I got FFXII for christmas and beat it like last week. A solid 50 hours of playing, I rarely got bored with the game and there is certainly plenty left to discover. The open-endedness of the game left me a bit disappointed, mostly because I beat the game easily with lower powered spelled (hell I didn’t even have the most powerful dark magic or healing and I still won easily). The storyline was almost as good as FFX (which I loved). I think Square-Enix could have use more cinematics, but they saved most of the movies for the beginning and end of the game (about 15-20 minutes worth).

The license board (that lets you pick skills/abililties/magic/equipment) is a nice idea, but I found that the characters whom had the items to boost license points basically covered the board. Vaan and Ashe both had every magic, every tech, every powerup (save most of the gambits, cause I didn’t use many, 3 per char), and every accessory. In the weapons and armour department each character had a specialization.

I found the game to be pretty easy though, I didn’t die often (although more often than any other FF game). The Marks were fun to hunt and gave decent money (especially towards the end of the game), however ‘zoning’ to get the proper weather for a hunt was a pain, so I didn’t kill more than 20 Marks. S’ok, cause obviously killing them was not required.

Another disappointment for me were Quickenings, which are basically limit breaks from FF7 (and whatever X had, I forget). Quickenings take up ‘magic slots’ usually costing around 1/3rd of your magic. For the best affect you need to chain them together, however chaining is a lesson in button mashing (my best chain was 7 in a row). I maybe used quickenings all of 10 times in the game. MP is too important to waste, and chaining was difficult.

Another disappointment were Espers. Like summonables from other FF games, the Espers join the summoner in battle (so if I summon the Gigas with Vaan, Vaan + Gigas fight the enemies). The Espers usually did not enough damage and had not enough health. Generally you had to summon one and then cast bubble + protect + other crap to keep it from dying and keep it healed. In the end, not worth it. I didn’t use an esper at all later in the game.

The battle system was otherwise awesome, same with the music and graphics. Great game. I enjoy the fact that sony almost doens’t need the PS3 to succeed because they are still selling PS2 games.

XenoSaga is another series I enjoy, primarily for the awesome intricate storyline. However the team at Monolith had to cut the series short (from 6 or 7 games to 3) due to personnel problems. It is a danger of trying a project that essentially spans 10+ years of development on systems that don’t exist yet ;)

I am at the end of XenoSaga 1 and now at the end of Xenosaga II. I need to beat both because I just bought XenoSaga III. III is the final game in the series now, so I’m a bit excited. However I and II had overly complex battle systems (for me anyway) and II is very difficult unless you find all the hidden skills (which I didn’t do at all ;P). Luckily I’m like 2 bosses away from beating II, so hopefully I can finish it off and start III. However I purchased another game to tide me over. THis brings us to…

God of War. A game that reminds me of Prince of Persia. God of War pits you against Aries, the god of war. You fight evil things and kill stuff and generally whoop ass; as well as receive help from other greek gods. I’m only to level 2, but i’m enjoying the game thus far. I’m trying to finish all these games off before taking a job. A job should happen soon (enough of you know why that is, but I’ll rephrain from posting the details here).