Quick Look: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

One of the greatest PS2 games!

Nice

Edit: Yeah, the audio quality sounded bad in the original, too. Which is a shame, because the voice acting itself is fantastic.

Edit 2: Forgot how much I love Basiscape's music

Enjoying this game a lot so far! The combat felt a little weird back in 2006, but I actually love how it feels now, after having played games with similar elements like Dragon Age, XCX, and even Final Fantasy XI.

2 minutes in and everyone is already fighting over what combat system is best.

Definitely a Final Fantasy conversation.

Feels like japanese games really gotta climb a mountain to get respect around here sometimes.

I wish this game had a single ounce of heart. Just something tangible I could love about it. But nothing about it stands out. The combat's boring. The characters are boring. The story is garbage. The world's completely forgettable. The leveling system is a huge letdown after the genius of X.

Everything after X just breaks my heart.

This game was so incredibly ahead of its time. It's the best in the series.

@rorie: I think you will have a lot more fun with this version, since you probably played the Us version back in the day. Since you can customize pretty much everything when it comes to classes. So you can make for example Balthier into White Mage, and Vaan to Monk. For the Re-release they even added the ability to dual-class that you unlock after the first esper.

I have great fond memories of this game but i own/played the Zodiac version when it came to EU. I had no idea how to set gambits so i dropped it, but after a few years revisited and i find this FF the best for me.

I hope I have time for it! I will probably wait for it to go on sale, though.

Bought this on a whim and I gotta say its really fun. I did play a little bit of the PS2 version back when it was out and never got too far due to the fact that I was in college. The addition of the jobs is great and its exciting and fun to plan what kind of party I will have.

Saying that you can't drive the car in FFXV really shows how far they got in it haha. That said, I really disliked FFXV. What a damn mess.

What?

I also fnished hated FFXV btw. But as fat as I know you can't drive the car - you can sort of semi-steer it along rails.

Mar-kwis is a valid pronunciation of marquis.

They actually released a patch last month that added a dune buggy upgrade for your car and allows you to take it off-road.

Though I imagine ghosthouse was referring to your very first trip where Ignis will drive for you and there's no way to take the wheel (at least if you let him drive when given the choice).

I would get this in a second on Steam.

The Gambit system was an interesting idea, but I hated that you had to find/buy them.

Brad - "He didn't mark my map..."

Me - "There's a giant red X with a circle around it at the exit you need to head to..."

And now I want to play Vagrant Story again.

Golden tip for anyone else playing this:

You can cycle between Normal, 2x and 4x speed by holding down L1 and using Left and Right on the d-pad.

I'm so glad that Brad and Rorie are enjoying this. It deserves a good chat on the bombcast.

I remember finding the original game so damn boring in both story and in combat, so I'd be fascinated to see how this remaster as turned out.

A friend described this game as "all the boring parts of an MMO"

I want to check this out eventually.
I enjoyed playing XV (story is terrible), first Final Fantasy I've played since the NES/SNES ones.

I'M CAPTAIN BASCH

Ben being a real hater and not the lover Ive come to expect him to be in this QL.

My favorite FF game, bar none. Will definitely buy on PC in 6-12 months time since that's probably the length of their exclusivity deal.

That Basch is so hot right now

That 2x/4x thing probably would have completely changed my opinion of the game if I had that at time of release.

My problem with it was spending an hour or two with my gambits set up running through those extremely bland dungeons, like this cave they started in, and stopping every minute to do literally nothing for a minute as my guys auto attack everything to death. It wasn't uncommon to have a long play session and feel like I only enjoyed the 20 minutes of boss fights and cutscenes while hating the other 3 hours of dungeon slog.

I guess you could say the same about every other final fantasy, but i think the flashiness of the animations and music of random battles helped make it less apparent. And they did seem to dumb down all the battles for this more actiony feel, as shown by Brad not even hitting buttons for that boss fight.

Fran!

Also the judges are greeeaaaaaat.

After reading up on the development cycle of this game years after playing it I realised why it turned sagged like a pudding from the middle onwards.

They said Matsuno left due to health reasons but it might not have been the case...

Ah yes, the Final Fantasy where they said, "what if we made it like an MMO, but single player, and also even worse combat than most MMOs?"

XII is the only main-number Final Fantasy I didn't beat besides III and XV (no PS4 for me). It was alright, but just never had anything that really hooked me.

Part of it was that I loved Tactics, its still one of my favorite games of all time, and when I heard XII was set in Ivalice I was hyped up for much deeper connections than what the game actually had. Also, I couldn't stand Vaan and Penelo was pointless; any of the other characters, probably Basch, should've been the main character. But I guess that would break the long-standing FF tradition of not having adult leads.

I don't think this is one of my top 15 Final Fantasies. It's the only one I ever quit because I was having a bad time.

Never liked this particular Final Fantasy as a kid as it seemed like MMO combat and I believed MMOs to be the worst genre of game.

@alvarofaraujo: The Zodiac version was never released outside of Japan. We only got the base version in EU.

That blonde guy always had berserk and haste cast on him so he would never stop attacking when i played this.

Playing through this now and the 2x/4x speed stuff really makes this great. Cutting down on the needless bloat and dungeon wandering is amazing, especially on a game I've played before. And it works well with the combat/gambit system in letting you push through the cruft and fodder battles quickly.

It's making me wish most JRPGs had this sort of option, or more preferably if they were designed from the ground up to go this swiftly without looking like your characters are on meth. If the Tales games let you go through this quickly instead of spending an hour wandering around a boring dungeon or jumping in and out of battles on the overworld between towns I might actually finish one of those games.

Also I think the original didn't have any of the job stuff as I recall. You could pretty much have every character do everything if you wanted. The job system was in some international release and then the dual job system is new here. Seems to be a fun add on, though locking you into jobs is a little strange since it basically requires multiple playthroughs if you want to try out different party combinations or new jobs.

I'm playing 15 and liking it so I'm going to play this when I'm done. 15 is the first FF game I'm going to beat, third overall (played 6 and 7 for few hours). This QL didn't need Ben.

The markqwez :D/D/D lol it's so dumb

Final Fantasy XII: The Zody Ackage?

I never understood why in this one, they decided to make one of the secondary characters the main character.

The idea that FF12 plays itself is an awful awful meme. Brad beat one of the first bosses doing this but you won't get far letting it play itself.

Once this comes down in price a little, I am definitely going to pick this up

FFXII is the best FF, this version makes it even better.

My main gripe with this game was that there wasn't a good gambit to steal items. I had to do something like IF enemy hp = 100% THEN steal item. Which was far from perfect... Eventually I just manually stole items because it was such a headache.

I just don't have time for 80+ hours JRPGs anymore.

Is Brad correct on the number of jobs per character? because I was under the impression you could have each character to do any job any time given the investment/time put forth.

@professorx86 said:

Two jobs per character, and you cannot change any job once chosen.

I liked the original but never got passed like 15-20 hours in it because the OG License board was confusing to me, I didn't understand MMO type character roles, and I got annoyed with redoing my gambits before and after every harder boss battle.

This new version though fixes most of my issues, I now understand the roles you want characters to play for a party, the new (to me) job system is fun to customize your party with....... and it has to be said that being in HD makes the game A LOT easier to visually make sense of. The original was REALLY pushing the ps2 hardware and detail, and at a low resolution the game often looked like a blurry jaggy mess because of it. Also the game to me actually looks a lot more like an early ps3/360 gen game than a ps2 one, but I've been saying for a while that people really dont remember the first couple of years of ps3/360 well and think games looked like gears 3 or the last of us.