Final Fantasy XII

I was really skeptical towards Final Fantasy 12. The last main Final Fantasy I really loved was Final Fantasy 9. All the changes towards the seires really turned me off to Final Fantasy 12, but I wanted to find out what the hub-bub was about so I decided to break down and finally play it hands on. Despite the slow start, I was surprised how good it ended up being.

What can be said about Final Fantasy 12 that hasn't already been said a 1,000 times already? Not much really. Either way, I did enjoy Final Fantasy 12 quite a bit, mostly for the fun battle system, the amount of exploring and sidequests, rather than the storyline and characters, which is odd for a Final Fantasy game. The graphics were really off at times, the voices sounded compressed, and there was a few other things that annoyed me (Bahamut is stupid in this game, and the Behemoths carry swords now? ugh). The storyline seemed pretty short, and Vaan was an annoying main character. Outside of that I had a blast exploring, grinding, dungeon crawling, buying skills and items, and tweaking my gambits.

I wasn't expecting to put 82 hours into this game, but that's what happened. Final Fantasy 12 had a really big open world, and a ton of sidequests, so the game was a huge carrot on a stick. Once you got one thing done, you'd find a new area or new sidequests, or maybe you just needed 10 more points to gain a new skill you wanted, so you just had to keep playing. This distracted me from the main quest but oh well.

----------Battle System----------
Final Fantasy 12 is a turn-based with very minimal bits of action. The only bits of "action" are the elements of real time within the battle system, no longer are there random encounters that transport you into a whole new screen for the battle system. Everything is in real time and you can run around in any direction you want. You can only control one character, but you can give orders to your other team mates in battle. But that's the only action you can do, running around doesn't protect you from battle though, it won't help you dodge attacks, it's just there to make the battles more interesting.

You can have a party up to 3 people, but sometimes you'll get a fourth party member as a Guest. The guest character won't gain experience and you can't equip weapons on them, but as long as they're in your party you can bring them in battle or use them for sidequests. You won't lose your guest character until you advance the storyline.

The battle system kinda reminds me of Knights of the Old Republic in a way. All enemies are visible before attacking them, you can run up to them and initiate the attack. Once the menu pops up for your options of attack, the game pauses, and this is where you can take your time and input each characters attacks. This is where the similarities end. You can also set your characters with pre-determined attacks by using the Gambit option. The gambits allow you to input up to 12 very specific attacks per character. This almost makes the game play itself, but it's very interesting. The gambits go in order of importance, so if you have "Heal any member below 50% health" first and "Attack any monster" 2nd, then if any character is running low on health, then your character will stop fighting and start healing.

You gain experience and license points after each kill, but no gil. Also the experience will only go to the characters that are currently in your active party, whoever is in reserve will only receive the license points, but no experience. Each character has a license board, each license board is exactly the same though. When you get enough license points you can go into your license board and buy skills with them. Arguments award your character with permanent skill boost, for example it can boost your Max HP by 100 or strengthen your magic. Within the license board you have to buy the ability to equip magics, accessories, armor, weapons or technics. Just because you open that ability with your board, doesn't mean you can use any of that stuff right away. First you have to own the magic or weapon before you can use it. That's right, you have to buy your magic again.

This might sound to simple but money doesn't come easy in this game. Monsters don't drop gil, but they do drop random loot. You can use this loot in sidequests, but more often than not you'll be selling all of this loot so you can afford to pay for each weapon, armor or magic for your characters. I like how loot is used in this game more so than any of the Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath type games.

Since the all license boards are exactly the same, each character are basically blank slates, you can build them up differently early on, but you'll eventually open up the entire board and every character will have the same skills and equips. The only difference on the board are Quickenings you'll find on the board. These Quickenings are kinda like Limit Breaks in Final Fantasy 7, they're just special attacks you can use in battle but they use ALL mp. Each character can learn up to 3 Quickenings. You can also learn Summons, but first you have to find the Summon (they call them Espher in this game) and defeat them, once defeated you can buy them from your license board. Summons and Quickenings are the only unique skills on the entire board and the only thing that separate your characters fighting style.

