with you. I never bother with that kind of thing. I just don’t get annoyed with it, and ignore it as something designed for an audience that is ‘not me’. Same thing with dodging lightning in X, it’s the kind of quest that I won’t bother with. Sometimes I may get annoyed that these things exist, but I’ll never have the patience and OCD to do them myself, but with the Final Fantasy games I don’t care. The secrets aren’t so powerful as to matter, so I just shrug and get some other uber powerful gear.
I mean read the alternate way of obtaining the spear. Holy crap! That is insane! Serious hardcore OCD going on to figure that stuff out. Nope, nope, nope.