#however according to some posts ive looked at about the best/worst dungeons in the game it only gets better from here

[lovely-v]

it's crazy how skyward sword is becoming my favorite zelda game despite the fact that I've spent 2/3 of my time playing it suffering unbearably

[shielddrake]

Final Fantasy XII: A Retrospective Review

So, I received Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age for Christmas last year.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of the Final Fantasy franchise.  I have played almost every game with that title that has been released…at least the ones released in America, since I sadly do not speak Japanese. So it’s not unreasonable to assume I would want a remake of one of its games.  I have quite a few, in fact, including V and VI on my iPhone, III and IV on my DS, and I and II on my PSP.  Final Fantasy IX was the first game I put on my PS4 when I got it (yeah, I admit I put a PS1 game on my PS4 before anything else) and I thoroughly enjoyed replaying VIII when its remaster came out last September.

 Final Fantasy XII, however, is a bit of an exception because, my Internet friends, I have a confession to make: Final Fantasy XII is my least favorite in the franchise.

 Now I wouldn’t say that FFXII is a bad game.  Far from it. It’s a very good game.  For the most part, I completely understand why so many people love it.  I just don’t feel the same way.

 When I first played the game when it was released, I was not too thrilled with a lot of the gameplay decisions and where it ended up going story-wise.  At the time, I concluded that while it was a good game, it was a poor Final Fantasy title.  And this is taking into account the fact that I had played and beaten both Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Advance several times before playing FFXII.  Both of these games are quite different from the main FF series, but are great in their own right. I basically consider the Ivalice Alliance as a separate spin-off series, sort of like the Crystal Chronicles games or the Dissidia series.  

 But FFXII was not that great, in my opinion.  I didn’t feel invested in the characters, I was not a fan of the combat or license board system at all, and I felt the story was incomplete at best and annoyingly vague at worst.  There were a lot of missed opportunities for the use of the characters.  I was neutral about the graphics, which, although beautiful, I felt did not really improve on what was presented in Final Fantasy X, and I didn’t like that a lot of the regular trends known in the previous installments (the summons being the main example that comes to mind) were thrown out for something completely disconnected.  I finished the game just feeling a mix of boredom and irritation, to be perfectly honest.  The only thing I can recall even remotely liking was the music, despite it not being composed by Nobuo Uematsu, my favorite composer of all time even to this day.

 Needless to say, playing The Zodiac Age was not on my list of priorities, and I’m not sure I ever would have played it had it not been gifted to me.

 All that said, I received the game and felt that, well, maybe since I have it anyway I would give it another shot.  Let’s see if FFXII is as bad as I remember. Maybe a retrospective review would be a good thing to post on the twelfth anniversary of the game’s original release, so why not?

 * Looks at the dates and realizes Final Fantasy XII was originally released 14 years ago, not 12. *

 Uh, never mind. Clearly I’m way too late for that party.

 Anyway, as I started playing, I decided that there were two big questions that I wanted to answer with this retrospective review:

 1.) Is Final Fantasy XII as bad of a game as I remember it being when it was first released?

 2.) Would I change my claim about Final Fantasy XII being my least favorite game in the franchise?

 Obviously the game has been out for a long time, remake or not, but I want to warn against spoilers here just in case. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s experience after all.  With that, let’s get started.

Statistics

 I just wanted to start this review with a few facts about my playthroughs (yes, the plural is intentional).

 I played through The Zodiac Age twice, once for about 42 hours in length and the second for about 47. I used each of the jobs in the zodiac job system in each playthrough, but in different combinations and on different characters.  Of course, I couldn’t account for every possible combination.  That would take a very long time…

 The party was at level 46 on my shorter playthrough and 51 on my longer one.  I did not complete all of the hunts, although I fought more of them the second time through. I did not try to get any of the special gear like the Zodiac Spear, mostly because I don’t know how.  I also did not get all of the espers, because other than the required time you have to summon Belias to get into Giruvegan, I never used summoning.

 I avoided any guides or other playthroughs for the game, relying on the game’s directions and my memory from my previous plays…fourteen years ago…to guide me through the main part of the story. Yeah, I haven’t played FFXII since it was released in 2006, maybe 2007, give or take a few months. So, if I got confused or lost during the course of the game, it was because I either missed directions or the game was not clear on where I needed to go.

