Final Fantasy XII review (PlayStation 2)

It’s no secret that I’m a bit of a Final Fantasy fanboy. I pre-ordered this game as soon as it was possible, last June, and after the ridiculous wait, and numerous over-excited mornings waiting for the post to arrive the latest in the hugely successful franchise is with me. I already know pretty much what to expect (aside from a six month wait since the US got it and even longer since Japan dipped their toes in the pool of Final Fantasy), a sweeping epic storyline, an enormous world to explore and more secrets to discover than an episode of Lost.

Final Fantasy is one of the most prevalent RPG series around, with its Phoenix Downs and Ethers being an accepted language in gaming. Levelling up to progress past the next boss, and generally exploring to find the next most powerful weapon are classic elements of the series, but where its turn based history comes to a stop, Final Fantasy XII has thrown a few spanners into the works. Appearing as a single player styled MMORPG, the battle system throws away the random encounter systems of old (whereby you would be whisked away into a battle location at various points traversing dangerous environments) and introduces the chance to see all the enemies around at any point, and choose which to approach. While the technical side of having party of characters to control, reviving, curing, and attacking all remains consistent with the series, the game certainly takes its new direction to a level further than expected.

It’s all about fighting

Theoretically, if you were patient enough, you could control your characters in a similar way to the previous games, as they all respond to commands you can give them mid-battle, but the real trick to the game’s battle system resides in the all new ‘Gambit’ system. It is basically a method to design your characters’ behaviours without having to tell them each time, and takes the form of ‘scripting’ commands in the menu. These commands can take the form of concepts from ‘If any party member falls below 50% health then use Cure spell on them’ to ‘Attack the nearest enemy’, and the order in which the commands are placed shows their importance. The series of commands can become rather complicated, with status effects, MP, enemy health and a ridiculous amount of other commands at your disposal, but while this does allow you to customise your party, it can lead to a lot of autopilot battles, removing a lot of the feeling of skilful disposal of enemies. I have had boss battles that have been won by starting the battle and letting my characters ‘do their business’, and while this shows skilful use of Gambits, it isn’t as much fun as choosing each attack command by hand.

Since you can now see exactly where each enemy is, at early points in the game (or just with tricky enemies) it becomes a skill to run close enough to an enemy to draw them towards you, then run away, leading them into a quiet area where you don’t fear being attacked by any more enemies as you kill the first one. Equally, put the other way, if you find yourself fighting an enemy you can’t seem to beat, rather than simply running from the battle, you must flee manually, and hope not to run into any other monsters in your escape path.

Vanquishing a foe gives you the classic experience points to level up your characters, giving them higher statistics, and a subtle enhancement to their battle skills, but new to FFXII is the licence point system. Each enemy will also give you licence points to spend on the licence grid. To truly understand the implications of the grid, imagine the following scenario; You reach a merchant selling a fantastic spell, and an all new powerful weapon that you can’t wait to try out. Spending all your gil (the world’s currency) on these items is all well and good, but unless you have the licences to use the items, they are useless to you. Going to the licence grid, you will have to buy licences in order, and you can only see which licences are available next to ones you already have. This doesn’t only make you feel like you’re having to earn each spell and item twice, but can be frustrating when you don’t know where the licence for your new weapon is located, and you’re running out of points to find it with. This does also mean that all characters can learn all of the same skills, and removes a lot of the individuality of each party member. The characters themselves are well designed (if a little too similar for my tastes), and seem to develop nicely as the story progresses, but are missing a lot of the emotion that previous Final Fantasy games have excelled so well at.

Quickening does not mean fast battles

Limit breaks have been present in some manner in most of the Final Fantasy games, and XII gives us Quickenings. Earnt on the licence grid, each character can learn three, which look different, cause different amounts of damage, but ultimately have very little variety. Instead of only being available after receiving lots of damage, Quickenings can be used with a full Magic Point bar at any time, so recharging MP mid battle allows another Quickening to be used. Once the first one is underway, you can chain together multiple Quickenings with a simple button press, and sometimes the opportunity to recharge your MP gauge leads to a large string of attacks in one.

Another way to charge your MP bar is to simply walk or run around (even if you are engaged in battle), and this also leads to a frustrating alternative to wasting ether and potions; running around like a mad thing until you have enough magic to cure all of your party back up to full health between fights.

A full MP bar can also be used to summon Espers to do your bidding (a notion familiar to any Final Fantasy veteran), and while they remain reasonably powerful and an exciting addition, they seem to pale in comparison to earlier games, especially with their focus in the plot.

Play for the story

After all of the gameplay quirks already mentioned, there is an important part of a Final Fantasy game missing here, and that would be the story. Normally a global epic tale of power, conflict and love, the plot has its moments. Set up by a mini-tutorial style prologue introducing the world of Ivalice and the political past, the story quickly becomes a tale of overthrowing the Empire, and restoring peace and order. It does not lack in depth, exposition and will delight many fans of the more classic visits of the series, but for me, it seemed a little too reminiscent of previous games, and never really expanded out as dramatically as the modern post PS1 iterations.

