Half-Masked

I’ve made quite a few articles based on the endless parade of mistakes FFXII makes as an RPG, as a video game and as a means for anything other than the annihilation of insomnia. To anyone keeping track, perhaps you’re tired of me beating this dead horse. I don’t know why the worst games tend to inspire a seemingly endless assault of pages from me. I’m sure by now a more positive look at this game might be in order.

Well, tough shit.

The Great Crystal is a dungeon in Final Fantasy XII. It is the most unpleasant experience in a game I already consider to be the worst out of the 12-game series. It looks like a giant poo.

To reach it, you have to first go through a long and boring area called “Giruvegan”. Two “screens” away from the entrance to The Great Crystal is a save point, the last of which exists until the room with the secret summon spell “Ultima”. Acquiring her should have taken a half-hour, tops. But I was not expecting TGC to be the single worst example of level design I’ve seen in a video game. I wish I were joking. It is the kidney-stone cherry on top of this shit-flavoured pastry.

You know how everyone complained that the levels in Halo tended to Copy+Paste themselves too much, making progressing through certain levels a confusing endeavour? They haven’t played Final Fantasy XII. Halo didn’t even have a mini-map, and those samey-corridors are still easier to keep track of than The Great Crystal.

Every room looks exactly the same. This was a half-exaggeration with Halo. Not so here. There are more than 50 rooms, and they are all based on the same room design. They are almost always perfectly symmetrical, so that there is no obvious way to tell from the look of the room to tell which of the sometimes six(!) alternate branching paths you came from(and there is a lot of backtracking). And you enter and exit each one through unnecessarily long green paths, all of which disappear as soon as you leave a room, so if you go back, you can’t tell which path you’ve taken and will end up going in the wrong room.

There are several identical gates that need to be unlocked by several identical stations that only correspond with each other by a certain Zodiac title(Virgo Gate, Taurus Gate, etc.). You can only determine which gate is which, and which station will unlock which gate by getting very close to it, provoking dozens of monsters in the area to rape you.

Speaking of, the toughest enemies in The Great Crystal swarm you, all explode en-masse(which means you don’t get any exp. for a reason that’s probably stupid), and even if you do manage to defeat one or two, they offer the least amount of experience points despite being the toughest enemies there. Then there are the enemies with that stupid insta-kill “Death” magic spell that always works when they use it, but never works when you use it. Then there are the enemies that spawn every two steps, then divide, so you have to go through 30+ before you can so much as enter the next room that looks exactly the same as the last room.

And depending on which direction you go, up or down, The Great Crystal gets either insanely, retina-rapingly bright, or pitch-black. Great, as if I don’t have enough trouble figuring out where I’m supposed to go, now I can’t fucking SEE where I’m going. Oh, and the mini-map featured in every other part of the game is removed arbitrarily, and the manually activated larger map is replaced with(get this) a drawing. Of The Great Crystal. From the outside. With a little circle that gives you a vague idea of where you might be.

Here’s the map the game SHOULD have come with. Here’s what you get instead. It’s not unbelievable, but it is definitely unacceptable.

And all of the room names are written in Sanskrit, so you can’t memorize rooms by name unless you know Sanskrit. I dunno, which sounds easier to remember:

• “Hall of the Slumbering Giant” & “The Coliseum“?

Or:

• “Khitii Vhadraaa Timbuktu” & “Vhadraaa Bithuu Pris Fallopia Flibbity Flabbity Floo“?

And the only save points are at the very bottom and the very top of the Crystal. This is why “Save Points” need to be obliterated from the face of video games. I don’t want to look around for permission to do something else with my time for 5 goddamn hours, and end up inadvertently leveling up my characters 5 goddamn times. Even I sometimes have other things I need to do besides wandering aimlessly in your horrible excuse for a dungeon, with your atrocious battle system, wannabe John Williams soundtrack and overall retarded excuse for a video game.

Oh, and once you do get the summon spell “Ultima” at the top of the crystal, you have to go all the way back to the start, and back through Giruvegan, because no one thought to put some sort of teleportation doo-hickey there to take you back to the start. So now you get to experience everything I just described above, TWICE. =D

This kind of juvenile game design would be embarrassing in the ’80’s. This is the kind of shit I expect from E.T. for the Atari, not Final Fucking Fantasy. Even Bungie throws in a different same-coloured/textured corridor now and then. The entire stage feels like it’s designed with confusing the player into frustration and swearing off from buying Square-Enix products in mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if it succeeded. This, from a game literally bursting at the seems with creative, no-two-stages-look-alike level designs and architecture. What the fuck happened? Who is responsible for this garbage?

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~A.H.