 At the time of this review, I have not experimented at all with Trial Mode or played through New Game Plus.

 Graphics

 This section will be short, since I don’t have a lot to say about it.

 The graphics are very good. As I stated above, in the original I did not feel the graphics were all that different than Final Fantasy X released four years prior, and my opinion of The Zodiac Age hasn’t really changed.  According to the Final Fantasy Wiki, the game was given “high resolution upgrades to backgrounds, character models, 2d parts, and movie scenes.”  To be honest, I didn’t notice much of a difference, although that might be because I didn’t play the game often enough to have the original graphics etched in my memory.

 However, that does not mean the game looks bad. On the contrary, it is still a beautiful game, despite a few small glitches such as Balthier’s dialogue not syncing up to his lip movements or Basch’s hair not moving, Those are minor nitpicks. The game is still lovely to look at.

 Sound and Music

 Again, the music for this game is excellent. As I mentioned before, the music was probably the one thing I would praise about the game when it was originally released.  The Zodiac Age somehow manages to make it better by providing a rerecorded soundtrack that makes a lot of the notes sound less harsh. There is the option of switching it back to the original version, but I preferred the new one. Basically they took the one thing I liked about the original game and made it better.

 The voice acting I am pretty neutral about. For the most part, I don’t think anyone’s voice work was either bad or good.  Other than the overuse of sighs, of which I get most annoyed by Ashe’s because she sighs all the time, I don’t mind the voice acting very much.

 The only one I have a problem with, and this was also the case when I first played FFXII, is with Fran’s voice.  I always feel bad criticizing a voice actor because they put a lot of training and passion into their work, but I just can’t help but be really annoyed at the choices SquareEnix made when casting Fran. She sounds so different in the English version compared to the Japanese one, and I don’t think it fits the character at all.  Viera, all viera, are supposed to be these rather ethereal beings akin to the elves in The Lord of the Rings.  So why, then, would the translation team have Fran be given a voice that makes her sound like a nasally four-year-old?  According to the Wiki, the translators wanted to “sell the new take on the viera,” but it just falls flat.

 Miscellaneous Gameplay

 Okay, I only made this section so I can briefly go over some of the extra gameplay components the game has, both old and new.  First, the good.  

 The high-speed mode is great. I always thought the characters moved so annoyingly slow! This fixes that problem and honestly saves a lot of time.  I feel like it sheared off a couple of hours off the game that are just empty time needed simply to move from place to place. I used this in the FFVIII remaster as well for the same reason.  I basically never turned it off.  It didn’t affect cutscenes, so that wasn’t a problem. Also, the sound effect of four people running in high-speed mode is strangely hilarious to me.

 There is a transparent overlay map now available.  I find this to be much more useful than the minimap alone, which was constantly moving and incapable of helping me orient myself. Previously, I was frequently frustrated and getting lost in pretty much every area, dungeon and town when I played the original version.  The overlay map was especially useful in places where direction was important, like the part in the Tomb of Raithwall where you need to turn the statues to face the blade. I could never tell which way to turn them and needed to bring up the main map over and over and over again. The overlay map resolves makes this and general navigation much easier.  

 My only complaint is that, although it is transparent, it does take up a lot of the center of the screen, but that is a small price to pay for the relief of so much frustration. There are times when the overlay map isn’t useable, namely in parts of Giruvegan and the Bahamut, and then the frustration rises again, which only emphasizes how nice the overlap map is the other times.

 Autosave feature.  Need I say more? Thank you, SquareEnix, for an autosave feature! Especially during some of the hunts.

 And now the bad, which can be lumped into one thing: minigames.  Or I guess they’re minigames.  They’re small quests that are required to further the story that are not combat based. The yell at the guards to make them move game while stealing the Dusk Shard, AKA the dumbest guards ever.  The have Vaan declare he’s Basch in front of people in Bhujerba to get the Resistance’s attention, which unless you had already played the game you don’t know to do in front of the guides, leading you to just listening to Vaan spout annoying nonsense while literally nobody listens.  The exchanging information quest in Archadia to get chops to be allowed to ride a flying taxi, which is only slightly less annoying this time around because they reduced the number of exchanges you need to do from nine to three.  I guess they realized how tedious it was.  I disliked all of these when I first played the game and they were superfluous and dumb and add nothing to the experience this time around too.

