Reminder that Final Fantasy XII has some of the best texture work in the history of games. LOOK AT THAT HAIR AAAAAA

This is REALTIME on a PS2

LOOK AT THOSE BUILDINGS

Super low poly but absolutely gorgeous textures, plus SUPER effective use of tiling/reuse

Alright I'm sick so let's see if this decrepit relic of 2002 can get my FFXII saves working with an emulator

Oh man this should be good

Just tried to stuff a gamecube memory card into the PS2

It didn't work very well

So, shockingly, the drivers for this bizarre USB device from 2002 don't work in Windows 7.
Gonna try to get win98 installed in virtualbox...

Awww yeahhh

Support for the new Universal Serial Bus (USB) provides a universal connection for many of the most popular devices like scanners & cameras

Oh man FORCE FEEDBACK JOYSTICK SUPPORT.

Think I'll be switching to gaming on Windows 98 now

Windows 98 install process is surprisingly onerous

So turns out win98 runs like complete butts in VirtualBox and is basically useless. Starting over with XP.
Waste of 45 minutes of being sick

Interesting. USB 3 flash drive doesn't seem to fall back to 1.0 correctly

OMG IT WORKS

VICTORYYYYYYYYY

So to recap: That's FFXII running on an emulator, using a save file copied from my actual memory card using a Gameshark cable from 2001

Getting the cable to work required installing Windows XP on VirtualBox so the drivers would work

Also XP doesn't support USB 3.0 so getting the files in and out of VirtualBox required using an SD card from an old camera in a USB adapter

Also had to rip the actual game disc to an iso because no torrents and PCSX2 can't stream the FMV stuff off my DVD drive fast enough

ALSO my DVD drive wasn't actually plugged into my mobo because I ran out of SATA power cables, so dug out some weird molex adapters

Also I have the flu

Goofy JRPG thing: Providing detailed explanations for why you can't use systems that aren't unlocked, before you know what they are

Save crystal in FFXII says "A strong Mist prevents teleportation". I can teleport? I mean, I can't right now apparently, but CAN I?

There're always these weird artifacts of stuff that's currently unavailable all over the worlds

I'M CAPTAIN BASCH FON RONSENBURG OF DALMASCA

DON'T LISTEN TO ONDORE'S LIES

Man I forgot how good the boss music in this game is

Still blows my mind how completely opaque most (good!) Japanese games are. Massively critical gameplay systems not made apparent ANYWHERE

FXII has an attack that does damage based on the second digit of the minute field of the game clock. Only explained in the strategy guide

And here I am, freaking out about design affordances when people take more than 30 seconds to pick up Aerobat's mechanics

Granted XII is an extreme example, even by FF standards. It's Dark Souls-level inscrutable. First playthrough became unwinnable 30 hours in

DS made sort of a community metagame of learning the rules though, whereas FFXII is more a giant "buy the strategy guide" middle finger

That said, the combat system is SUPER interesting, and can only be so because they didn't go crazy trying to make everything intuitive

Okay, legit gripe with FFXII: I'm like 20 hours in and still haven't unlocked most of the SERIOUSLY IMPORTANT skills

Haste, Dispel, MP-related gambits, mage-build items. Checking the Internet and you don't get them until like halfway through the game

Also healing is super underpowered so building a dedicated healer is mostly impossible at this point

I like how FFXII, being set in Tactics' world, had to figure out how to take the cute cartoony rabbit people and make them all realistic

Went from these:

To these:

Okay major FFXII complaint: Rather than making bosses immune to status ailments they IGNORE them. Silenced boss casting fire spells FFFFFFFF

Using Steal on wolves gives me their pelts? While they're still alive?

hashtag videogames

This dude has a servant who carries his sunglasses for him

So I just looked at my timeline and it's like a week straight of nothing but FFXII tweets. Sorry everyone who followed me for gamedev stuff

In my defense I had the flu

Flu obtained from MEETING OTHER DEVS I might add

Getting back to FFXII. As much as I like this game, the fact that I'm using the emulator to play at 3X normal speed is kind of an indictment

Hacking through normal mobs isn't terribly interesting. It's a problem with most RPGs but being able to fast-forward really highlights it

