Having nearly finished the IZJS edition on PCSX2 fairly recently (I stopped at Ridoran; planning to continue soon) I can say with some authority that a proper remaster of this game (namely HD textures) is probably going to blow a lot of people away with its visuals. It's a fantastic-looking game upscaled to 1920x1080 and AA'd to with an inch of its life via PCSX2 even with the textures being really bad. Hopefully we'll get 60fps too. There is a lot of really good animation work in this game that is slightly undercut by the 30fps limit.
Here it is running at 1080p/30fps and captured at 720p with something like 4x MSAA. And hot OBS + YouTube compression. There is a summon in that video so click at your own peril. Hopefully you can get an idea of just how clean it's going to look at 1080p.
I think the IZJS edition only choice for the remaster. It's superior in almost every way. More weapons and marks, many quality of life improvements, and an un-missable Zodiac Spear. The one area that I feel vanilla is better is that the player can see all the cool weapon animations just by unlocking that weapon for any character on the giant license board. Remember they had to animate every playable character (Ashe, Vaan, Penelo, Basch, Fran, and Balthier) using every weapon type (spear, staff, rod, pole, unarmed, dagger, ninja sword, katana, hand-bombs, gun, crossbow, bow, great sword, mace, et al). It's simply not possible to view all those animations in IZJS edition as the license boards are restricted to a few weapon types at most. Fran has an awesome great sword animation but you'll likely never see it in IZJS unless you designate her as a White or Red Mage (which you should most certainly do) or a Knight (which you probably shouldn't do). And if she's a White/Red Mage you have to burn a Esper slot to do it. And you don't get it until super late in the game. Additionally many weapon pickups are completely worthless in IZJS because no one in your party can use them. These are minor quibbles but they made me long for vanilla FFXII all the same.
Unfortunately this game is really long and there is a lot of annoying grinding to be done if you want to get the best weapons and armor, especially early on. The way the treasure chests have a chance to yield rare items and respawn means a lot of shuffling back and forth between screens to get that early Diamond Armlet or Gladius. It's a baffling design choice IMO and unnecessarily adds time (hours?) to an already lengthy game.
The good news is that the rest of the game is great once you get maybe 10-15 hours in and the battle system opens up to the point where you're not just spamming Attack and a few spells. The restricted license boards force you to consider your party more deeply and make normal and boss encounters more interesting (or at least a little more challenging) than in vanilla FFXII. The character growth stats are more important as a result but you also get pushed into making more conventional job choices based on those stats. You can't assign Penelo to be an Uhlan (spear user) and expect good results since she has such poor strength gain. It's a little too restrictive for my tastes but the tradeoff is that the combat and party construction is better so I guess it evens out.
All of that to say that this should be a really good remaster and hopefully it exposes more people to one of the better entries in the series.
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