Good grief. So, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I’ve now got almost two weeks off. Today, we went to Great China (great, see below), and I went biking with Alan in Joaquin Miller Park (also great).

Been playing some FFXII, which is surprisingly good. I absolutely despised FFX – everything about it, from the battle system, general gameplay, sphere grid, Blitzball, writing, characters, the works. I just hated everything about it. FFXII… it’s much better. The best piece of game design advice I’ve ever heard was, “Figure out what your players will be doing most of the time, and concentrate on making that fun.”

FFX’s core gameplay consisted of, “Walk to the red dot. Walk exactly away from the red dot to find a hidden item. While you’re walking, every five seconds or so, we’ll spawn a random battle.” That was just about all you did in FFX from start to finish. But walking from place to place was an absolutely torturous disaster, because of the random battles, and the fact that all you had to do was point your joystick in the direction of the dot.

FFXII improves on this in a fistful of ways. No random battles, for one, which is the single biggest improvement in the entire series, ever. There are a lot of random, and relevant generic NPC dialog snippets. There are a lot of nonlinear levels, where you’re not absolutely required to walk from point A to point B in a straight line. The combat is actually engaging and fun. Finding stuff, as a result of the less linear levels is also fun.

The writing is leaps and bounds better. Where in FFX, the plot was extremely heavy handed, and the characters were little more than ill-conceived plot devices and deuses ex machina, the characters if FFXII are (mostly) charming and well-written. The sole exception, so far, has been Vaan (the main character), who’s a bit of a precocious (obnoxious) twit. But Balthier, far as I’m concerned, is thus far the best character I’ve ever seen in a Final Fantasy. So, that’s a win for them.

A lot’s been written about the battle system in FFXII, and I won’t add more other than that while I thought automating the busywork would basically automate all the gameplay, I’m glad that basically the choices that *aren’t* automated are now much more significant, strategic, and interesting. And the gambit system’s design is quite flexible and interesting, and moreover, unlocking pieces of it actually opens up its complexity at a proper rate, and is surprisingly rewarding.

So, yeah – surprisingly good.

I’ve got two weeks free. One of the main things I want to do is arrange our old “computer room” into a “guest room,” and make the downstars “kitchen” (which isn’t a kitchen, but can quickly be converted into one) into a “hobby room,” where all the music equipment, the PC, and Ei-Nyung’s sewing stuff will live. We’ll see how that goes.

Should be fun.