The game is HUGE, even by FF standards, but with PS2 draw distances the zones are smallish so they have to slow your movement with combat

In their defense, balancing movement speed vs world size is INSANELY hard. Making regular encounters more fun would fix it. Worked for KHII

Classiest NPC around

FFXII does a really good job of spacing out gear upgrades. Gear matters more than level so replacing everything feels AWESOME

But it's SUPER rare. Normally you live off occasional gear drops from enemies, but the major cities have shops where you can buy tons

But the major cities are separated by HUGE distances so by the time you get there you probably have JUST enough money for a full upgrade

Really nails the RPG power cycle of feeling super OP for a little while then gradually becoming outmatched, then re-upping with new powers

Back to FFXII.
Noticed a weird quirk to their alpha blending:

The clouds blend correctly with the opaque sky, but fall back on pass/fail alpha testing when they overlap the also-transparent sun texture

Not even sure what kind of settings could produce this behavior, at least offhand. Might be really hardware-specific?

PS2 didn't have programmable shaders so as far as I'm aware most of the later games like FFXII and SotC were running on pure magic

Wait nevermind. Was just PCSX2 screwing up the rendering. Here's software mode:

Now I'm mad that the lens flare isn't working right in hardware mode because FFXII has the prettiest lens flare ever

OKAY ACTUALLY: After further examination in software mode, the artifacting is still there; it's just mostly hidden under additive flares

So the original tweet is still valid after all.

Anyway I'm sure you're all fascinated by this series of tweets

brb changing twitter handle to "IMPERIOUS MAN"

Can not get over this hair aaaaahh

Look I'll admit I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure that's not how thongs work

Wait the dude next to her has one too

Maybe you can play Thong Pirate in the Zodiak Job System version?

This is like a pirate port and every single pirate NPC has a thong cinched down over their pants this is incredible

Multiple character models; like this is seriously a completely deliberate decision on the part of the art directors

FFXII GOTY

I like how third-person games always have absurdly high ceilings so the camera has room. This is somebody's HOUSE

@AmazingThew Hypothosis: Everyone in Ivalice actually sees themselves in third-person so they just naturally make their buildings like this

Alright it's 3 AM and I started thinking way too hard about Viera feet let's do this twitter

Like sure, laugh at the blatant fanservice of a race that exclusively wears high heels, but wait LOOK AT THOSE FEET

Those aren't sexy heels, those are prosthetic augmentations so her ankles don't snap when she tries to walk

It's like they got halfway through evolving to walk upright and then got impatient and invented heels so they could stand

Which upon further reflection is exactly what we did too? Our feet suck, not THAT badly but they're not very durable, so we invented shoes,

thus eliminating all evolutionary pressure to develop feet that DON'T suck and dooming our entire species to wearing prosthetic feet forever

Also maybe rabbitgirls think sneakers are inherently provocative and laugh at the implausibility of an entire race wearing flat shoes

I'm trying to construct a joke about Square consulting Deviantart for advice on drawing digitigrade legs/feet but it's not coming together

Also how does Yoshida keep his pencil work clean enough to scan and digitally color like that? Mine's always super smudgy when I try that :(

My entire party's at level 50 and they just got one-shotted by a chocobo

More commonly known as a "Tweet"

FEELS GOOD MAN

JRPGs have this weird tension of wanting super sophisticated complex battle systems but ALSO wanting to let you faceroll stuff via leveling

Feels like more open-ended RPGs (FFXII, Dark Souls, etc) suffer most. End up just hammering your way through what SHOULD be technical fights

FFX's Sphere Grid fixed this of course but honestly bringing up the Sphere Grid is cheating since it fixed basically EVERY problem in JRPGs

But soft-capping character progression until certain plot milestones have been passed is a really nice approach. Wish more games used it tbh

GOTY

Dude yes I am all ABOUT wresting Orbs from beasts in Towers

Okay this is just straight up showing off. Orb in FFXII refracts entire scene. No way that was even VISIBLE on CRT

Reminder the PS2 did not have programmable shaders

For tech art stuff it's hard to overstate how much I love the PS2. Just powerful enough for CRAZY effects, but you can still see the tricks

