I have been a fan of Final Fantasy since I first convinced my wealthier than I am friend to purchase Final Fantasy 2 from Montgomery Ward's (which probably isn't even a store anymore) back in the early 90's. The idea behind this puchase, which was probably only $25 or so at the time was that if the game sucked (and the graphics did NOT look good on the package) was that if the game was terrible, I would owe him the money for the game.
It turned out to be both of our favorite game for about a year and I have been a die-hard fan ever since.
Things have changed as far as my opinion of Final Fantasy games are concerned in the past 5 years as I think they are just cranking out garbage title after garbage title and milking the Final Fantasy name for as long as they can. People are still buying it based on the name alone so why would they ever change?
I have ranted about that many times in the past so in case you missed any of those just know that for the first time in my life, I will be skipping any future releases of Final Fantasy games that are released.
That being said, I think that Final Fantasy 12 was probably my favorite that I ever played in the franchise.
The reason for this is the fact that they incorporated turn-based and real time into a form that I feel they should have stuck with. It was more turn-based than real time, but it was only as "turn-based" as you wanted it to be as the action would keep going if you didn't feel like pausing time. In fact, the hardcore players do runs on the game that they never stop time and it is a pretty impressive feat to witness, if you are into that sort of thing.
Anyway, there were a bunch of optional bosses in the game if you wanted to get to 100% completion and when you consider that this was kind of before we had achievement systems, getting it done took a bit of research on your part. One of these optional bosses was named Yiazmat and it was just a stupid battle.
He was a dragon looking thing with 3 drone-looking spirals on his body. He also was so huge that he took up almost the entire arena that you encounter him in and this is the first thing that made this encounter a bit of a pain in the ol' backside. Not that any of that really mattered since in FF12 dodging attacks based on proximity wasn't really an option anyway - this is something they tried (and failed with as far as I am concerned) in future releases of the franchise.
The thing that made Yiazmat such a silly opponent is the fact that he attacks would one-hit kill you, but only one of your party members at a time. Seeing as how you encounter him so late in the game, the cooldown on your abilities were so fast that it was a mathematical certainty that you were going to be able to resurrect whoever got downed to full health before he had any chance of downing all of you... well, provided that you aren't a complete nonce anyway.
The second thing that made Yiazmat so annoying was the mandatory animation sequences that would come with his (or her?) major attacks. They were in excess of 10 seconds long and most of them, if you prepared for the fight even slightly with protect or shell defenses did almost no damage to you anyway. The worst one of these that I can recall was called "White Breath" and it was meant to do high damage and also cause status effects but once again, if you set up your AI properly and had the gear, all of these status effects were meaningless because you would immediately negate them.
The worst part about this battle was that Yiazmat had an absolutely absurd HP pool. He had 50 MILLION hit points. This was such an astronomical amount of HP that it couldn't possibly be represented at a health bar on the screen but instead was a full health bar with 50 or so little dots below it to indicate how many times his health bar was going to reload.
This fight was basically just a long and drawn out battle that was nearly impossible to lose unless you just got bored and stopped paying attention to what was going on... which was easy to have happen to you since even the best speed runs I have seen out there normally take over 30 minutes. For most people this takes over 2 hours.
This would be all fine and dandy if the reward was something really awesome but instead the reward is an item needed to create a sword that is almost certainly not even as good as the one you had when you went in to face him in the first place.
I get it, this battle was totally optional but it just kind of goes to show that Square Enix sometimes just doesn't GAF anymore when it comes to their content. They could have given him a reasonable amount of HP and made his attack patterns a little less predictable and easy to counter but nah... why bother with that? Let's just make him have such an absurd HP pool that most players wont even bother with the fight..
It is worth noting that in later re-releases of this game post PS2 that his HP pool was drastically reduced but do you think they altered his very predictable attack-patterns? Nah... they didn't do that.
Does that sound like good game design to you? Because it doesn't to me