 Character Progression and Combat

 Now we get to the parts where I feel I can really say something constructive. I was initially going to have these be separate sections, but they are so closely related to one another that it seemed silly to split them.

 There is something I want to make perfectly clear, that I must admit came very much to my surprise: The combat in The Zodiac Age is nowhere near as bad as I felt it was when I played the vanilla game.  Before it felt like a boring slog just to get from one quest to another, but I found that not to be the case this time around. I think the changes to the license board helps with the combat be more dynamic and require a bit more strategy since not every character ends up being the same.  I’ll get to the license board in a moment.

 With the job system in place, you have to think more about how you’re going to approach an enemy rather than having everyone just attack the whole time.  I mean, you can still do that, but your white mage is not going to be as strong as your knight, so having the white mage do only physical attacks doesn’t work quite as well.  And with the option of giving everyone different abilities, it means that every character has a different role to play in battle.  

 The ability to add a second job later in the game adds to the diversity you can bring, since you can make any number of combinations of jobs and really none of them are bad.  You’re also not limited by which characters can have which job.  Once you pick a job for a character you are stuck with it (at least on the PS4 version) but that does not lock the job away from other characters.  You can have two white mages, two knights, five red battlemages, or make every character a bushi if you so desire.  You can have someone balanced, someone focused on only offensive spells, someone focused on healing, someone just for physical attacks, a tank…the possibilities are huge!  

 The gambit system is still in place, and I still am not a huge fan.  If I have to micromanage a character’s actions, I’d rather have a system that allows me to input commands individually like in previous Final Fantasy games rather than allowing an AI to do it.  However, I understand that the combat in FFXII is fast-paced enough that it makes that sort of system more difficult, and I managed to deal with it fine. I wish I didn’t have to buy gambits for every single miniscule action though.

 On the other hand, I did find having multiple gambits useful for the various abilities each character has, especially since the job system allows for more individualized characters. This time, I felt like having several gambit slots was actually worthwhile because I had the characters able to do more things under specific circumstances, especially for spellcasters. This made it seem like it was worth the license points to spend on gambit slots from the license board.  So while I still am not fond of the gambit system, I found it overall less annoying than before.

 Obviously the license board is the biggest change to The Zodiac Age.  The job system is excellent this time around, compared to the complete lack of a job system in the original version. Normally a blank slate for character progression isn’t a bad thing.  VI, VII and VIII all had no job system as well, but you could still customize the characters to fit with a play style that you liked.  Vanilla FFXII didn’t allow that.  It was far too easy to make every character identical, so it ultimately didn’t matter which character you had in your party.  This time, the available variety made it much more enjoyable to play and experiment.

 The board was also improved on in that it was much more logical within each job.  Before, the board was literally just a board, with every license just kind of lumped together. The license for a helmet was next to a license for the fire spell.  It never made much sense and it seemed hard to predict what adjacent licenses you were unlocking. This time, armor licenses are together, sword licenses are together, magic licenses are together, and so forth.  Some licenses in the same category are spread apart, such as the technicks, but for the most part there is at least some sort of logic to it all, making it much easier to plan character growth instead of it feeling random.

 Later on, it is possible to make the characters very similar to one another, so that everyone can cast white magic, use the same technicks, wear the same gear, etc. This is especially easy if you pick secondary jobs that are opposite the first job (for stance, adding a foebreaker job to a white mage).  This doesn’t happen until late in the game though, so it doesn’t feel nearly as cheap.  FFX did the same with the sphere grid, but you had to be pretty far in the game before that was possible.  Same thing here.

 I feel I should mention the quickenings and summons, even though I never used the latter in battle. The mist abilities now have their own gauge rather than using MP, which is a nice throwback to the limit break bars of some of the previous games.  I definitely prefer it that way.  I found myself using quickenings less frequently than during my first playthrough, but that might be because the game was made to be overall a little easier.

 Story and Characters

 While the job system was the big change for The Zodiac Age, and certainly for the better, I feel I still need to talk about the story and the characters even though nothing about these parts of the game have changed.  The big reason for this is because the story was where I had the biggest problem with the original version of FFXII, and therefore will probably have the biggest impact on answering my two burning questions at the beginning of this review.

