FF12: Epitomic 6th-Gen jRPG content

    It was a fun run, but the early "jRPG-ness" of FF12 finally got me. The game got off on the wrong foot immediately when I identified FAR more with the villains than the heroes. People complain that the plot is overwrought and convoluted, but it actually was reasonably interesting and straight forward. The nail in the coffin, however, was when a series of Deus Ex Machina transformed what could have been a very subtle, morally ambiguous tale into a hard, black-and-white "Good vs Evil" plot line that completely lacked any depth. And don't get me started on the culturally appropriating implications couched in cutesy names and non-human races. The story very much plays on modern World War tropes and ends up with the inadvertent Tolkienesque "it's not about the real world but actually TOTALLY is" hamfisted stereotyping of geopolitical groups.
    Of coure, this isn't always bad, BUT, the character arcs were also 1-dimensional caricatures of tried-and-true fantasy tropes, hewing tightly to their archetypal underpinnings with no substantive growth or individual personality. Not to mention the gross, gratuitously sexual costumes and camera angles. Seriously, they have a character in a thong like its pants. The prim-and-proper princess wears a double side-slit miniskirt short enough that without imperfect rendering elasticity her cheeks would pop out when she walked too. Even the youthful 16 year old female looks like she's naked with token clothing rendered on her, it's so form-accentuating and sexualizing, but everyone feigns modesty by hiding flesh via thigh-high boots and/or a long jacket (with a convenient split-tail cutout to let said cheek-exposed ass hang out). Don't get me wrong, though, I'm all for personal ownership of one's body and women dressing sexy because they want to, but the slow, low-angle, ass level camera pans that make sure to let you soak up every SECOND of hypersexual T'n'A make it VERY clear their attire isn't about empowerment. The men don't make out so well, either. They are all model-cute with outgrown senses of toxic masculinity.
    Now, none of this would have been an issue either, as this is a video game and not a TV show or movie and I'm a grown-up and know how to not internalize marginalizing stereotypes. The Last Remnant is a great example of a hackneyed game that hooked me. That was because the gameplay loop had real legs and never overstayed its welcome. I think I dumped 32-ish hours into Last Remnant, but by that time I had completed the story, maxed my character levels, done all the side-quests, and was muscling through collecting resources for ultimate weapons before the time wastery finally "got" me and I gave up. Because of the way the License Board system and the gil-earning mechanisms work, I was barely 66% of the way through the story line before it was death-by-grindfest. The gear system requires you to dump skillpoints into access skills, preventing you from allocating them to precious stat-boosting skills. And, creatures don't drop money, you only get it from selling junk drops. The re-spawning chest system makes new gear a lottery, as well. So, you have to grind for LP to unlock gear, grind for uncommon value drops to buy said gear and consumable resources, and ALSO for the various spells and Gambit-word unlocks necessary to make the game's central scriptification mechanic work. And, with EVERY character's unique skillset being necessary at most all points in time, you have to cycle your party pretty regularly to keep character levels symmetric. You occasionally travel with a guest NPC, and because of the pervasiveness of status afflictions, I would make an argument that the game would have been FAR more playable with a 4th PERMANENT character in the battle roster, as the mechanics are very rock-paper-scissors, which does not lend itself to the hybridization needed to have a well-rounded utility skillset to handle the constant barrage of illnesses even trash mobs can wing at you. This overloads the central gameplay loop, which is to generate scripts via the "Gambit" system and then let the battles play out dynamically. In its purest incarnation, this battle structure is SO boring that they actually added a 2x and 4x speed-up button so you can rush through the ACTUAL gameplay and get back to the uninteresting story. It might be more fun if you artificially gimp your character layouts into the aforementioned hybrid paths, making the gambit interplay a bit more rich, instead of just leaning on brute force and gil- and LP-farming to build more scripts to obviate physical play, like the core loop seems to be optimized for. Tank-Healer-DPS with the player jumping in with consumable status-healing items (that can itself eventually be scriptified once "Remedy Lore" is maxed) is all it takes to ace the game.
    Now, there are some places I can give it some positive feedback, one being the PC version's reorchestration of the OST. The music is absolutely incredible. It's a bit programmatic, but the pieces are extremely well-composed. They're all mostly either Romantic or Neo-Classical and loop well without being obtrusive. The tracks have a great feel to them and have that distinct Nobuo Uematsu sound, like a Japanese John Williams. My significant other is a concert flutist, and I can tell that the pieces are technically complex and musically rich, if a bit de-emphasized and straight forward. They do, however, suffer a bit from the aforementioned sweeping stereotypes in the story cues they have to conform to, leading to a bit of Exoticism in the score.
    The interface design is quite good as well. There's very little back-tracking through completed dungeons and the merchents and save points are very well spaced. The menu interface is a bit overloaded but it is very serviceable. It comes from an era before the advent of a coherent quest log, but it has a reasonably useable mechanic to help you at least keep up with the main story. The visual design itself is absolutely stunning, as well. It's largely glitch-less on the happy path and the set dressing is quite breathtaking. Even with the refresh, it suffers some from aging, but it has done so extremely gracefully. The voice acting is pretty tight and though the cutscenes can get a bit long in the tooth, they never feel like they're overdone. There were a couple times when my controller timed out from lack of input, but the scene itself felt organic enough to excuse it, coming as a reward for hours-long stretches of dungeon crawling. The map and level design is intuitive but not overly simplistic and the pacing between overworld, dungeon crawling, city/camp time, and story is also well balanced. Indeed, my only real gripe with the game design comes back to the actual mechanical gameplay loop, as egregious a slip as there ever could be, but still, in most games with poor gameplay loops, the general game design tends to be sub-par as well, but this is not the case.
    Overall, I'd say the game hovers around a 7.5 to an 8. To me, I define an 8 to mean it is technically complete but has a genre focus instead of broad appeal. A 7 means it might be lacking technically but has extremely esoteric genre attraction to compensate. FF12 is highly genre and, save for the gimped gameplay loop, about as technically complete as a major studio release can be. I don't think it could ever break the 8 barrier because I would never recommend it as an introduction TO the genre. It's too "in-verse" to allow easy pentration by a genre outsider. Good game, but just plays against my specific tastes.