RPG Diary

Final Fantasy XII

Final Fantasy XII marks a major turning point in the series for several reasons. The game had a very long development period during which Square merged into Square Enix, and several influential people left the company. Final Fantasy XI was an MMORPG and there was some uncertainty about the future of the Final Fantasy series. I was in college when XII came out and I barely remember playing it. Given that context, I was looking forward to play this game again.

Title	Final Fantasy XII
Year	2006
System	PS2
Developer	Square Enix
Publisher	Square Enix

The battles in this game are probably the biggest change from previous games. First, battles occur directly on the map without a separate battle screen. Second, your party members can be programmed to act automatically with the "gambit" system. You can still override this with manual input at any time, so there is little downside to it. I generally enjoyed the battles as I found it to be smoother and less tedious than previous games. My biggest complaint is that many useful gambits are locked by story progression, which means that the AI is unnecessarily dumb for much of the game.

Characters unlock abilities (including abilities to wear equipment) on the "license board". In theory, this flexibility allows for a lot of customization. However, I found just the opposite — once license points were no longer scarce, my main characters all had basically the same build. Since my characters were functionally identical and the plot never forces specific characters into the party, I just stopped using half of them completely. In my opinion, this is a very big design flaw.

It can be frustrating to acquire good equipment in this game. Almost every treasure chest has randomized content, but some will never respawn. This means it's possible to miss (powerful) unique items from chests in the endgame. In my opinion, that is also very bad design. Some equipment is only obtainable from the "bazaar" — a special store that sells items based off the "loot" you have previously sold. Unfortunately the bazaar recipes, are not listed in-game and some of them require grinding chains of loot to fulfill. I typically do all sidequests and optional dungeons for "ultimate equipment", but this time I only bothered to get the two easiest ones (i.e. no bazaar, no random chests): the Zodiac Spear and Masamune.

I did like the story in Final Fantasy XII, but it will not be for everyone. While Final Fantasy is typically known for character-driven adventures, this game is a political war drama. Instead of character growth and romance, there is intrigue and political scheming. While the story started off strong, I felt that things kind of fell apart towards the end. After Vayne seizes power, it felt like the world came to standstill and the party was just marching back-and-forth across the map. The other odd thing is how the characters Vaan and Penelo seem irrelevant to the plot and bolted-on. Ashe and Basch are much more important to the story, yet they were the last two characters to join the party.

This game has a ton of optional content, mostly in the form of hunts and espers. I normally don't comment on this, but given the sheer volume and how they are generally more difficult than the main quest, completing these will make the main quest trivial. Unfortunately, I also found many of their rewards to be unsatisfying, so I stopped doing them. It would have helped if espers weren't so useless gameplay-wise.

Ultimately, I have mixed feelings about the game. There are some things I think it does very well, but there are other things that felt either incomplete or just not very fun. I did really enjoy the game in the beginning, but by the end I was glad to be done with it — I skipped a fair amount of the optional content at the end. The Zodiac Age re-release makes some significant changes to the game and I am interested in playing that eventually to see whether those changes improve the game.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. This is a tough one for me to rank because of how my feelings changed during my playthrough. It's definitely below Final Fantasy IV, which was a quick and solid adventure. Overall, I think I enjoyed Final Fantasy III just a bit more, so I'll slide this under it.