 That being said, if I were to go into all the details about the story and characters and what I think of it, this review would probably be three times as long as it already is.  To add to that, since the game has already been out for twelve fourteen years I’m not sure there’s a whole lot I could add to the conversation that hasn’t already been said, other than to point out how I would change the story to make it what would be, in my opinion, better.

 Perhaps if people are really interested in my in-depth analysis of the story I can do that in another post, but for the purposes of this review, I’m just going to give summarized version here.

 1.) Reks should have lived, or been replaced by Vaan, or have both in the party.

 2.) Vaan is not as annoying as I previously thought, but he needed to have a more concrete connection to the plot.

 3.) Same for Penelo. Still kind of preachy, but seemed more like a Jiminy Cricket character this time around.

 4.) The Strahl needed to be stolen somehow, both to give Balthier a better reason to go with the group and to give a better excuse to not just fly somewhere.

 5.) That said, knowing the whole plot of the game makes Balthier’s behavior throughout the story make more sense. Better foreshadowing, in a way.

 6.) Fran’s storyline needed to have a more satisfactory conclusion.  It just sort of ended.

 7.) Basch and Gabranth needed to have more personal interactions throughout the story to make their final moments more satisfying.

 8.) For that matter, have more personal interactions between the party and both Dr. Cid and Vayne. We meet both of them a total of two times…over the course of a 40-hour game. Too disconnected from the party’s actions to give much motivation for us to defeat them.

 8.) Why did they not use Vossler’s actions as a bigger plot point, with Basch trying to stop Vossler from doing what Basch was accused of? It’s sort of there, but it ends far too quickly.  Big missed opportunity.

 9.) More judge fights! We fight a total of three, Ghis, Bergan and Gabranth. I wanted more judge bosses!

 10.) To add to that, have more context for some of the bosses.  It kind of felt like so many of the bosses were there just for the sake of being bosses, and there’s only so many times I can say to myself, “It’s probably a guardian of whatever place.”

 11.) I still don’t get the love people have for Ashe.  I just don’t get it.

 12.) And finally, Larsa should have been the main character.  End of story.

 …Yeah, that’s the summarized version.

 Conclusion

 All things considered, I definitely had a different experience playing through The Zodiac Age compared to when I first played FFXII twelve fourteen years ago.  And ultimately this is why I decided on playing this game again.  I wanted to see if my opinion had changed, if I could look at it from another perspective rather than just negative memory. And although some of my feelings haven’t changed, it’s good to look back on something and see that maybe it isn’t exactly as I recall it.

 Let’s go back to the big questions I proposed at the beginning of this review.

 First, is Final Fantasy XII as bad of a game as I remember it being when it was first released?  No, it’s certainly not.  I think the changes made to the license board made the combat more enjoyable for me, and by extension it seemed less of a hassle and more of an actual game. I enjoyed running around and exploring more, and the bosses and hunts were more entertaining as well.  While I’m still not fond of the gambit system, I wasn’t as irritated by it and actually found myself experimenting more with it.

 Second, would I change my claim about Final Fantasy XII being my least favorite game in the franchise? Eh, probably not.  Again, even with the alterations made to the game, there are still a lot of things that I personally was not a fan of, especially involving the story.  I’m one of those people who love the story of a game more than anything else (which is clearly why I prefer RPGs to any other game genre). Since the story is still the weakest aspect of FFXII, in my opinion, especially compared to other Final Fantasy games, the game overall doesn’t grab me as much as some of the earlier ones.  It’s still a good game, but not great.  To be fair, short of completely overhauling the storyline and characters, it would the difficult change those aspects for the better in just a remaster.  This makes me wonder how the FFVII remake is going to go, but the jury’s still out on that one.

 With all the various opinions and thoughts about what makes a video game good, it’s hard for developers to create what might be considered a perfect game for everyone, and the Final Fantasy franchise is no exception.  That doesn’t mean a game cannot be corrected to make it better than the original.  That’s what is good about patches and remasters.  It gives the developers another opportunity to improve on what was criticized.  Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age definitely succeeds in this, even if there are still parts that are not quite as good.

 Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a Kingdom Hearts DLC to play and then proceed to tear apart.