There's a ton of sidequests in the game, so much that you'll be distracted from the main storyline. Honestly, the sidequests are actually alot more fun than the main story. The biggest sidequests is are Hunts, if you go to any bar in the game you'll find a Hunt board, and there's a list of monsters and their rank. Once you read a little info on the monster, you have to find the person that posted the Hunt, once you find that person, he will vaguely tell you where the monster is and you can go out and search for it. Hunt's are basically optional boss fights and theres a ton of them.


----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Vaan, the brother of a rebel solider. Vaan lives in Rabanastre, a city that was overtaken by the evil Empire during a war years ago. Vaan dreams of overthrowing the Empire with his best friend Penelo. As these two decide to sneak into a castle full of Imperial soldiers, they run into treasure hunters / air pirates, Balthier and Fran. As this party band together in unfortunate times, they run into Ashe and Basche. They later find out that Ashe is the forgotten Princess of the previous Empire, and she goes on a quest to gain the power to overthrow the Empire.

I really really didn't care for Vaan as the main character, luckily once you gain a full party, Vaan becomes more of a background character. While you're forced to use his as your main avatar while walking through towns, he quickly because unimportant to the story, and you realize he and Penelo were more tutorial characters. It's like you're being forced to play as Roxas in Kingdom Hearts II but he never leaves the party. Ashe and her quest for power is the focus of the game.

With that said, I still didn't care much for the storyline, as matter of fact I was pretty bored during most cutscenes. This was also the least story driven Final Fantasy I've played since Final Fantasy V. You'll get maybe one dialog scene each time you visit a new area, and most of those scenes don't have much to do with anything. I was expecting an epic storyline like the original Final Fantays Tactics, while the storyline had elements of Final Fantasy Tactics, it was no where near as complex.

----------Graphics----------
The graphics are weird for me. Final Fantasy 12 has alot of open ended worlds, with real time combat, this is alot different than the previous Final Fantasy titles, excluding Final Fantasy 11. New age Final Fantasy games usually have smaller environments, with alot of prerendered backgrounds, cutscenes, and many other tricks to make the game look really good. Final Fantasy 12 had to drop all of that to make a more gritty game, while there's still some CGI cutscenes, they mostly look like the game engine graphics touched up. Some of the cutscenes are extremely pixelated too. The worlds are much bigger than any main Final Fantasy, but because of that the textures seem dull at times. Despite all those set backs, the game still looks great and looks alot better than games of this ilk. I do like the gritty art style that brings me to mind of Vagrant Story for obvious reasons.

----------Sound----------
The music is classic Final Fantasy, basically what you would expect from a Final Fantasy title. Has there ever been a Final Fantasy game with bad music? The answer is no, this is no exception. However, the voice work is an iffy subject. Half of the cast sounds English, and some sound American, it's a weird mix that works. My biggest grief with the voices is how condensed they sound. There's a weird echo effect that makes the voices sound as if they're recorded with tin cans. It's not as bad as the original Baten Kaitos, but it's enough to remind me of that horror.

----------World Map----------
The world map is completely open, there's no overhead view or dot-to-dot map, similar to a modern Zelda game but much more massive and explorable. You can open a map that shows you each town, field or dungeon, but that's the only purpose. For most of the game you have to walk, but you slowly get better transportation like a Chocobo that runs across the fields, or a Teleport stone that let's you teleport to previously visited save crystals. You'll eventually gain a ship near the end of the game, or you can pay for a flight cab to transport you the bigger towns. There's alot of options.


----------Time to Complete Game----------
82:06:35

The game is a little longer than this because you can't save within the final dungeon. The last dungeon is short, but there's quite a bit of boss fights and story, so you can probably add an additional hour and a half to that total if you include the end credits and final scenes.