That said, the cinematics are certainly a step up in cinematic quality from Final Fantasy X, and seem to flow much more naturally than before, assuming you care to watch such lengthy plot ‘developments’ that understandably pad out a lot of the back-story, but unfortunately at the expense of game pace. Superbly acted voice work compliments accurate sound effects and a decent soundtrack (although I still think it would have been much better if Nobuo Uematsu was still involved with the series). Occasional fully pre-rendered CG sequences dot the game, but whether a compliment to the normal graphics (which are fantastic for the PS2) or a complaint about the CG, it has often taken me a few seconds to realise that I have been watching CG. This could be coupled by the fact that many of the locations are very similar in terms of colour scheme and even style, which put me off the sense of exploration of some of the larger areas and cities by pure repetitiveness.

It’s a whole world

Calling Final Fantasy XII’s locations repetitive doesn’t do justice to the style and design of most of it, but with the exception of the few settlement locations, it feels like everywhere is a ‘dungeon’ location. By this I mean that you will be navigating twists and turns, pathways and valleys in the hope of reaching your next destination, and hopefully a save point sooner rather than later. This desire to reach the next area makes the majority of the game about looking forward to the next event rather than savouring the current experience. Once you reach a ‘teleport crystal’, you can warp to any other such crystal in the world that you have already visited. While a world map is present, you never really need to use it to navigate, trusting rather on the area maps that you can uncover or buy from conveniently placed traders.

These maps merely show the paths that you can take, not necessarily where they lead, and indeed if you enjoy exploring each location fully (finding all the treasure), then it’s never a necessity to buy the maps, since you will fill it out by wandering around. This however brings out another frustration that I still can’t understand the reason for. Occasionally when exploring a location you will trigger an invisible trap along with the fantastic tagline ‘Vaan has triggered an explosion trap’; which seems indicative of my feelings to the game at this point. It could simply cause damage (and must therefore simply be healed) or perhaps cause a status effect such as blind or even petrify, to add insult to injury, or vice versa. The gameplay design reason for these traps seems non existent as they only serve to annoy, frustrate and cause you to take a few seconds to repair the unfair damage caused on you, not least if you are trying to escape at the time.

Bosses are meant to be annoying

The Final Fantasy series has always been resplendent with larger than life boss characters for you to defeat over the course of a longer and more in depth battle. FFXII is no exception, and give a large energy bar at the top of the screen for you to judge how far through the battle you are. The aforementioned Gambit system, if set up well, can often reduce these dramatic and exciting battles to merely waiting around for your characters to chip away at your enemy. Certain points in the game give your normal party of three characters a ‘guest’ character to join you in battle, and while you have no control over them (their Gambits are automatically set), they can be of great use in a tricky area. I was fighting a remarkably tricky boss, about half way through the game, when I realised that my guest character automatically used strong healing on my characters whenever they were low. Not only did I not have to set up complicated gambits, but I literally started the battle, made sure all of my characters were auto-attacking the boss, left to check my emails for 5 minutes and came back to witness the killing blow.

Hardly the most well designed boss fights, although encouraging more user participation would have solved all of that, even if all I was doing was choosing when to attack and when to heal. Frustratingly, the difficulty curve is set higher than the story suggests, practically demanding you spend time off the beaten track, levelling up your characters merely to overcome the next boss. Sure, if you happen to know the weaknesses of the upcoming boss, what magic and accessories to purchase before the fight and how best to set your gambits, most enemies are defeatable, but without a strategy guide (cheating in my book if it’s on the first play through), this kind of play is incredibly unlikely, not to mention the simple strategy of the first half of the game that seems to be a simple case of buying whatever magic is powerful against your next boss just before facing it.

Extras and secrets

No Final Fantasy would be complete without a Moogle or a Chocobo (or a character called Cid for that matter), and all of the above are joyously present within the game. I say joyously present, but it feels more like an expectation rather than a pleasant surprise (much like those ‘ahem’ wonderful Marlboros with their Bad Breath attack). Since much earlier in the series, mini-games and extra tasks have been present within the franchise, from Snowboarding (FFVII) to those addictive card games of FFVIII and FFIX, but such magnificent sidetracks seem missing in this newest iteration of the series. Sure, you can fish and go on special monster hunts, but the fishing hardly has the draw of even Blitzball, and monster hunts serve only the purpose of giving you optional boss battles.

There are a large number of secret missions for Espers, weapons and general loot, which should keep a completionist playing for a good number of hours, but I can’t help but feel like for all of its production values, depth, and size, Final Fantasy XII tries too hard to reinvent itself, missing those aspects that brought a swarm of fans to the series from FFVII. I said a similar thing in my review of Final Fantasy X-2, that I feel is appropriate here too. FFXII is not a bad game, but merely a bad Final Fantasy game. Any self respecting gamer will find something to love in it, and despite my harsh words, I do like it, but there is a certain level of disappointment inherent in its uncertainty and sections of drastically varied difficulty. I shall give SquareEnix the benefit of the doubt, but I hope that when we lay our sweaty Hi-Def palms on FFXIII, we’ll be talking about a return to form, rather than experimentation in genre that honestly won’t appeal to all RPG fans.