The project just started today and is at 1/6 of its normal goal.

Yeah, I really don't think many of the stretch goals are going to be a problem :P

Haha, yeah, I'm pretty confident that it'll get there, but I'd be totally heartbroken if that Sakimoto one isn't reached. :C

My god, my favorite game designer is making his own thing! I totally just backed this! We need to get the word around.

Hey, are you implying that FF12 wasn't a good game?

That Kickstarter does look pretty interesting though :o

Gonna be honest; FFXII fell well below my expectations. I don't think it's an awful game, but with that dev team's pedigree, all the promotional stuff and the Famitsu 40, I had extremely high expectations, and the game just didn't get there for me. When a third of your main cast could be cut from the game with pretty much no consequence, that's a problem, especially when one of those is supposed to be your main character. I felt like it was lacking a strong overarching story for your main characters, as well, instead being more of a "point A to point B", and now that we're at point B, something comes up, so let's go to point C. I feel like there were still tons of strong story sequences in the game, ("You wear the mummer's motley well, Bergan!") but almost all of them happen behind the scenes with the villains and is kind of a substory going on that's mostly divorced from your main quest. Mechanically, I thought the game was fine, although the license board was just a more homogenous sphere grid, but they did fix that somewhat in Final Fantasy XII International Zodiac Job System.

Aaaaanyway, I could ramble on about it forever, so I'll just stop, lol.

I played the game well after it was released (like 2008-ish) so I don't really know how all the hype went down.

I actually felt the overarching story was very strong, stronger than the individual stories for each of the characters (within which I think is the problem most have with the story - the individual characters' stories aren't as strong). The overarching plot was very political with the relationships between the Archadian and Rozarrian empires and the smaller political machinations going on within the Archadian empire that we were shown throughout the game. For example, the relationship between Cid and Larsa juxtaposed with the attitude of Vayne and the rulers of Rozzaria. All of that tied back to the main characters because Dalmasca was sandwiched between the two empires as a casualty of war, even though that wasn't emphasized as strongly as I would have liked.

I liked that there was plenty of plot events that happened without the main characters. It gave me the sense that the world is bigger than just the six guys you control: that they aren't all-important, that the big and powerful aren't just going to sit around and wait for the heroes to show up. It made the story more complicated than most games and not in a bad way.

As for the bit of "point A to point B"... well you just described every Final Fantasy game, perhaps even every adventure game in existence.

I've never played the International Zodiac version, so I can't comment on that, all I know was that the 'classless' combat system was enjoyably customizable and gave players a large amount of control. The gambit system was also interesting and is actually somewhat educational as it teaches players how do/while loops and if/then conditionals work in programming, though I'm sure the developers didn't intend to be teachers :P

Here's my problem with that; there are definitely lots of cool parts of the story, but, like you mentioned, it's all to do with Rozarria and Archadia. While that's all well and good, where the meat of it needs to be is with the main cast, but it isn't. When I was talking about the overarching story, I meant the one that I felt was missing with your playable characters. There really wasn't much of an arc there, other than "trek halfway across the continent for this stone, trek halfway across the continent for this sword," etc. I never really felt like I was accomplishing much in that story, because all the really cool stuff that was happening was happening elsewhere, and the stuff you end up doing was just really quite boring. If you look at the stories for Matsuno's other works, you see similar things, where the story focuses a lot on a lot of politics and complex character interactions outside of just you or your group, but the stuff that happens to you and your group is also compelling; the other stuff is just icing on the cake, instead of icing on the empty plate. I just couldn't bring myself to care about the main quest, and I feel like that should have been the thing I was most invested in. Honestly, the main story only picked up for me in a big way when you meet the Occuria, but by that point the game is practically over.

It's true that the "point A to point B" stuff, when you boil it down to that, is true of the other games, but I guess it's sort of a subjective "feeling" thing for me. I just never felt like it was anything more than a series of fetch quests, whereas a lot of the other Final Fantasy stories felt like a lot more than that. Like you said, the individual character arcs were not great or not fleshed out fully, and I feel like that might have been responsible for a lot of the difference. The characters in XII hardly develop at all over the course of the story, and I think the point some time near the end, I think on Bahamut, where Vaan makes that friendship speech is where it stuck out the most for me. I didn't even really get the feeling that they were friends; they never really bonded much.

I really did like the gambit system; after being frustrated by horrible NPC AI, it was really refreshing to be able to program your own AI to make them work the way you want. I had no problems with it, really. The license board I felt was an issue. Sure you have a lot of control over how you customize your characters, but the problem is there's no real limitations, so you just end up being good at everything and taking every license at the end. Even though it's just a game mechanic, I feel like you lose a lot of the identity of your characters when they all just play the same. Past Final Fantasies that had homogenous character growth at least left some defining features to your characters, (such as unique abilities, different equipment choices, or limit breaks) but the Quickenings all worked the same and were only visually different, and there wasn't really any other game mechanics other than barely noticeable base stat differences. I also just left like the license board was ridiculous, because, like... what, I need a license to wear this hat? Why? Are the judges going to come after me? Oh wait, they already are coming after me. Why do I care again?

I understand what you're saying now and I can see why it would have bothered you. Even though I noticed the story was lacking in places, it never bothered me enough to detract from my enjoyment of the game.

I totally understand what you mean about the homogenous character growth, the game worked in a way so that you could pick your favorite 3 characters at the beginning of the game and just stick with them without ever feeling the need to change. However, I think that if they gave powerful incentives to use your other party members, the game would quickly become a grind-fest to keep all your characters around the same level, unless they revamped the way that experience worked.

Heh, the license board did have a silly conceit, but I only played FFXII after playing a bit of FF Tactics Advance and after the way that judges worked in that game, nothing really surprised me :P

Yeah, it can be a very subjective thing! I think my biggest problem was that I let myself get overhyped before the release and ended up expecting a perfect game, so I had a really tough time looking past anything that I found lacking. As a rule of thumb, I try to prevent myself from building unrealistic expectations, but because Matsuno never did me wrong, I got ahead of myself, lol.

It's funny that you mention the FFT:A judges, because I actually thought they did a pretty good job explaining those away, haha. They kind of make sense when you think about the fact that you're sucked into a fictional world within the book that emulates a video game, and that they're bound to only act upon the laws, so they can't really interfere in any of your fights in any other way. And the laws are suuuuper ridiculous and arbitrary, but they give a nod towards that by having characters even mention that the laws are pretty fucking dumb and they're that way cuz Prince Mewt is a bratty little kid who just likes to fuck with them, lol.

Oh, it kinda made sense in that world, but when I actually thought about it, it was just so silly :P

It was pretty funny to have the characters in the game realize just how silly they were too, heh. It always struck me as strange that the two games supposedly take place in the same world, Ivalice, but the judges were so vastly different, going from real people to magical entities to real people again (I remember in FFT:A2 there was someone who was a former judge, but my memory is a bit fuzzy about that). It kinda confused me.

Haha, yeah, video game logic can get pretty nuts sometimes!

I FUCKING WISH i could throw money for it ;-; i frigging loved FF XII/ FF Tactics (specially this one XD) and even vagrant story * -*!! cant wait to see how this tactical RPG works out