Where to begin where to begin? Ok let's start at character creation. That is nice, the variations can vary to a very wild degree. Either a normal looking human, or a short mustached lady with an affro. That's nice.
There were different starting towns and each of them had a little tutorial sceneamajig with lots of cutscenes with your character in them. Ok.
Then you are thrown into the world and you are now wondering: What do I do? I swear, even in FF12 NPCs with quests or something important to say would have some sort of notificiation on their heads? We're not expecting a yellow arrow, but how about a whisper or on screen yelling at us?
The main quest line to each area is interesting enough, I guess, but to progress you need to be at a certain level. So what do you do to level? You go and level.
It seemed the major way to level was either to do these sort of mission quests which have 36 hour cooldowns (wtf), and provide no significance to the story, or to the world really. It's more like "Hi, these goblins attacked my wife at her farm, go kill 6". Ok.
The mobs you see on THESE quests will be easy enough to kill. The map will have an arrow to point you in the direction to go. But on your way to these mobs, you will encounter the natural mobs of the environment, this is the funny part. You'll see various animals and creatures, some low level, and some able to kill you in one or two hits all packed together. Why?
After a while of playing it took me a while to figure out the "color coding" for mobs. It seemed that BLUE meant easy, GREEN meant equal to you, ORANGE meant difficult, and RED meant deadly?
But that sometimes was untrue, sometimes you can kill an Orange mob easily and quickly while a blue mob will kill you?? Whaat?
Oh and you can't jump in this game. Nor can your character "drop" from a 4" ledge in the ground, as any environmental structure with x and y axis at a 90 degree angle constitutes as a physical barrier in which you have to walk around. Lame.
Tabbing around to switch targets while you fight is irrelevant. The first selection is always yourself, what if I don't have heals or self buffs? Why? The next is the mob you are fighting, the next is the mob all the way out on a mountain, and it will circle around. If you are fighting 2 mobs, good luck. It is faster to click. Oh but the clicking is not very accurate, as the in-game mouse was very slow. I do believe they are correcting this or have corrected it for retail release.
A good thing is: You can be any class you want! When you make your toon you are told to choose a class, but in reality you can just switch. All you have to do to switch roles is to equip that role's weapon.
Oh here comes the next part: Equipment.
Say you found some really awesome pants while fighting, you want to see them right away? Oh no this game does not believe in instant gratification. You can not just push "I" to open up your bags, you must navigate the Main Menu > Inventory. To actually EQUIP these pants, you can not use the Inventory menu, you must use the Equip menu, where you must select your pants on your character panel which will open up another window showing everything in your bags, you must then (most likely) scroll down and find those pants you were wearing, then equip them.
See, this would make total sense if the game were played on a console. When you are limited to a dozen buttons, this pace is expected.
Can someone tell me if we can create a macro that goes directly to the Equipment menu? How do we set-up macros?
Ask a friend in game! Oh wait, to talk to a friend, you must type /tell (friend's first name) (friend's last name)
Apparently there is an in-game "cellphone" which you can use which expediates this mess? But then again you probably have to open up some main menu, and add your friend to that list and...yeah let's not go there.
Let's see what's next on the complaint list? Don't worry essentially every funciton you now take for granted in games are in this list.
Oh right, equipping items was a pain. Ok so you were a mage now you want to be a warrior, easy go buy a sword. NOT as easy as it seems. The NPCs have no indication of what type of wares they sell you must find the NPC which sells the type of items you need then just remember where they are each time you need that specific class/type of items.
So if you managed to find that sword, let's go and level! Each time you level you get stat points, and elemental points. Seems simple enough? There's Strength, Vitality, Agility, Dexterity, Int, Mind, and Charisma? Mind? What does that do?
Then the elemental points have no indication what they do, I believe they are the type of element you would like to have higher resistances in. At first I thought it was the type of element that I would do the most damage in. Who knows!
Along with the basic "levelling" classes you can also choose to work on "gathering" classes like mining, fishing, I forget, and something something.
I ran out of the day.5.ly quests and decided to do some fishing deeds. Buy a fishing rod, equip it. BAM my skill list now has fishing skills, and some fishing "attacks". (In cooking, there is an ability called "Flick Wrists" LMAO)
You can track for fish, then use your "fish" button. Then it gets really complicated, especially for those of us who over-think things.
"How far do you want to cast your line"....wait what? Wait I don't know, can you please tell me if this is a fresh water lake, how deep it is, what the fish count is and the type of fish so I can better tell if the fish tend to be near the shore, or near the middle? What what? Ok I don't know so stressful umm ...choose a random distance.
"How deep do you want your line to sink"...ok wait so again how deep is the WATER? or is this a percentage or a ratio of the total depth of the water? I quit the game after that.
Graphics: Very very nice, when you're walking along the plains you can see the grass move and the wind blowing dust across the field. Character and mob models were very nice and detailed as well, the movements to the characters had very good weight behind them.
Otherwise I didn't find the game to be able to be very immersive. Not that WOW was immersive, wow is more pew pew pew pew but, there's not much to do at the moment other than kill the same enemies for many many levels.
Wait two years and see. I had more to complain about but I am getting bored so goodbye.
Turby, Klupty's Dog
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