Some closing thoughs for this weekend in one somewhat disjointed post. Praise, petty complaints, and serious complaints all mixed together:
My two characters,
Nozomi Dunan (on the left) and
Iorek MacDougal (on the right):
I played a lot more and am considering not touching it very much more until the real version starts; a lot of the quests are grindy and we're just going to have to do them again once these characters get wiped.
For the beta, I wish they had offered us the option to start at level 5 or so and skip all the opening stuff. I wanted to try various classes, and experience all three cities, but the tutorial-ish opening quests are only really interesting once. You do them, and then when you start a new character in another city, you want to skip them and just start battling as a conjurer or marauder or whatever. So I only made three characters and only really played with two of them. My Limsan Marauder got very little playing time.
Of the three cities, Ul'Dah with its Rabanastre vibe seemed more attractive than the Eruyt-like Gridania or Limsa with its sort-of-Balfonheim air. But the areas surrounding Ul'Dah weren't as engaging as the fields around Gridania, which look beautiful and are a lot of fun to explore.
Gridania's Hobbitonesque music was OK but I liked the other two more. Battle music is great, and one of the story battles manages to work The Prelude into a battle theme! I quite liked that.
I wanted to play a mage and avoid melee classes, because FFXII sort of forced you to use melee-ers, plus the mandatory right-handedness of melee weapons stands out too much. With the Thaumaturge, you can't move while casting, which takes a lot of the fun out it -- contrast this with the Archer, who can shoot arrows while running around obstacles and getting out of the enemies' sights. I had a
ton of fun doing this as an archer, and taking on enemies that were above my level. I'd poison them with my first arrow, find a hiding spot, then pick away at them from afar, moving and dodging.
The HUD UI is clearly designed around the PC and not the PS3. The dialogue font is much too small to read when sitting at TV distance (and the upscaling from 520 to 720 to 1080 makes it hurt your eyes); at least change it to light on dark! And on the PS3, the HUD really gets in your way. I went into the HUD adjustment screen and moved most of the elements closer to the edges to make use of some of that dead space, and also shoved the hotbar and the stuff below it into the lower right corner, FFXII-style, so that you could see your character, like this:
Is there a way to remove HUD elements entirely? Some of thst stuff really isn't important enough to justify the screen real estate that it takes up. We
really don't need to see how many gil we have all the time, and the experience bar should probably also be on a subscreen. I'd prefer the more streamlined look of FFXII's HUD, particularly when outside of battle (where the HP/MP totals don't need to be shown at all).
Does anyone else wish that there were more daylight hours, or that you could change the time of day in the game like you can in Xenoblade? It's
dark at night and not as much fun to explore. I'd like to see them make things brighter at night, leave a little more light in the sky after the sun goes down, and maybe have more than 12 hours of sunlight per day. It's summer in the northern hemisphere after all!
One more thing -- something I love discovering in games and love talking about: the alphabet that they invented for their world. It was deciphered long ago, so there's no longer a prize for being first:
This writing is all over the maps and even on signs and things in the world, and is a lot of fun to try to read! Already I've seen signs saying NO ENTRY and DEPARTURE TIMES and that kind of thing, and of course the maps are filled with it. I hope they make a lot more use of this; it's great!
![bkTuv0b.png"](http://i.imgur.com/bkTuv0b.png")
