Final Fantasy 12

About a month ago I got a game called Final Fantasy 12, but it took me a week or two to start playing it. My advice to you is to just not get it unti you know you are going to have a lot of free time, because it is one of the most addicting games I have played.

The plot and characters are fairly typical of the newer Final Fantasy games (androgynous 17 year-old boy and his various friends run around killing monsters and people to save other people from them). The gameplay, on the other hand, is what is so addicting. Unlike the other Final Fantasy games, you run around and can actually see monsters (and avoid them or not) whereas in previous ones you were just walking around and after a random number of paces you get attacked by monsters.

Plus you have the gambit system, which allows you to give your characters AI and then fine-tune it. My characters, for example, are set to immediately attack any hostile creatures that they can see, as well as to heal each other and various other, somewhat hard-to-explain things. In boss fights, for example, I just turn on what I call my 'boss gambits' and so they have 4 or 5 spells that they automatically recast after the duration runs out so I can focus on the tactics of the fight rather than watching all of the effects that are on them all the time.

There are some really cheap effects in there, though. Thing is, the game is designed for players who use them, so if you don't, for example, cast bubble on your characters to double their health for about a minute, your characters will be dying a heck of a lot more than they should be. And if you don't resurrect your characters after they die then you will run out of characters in no time during many of the boss fights and possibly even during the non-boss fights (and that would be VERY embarrassing).

It is a fun game though, and actually the only thing stopping me from playing it right now is the fact that I really want to improve my win:loss ratio in Minesweeper (another extremely addicting game that you should play if you haven't already).