#and with names of places like sochen cave palace

[telemist]

Honestly, as much as I'd love for something like a general level-up for monsters after, for example, beating the game (aka defeating Vayne and taking down the Alexandria), it would certainly be a bit of a toll if you were to try to really complete the game with all the grinding that it might take. It's theoretically good for leveling up but if you up the ante too much then moving through places can become very tiresome and boring even.

I think FFXII does this thing really well where instead of upping the level cap of everything they sort of unlock areas from already known locations and gives them new rooms with harder enemies, bosses, espers and items. This happens in areas like the Garamsythe Waterducts (sorry if I write the names wrong, I only played the game in Spanish) on your quest to defeat Cuchulainn, the seasons changing in the Giza Plains, the new zones in the Lhusu Mines where you can fight Gilgamesh, the bottom floors of the Ridorana Lighthouse where you can defeat the Shadow Man hunt... The game baiting you into thinking you'll enter a new area of the Henne mines from the Feywood, but then you discover you have to have 10 espers and talk to the Garif geomancer to unlock that new area of the mines, which turns out to be huge, filled with new monsters and a secret esper... Sometimes these areas are mandatory for progression and the way it's done they feel fresh and new but also kind of familiar.

The only gripes I may have with how FFXII's map is built from the perspective of post-game completing is:

1. when they introduce that kind of content in an area that doesn't expand like that or that works just as a nexus between bigger or more story-wise important locations. I love the Hell Wyrm fight but I hate that it had to happen in the Sochen Cave Palace. It could have been the secret boss in the Ridorana Lighthouse's bottom floor instead (though I admit that seeing two boss rooms in the Palace after finding the map and only having fought Mateus up until that point did make me curious).

2. There's some huge areas of the game that don't have enough map connections to justify their size, or, if this makes sense, they're too open. I'm mostly talking about Phon Coast and Cerobi Steppe. In the case of the first one, it's absolutely HUGE. Like, MASSIVE in size. And it's maybe not a very interesting place to go through or explore (still amazing though imo), the only relevance it has is that the hunter's camp is there. The thing that I'd mostly criticize its design for is, well, it's vast. Like, really vast. It feels too open somehow to only connect the Salikawood to the Tchita Uplands. Cerobi Steppe is like 3 massive open fields in one as well. There's the windmills thing but that's that. Giruvegan's too unnecessarily zigzaggy but I understand what the map designers wanted to convey with it (and I love the view). Which leads to the Crystal. I'd need a huge new comment to talk about the Crystal.

This Enemy Is Too Strong

So like, I've been playing Final Fantasy XII again, and I've been thinking about in comparison to that other single-player MMO, Xenoblade Chronicles. There's a lot I can talk about there, and I probably will later, but the thing I wanna talk about is level scaling.

The thing is, right, both of these games let you fight enemies that are far above your current level. They just go about it in very different ways.

Xenoblade Chronicles is largely a linear game. You will go to Colony 9, then Gaur Plain, etc. It's a chapter structure, the Switch version literally has chapter markers.

But these areas are massive, you can spend several hours in one just exploring the place. And from the very first area you can venture off and find monsters way above your level. They're just scattered around the place, Xenoblade has some of the most level diversity you'll ever see in an RPG.

And since a lot of them attack on sight, or on hearing your footsteps, or detecting the game's magic equivalent, it means you genuinely have to watch out when you're exploring. Like, this is an ecosystem that you have to keep in mind, and it's honestly pretty damn lifelike in a lot of ways.

FF12, on the other hand, is different. Let's start out with the major difference in terms of structure. Yes, this game does have a linear story, but you have a fair bit more freedom in what areas you can access and when.

From the beginning, you can go to the Estersand, the Westersand, or Giza Plains branching off from the hub city of Rabanastre. You'll have to go through all of these branches at some point, but the freedom is pretty nice for an open world feeling. If you visit the Salikawood early, and get past a boss, you can visit Nabreus and Nabudis, optional lategame areas that will almost certainly kill you if you try to go through them too early. It's a lot of freedom for a game like this, and I appreciate it for that open feeling.

...But this runs into a problem when you get down to the realities of each area. Because FF12 doesn't really have level diversity in its areas. If you're encountering a high-level enemy, that's because you're in a high-level area. If you can't fight one enemy in Nabudis, you're probably not going to have a good time in Nabudis. And, conversely, going back to an old area kinda sucks, because every enemy is a pushover.

If you want to actually play at the right difficulty level and have a good time, you basically have no reason not to just play the story normally. And it honestly makes the game feel more gamey. FF12 just doesn't have the kind of unique enemy behaviors that XC does, and it makes each enemy feel like, well, mobs in an MMO. I can appreciate in some sense, like FF12 is not trying to hide the fact that it's a video game, and in a lot of ways that's really good. But it kind of makes the game feel more lifeless, you know?

In a post-BotW world, it can be kind of trite to think about these kinds of semi-open-world games. Like yeah, it's the Switch era, everything is open-world now. Fucking Sonic and MegaTen have these massive areas, you can't escape it. But there's a lot of room to talk about how to do these things well.

If anybody sees this, which I fuckin hope people do, tell me what you think about this! How do you like these kinds of games to be structured, and how much do you care about stronger enemies?

[xaphrin]

Okay. But hear me out. 

Beauty and the Beast, but like in an opulent, sandy cave palace?????????????????????????