FFXII gets SO much mileage out of rendering the scene to a texture and feeding it back. More than just refraction effects

Check out the edge of that column on the left. Fake DoF by overlaying the scene at low opacity with a few px offset

Running on an emulator at high resolution like this it just looks like everything's doubled, but at 480i on a CRT it's a nice soft blurring

I don't have screenshots, but Shadow of the Colossus faked HDR with a poly grid overlayed over the scene. Each vertex sampled its color from

the underlying rendered image, thresholded so darker colors went to zero. Poly grid then rendered additively over top of the scene texture

Result is vertex color interpolation makes huge soft gradients, which are blended over top of bright parts of the scene, thus massive bloom

And they could fade the effect to fake eye adaptation because they only needed to look at a handful of vertices to analyze scene brightness

Note this analysis may be TOTALLY wrong; it's just based on me observing the game. The vertex interpolation is clearly visible in bloom tho

But, DUDE. Fake HDR with eye adaptation and bloom on hardware from 2000 and no pixel shaders!

All of the voice actors in FFXII sound like they're having so much fun. Like it's all super hammy and overblown, but like, sincerely so

Like just listen to this dude haha. Just keeps getting more and more ridiculous until the boss fight starts

(Spoilers obv)

There's also a seemingly random sidequest which suddenly turns into John DiMaggio shouting at you gloriously

Hi I finished FFXII

It took just over ten years

It's one of my favorite games ever

I played the first few hours at a friend's house when it launched

Eventually got my own PS2 and put probably 30 hours into it

But so many systems are so completely opaque that I ended up completely screwing up all my character builds and couldn't progress

Started over in college on my friend's PS3. Probably another 30 hours or so. Then he sold the PS3 because broke college students :(

Restarted AGAIN on my own PS2/memcard and made decent progress but school stuff got in the way and I ended up not getting back to it

Screwed around with an emulator for a few hours; enough to determine that PCSX2 handles it pretty much flawlessly, but still lol college

Finished college, moved out, no longer owned a TV. Wanted to transfer existing memcard to emulator rather than replay the opening a 6th time

Bought a GameShark USB memory backup cable from 2002 to get the memcard image onto my computer. Some of you may have witnessed those tweets

It involved physically installing an optical drive and also installing Windows 98 in a VM so I could install the drivers to use the cable

This took several days

Ultimately got the memcard copied over and converted such that the emulator could actually read it

This was like, 1.5 years ago?

Been playing it super slowly on and off ever since. Doing (nearly) all the hunts, getting secret weapons, etc

The game's been somewhere present in the background of most of my adult life

It's sort of weirdly special to me in interesting ways

I think cumulatively I've probably spent nonzero entire days listening to the Rabanastre music?

It still hasn't gotten old

Real talk:
If I could be an inhabitant of any particular fantasy universe I'd probably go live in Rabanastre

I will now tweet some more about Final Fantasy XII

Check out this awesome split rendering. However they pulled this off, seems they had to render one side at half res

Another cool trick in this sequence: It was seamlessly switching between prerendered and in-engine cutscenes, while keeping the music synced

Like the music wasn't just a loop; it was clearly timed to go with the animation, but wasn't baked into the prerendered video

And then after the cutscene ended it continued playing through a loading transition and into the next gameplay zone. So flashy

I SHALL NOW TWEET CONCERNING THE ENDING

Mute if you don't want an extremely good but also decade-old JRPG spoiled

I adore that the plot's 90% political intrigue but the final boss still had to go full Final Fantasy Final Boss

One of his attacks is named Gigaflare Sword, in which he blows up an airship and then propels the shredded metal into a giant sword laser

I love Square

Also

FRAN AND BALTHIER FISTBUMP AFTER DOWNING THE FINAL BOSS

GAME OF THE CENTURY

I appreciate that FF final bosses are always eldritch monstrosities so killing them can be celebratory instead of "so we just killed a dude"

It's particularly notable in XII since most of the bosses ARE human, and killing them is treated with a good deal of gravity

So yeah

FFXII

It's super great and I'm kinda sad I finally beat it

But Fran and Balthier performed a fistbump so, worth it really