Let it be known: Final Fantasy is not nearly as staid as people make it out to be. Besides the fact that the series essentially reinvents itself narratively for each installment, the gameplay is often downright progressive, especially compared to something like, say, the Dragon Quest series. Now, the thing to keep in mind is that these reinventions aren't necessarily good or right, but it demonstrates a willingness on the part of Square (Enix) to not deliver the same thing over and over.
When Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the series, was in charge, this reinvention almost always expressed itself in ever deepening humanism. His first efforts with the series were an attempt to capture the epic template of western fantasy novels, but even by Final Fantasy IV, Sakaguchi was beginning to tell the stories of characters first and foremost, setting them against a swirling, gargantuan conflict only as a narrative (and gameplay) crutch. Sure, the job system might have changed or the magic system revamped, but if Sakaguchi's latest efforts, like Lost Odyssey and The Last Story, are any indication, he's always been the type to use a sturdy gameplay system over something flashy if it gets out of the way of an organic and well-told story.
Final Fantasy XII, then, is perhaps the least-Sakaguchi entry in the series. It's a definitive and clear break from tradition, reinventing itself constantly and often thrillingly, but it must be said that for the longtime fan of the series, it misses Sakaguchi's touch. Indeed, this is much more Square Enix's game than it is any one creator's (even if it exists within the reclusive Yasumi Mitsuno's Final Fantasy Tactics universe), often feeling overwhelming in its staunch refusal to play with the conventions of the series.
It's often been said that Final Fantasy XII shares more in common with its predecessor, the MMO Final Fantasy XI (which I unfortunately won't be reviewing, as I kind of have an aversion to MMOs), than it does Final Fantasy Tactics. That's not really true – in fact, Final Fantasy XII is more its own beast than almost any JRPG before or since. The most obvious change, as has been Square Enix's MO in recent times, is the battle system, which more or less ditches turn based battles and the drama inherent in them for quasi-real time, action-RPG conventions that are just a little too idiosyncratic to ever feel entirely natural. As in Final Fantasy XIII, you're only in direct control of one character, though you can also issue commands to your other team members. By placing the enemies on the field (shockingly, for the first time ever in the series, even though Squaresoft somehow managed the feat with Chrono Trigger eleven years earlier) and more importantly, not switching to a battle-specific screen, Final Fantasy XII makes a bold claim: that traveling, either on the now-proportioned world map or through dungeons, and battling, are on even footing and can happen at any time. It makes the game a little bit more invigorating from an actioner standpoint, though it loses a bit of the series' embedded melodrama in the process. Take that as a positive or a negative as you will, though it's also very much a clearly better alternative than Final Fantasy VIII's "stuck in first gear" battle system.
This battle system was initially greeted with much enthusiasm from the gaming press when the game was first released. There was apparently a palpable sense of fatigue for Final Fantasy's perceived staid, safe battle system, and the nostalgia for the golden age of JRPGs from the SNES and Playstation eras hadn't really set in yet. In the years since, though, FFXII's battle system has received the kind of backlash usually reserved for, well, Final Fantasy VII, and that's due to one simple word: Gambits.
For the uninitiated, here's the basics: to avoid micromanaging your teammates on the battle field, you can instead micromanage them from the backend, giving them instructions (or Gambits) for specific situation. While in the beginning, you can only set a few Gambits per character, by the midway point of the game you can set Gambits for nearly everything the game throws at you. There's a character with the Blind status? There's a Gambit for that. You want a character to direct the Curaga spell at a specific character at specific intervals? You can do that too. It gives the impression that the game "plays itself" for some people, an apparent failing of this game.
Personally, I think it comes down to perception. I was just as pleased to see a well-executed plan come to fruition as I have been in the past by my quick menu navigation. Neither system is perfect or particularly interactive, but it's gotta be essentially a value judgment. It's also an interesting experiment in foresight, and though you can eventually have enough Gambits to cover almost any situation, there are a lot of situations that require some trial and error (or a walkthrough). This is a little disappointing, as it doesn't allow for much experimentation with the system, though the alternative – having a blanket setup that more or less works for everything – wouldn't be much better.
Much more tedious even than the extensive backend tinkering required in Final Fantasy XII is the statistical system, which is annoyingly tied to the "license board." Essentially, it's a thing that forces you to level up your characters in specific ways, though the ability is there for every character to have every ability, which makes it a little soulless. More than that, though, I've never really cared that much about this aspect of the series, and it would have been nice to have a more automated setup where characters level up in more ordinary ways.
When you're traversing the landscape and fighting the generic enemies (you know, relative to the rest of the series), the game's battle system is fluid and interesting, and is definitely the focal point of the game. It's far from amazing, but it's considerably more engaging than a lot of standard turn-based battles. Unfortunately, the breezy feeling gets obliterated pretty often by the game's cruel and drastic difficulty spikes. Despite the fact that FFXII feels post-grinding in most ways, it's not. In fact, there are boss enemies that are essentially cannot be defeated without hours of grinding, and that's unfortunate. It kills the pacing of the story and makes the game an exercise in frustration and sometimes boring persistence rather than a challenge that can be accomplished.
I've spent about a thousand words just talking about this battle system, and that's for a reason – it's definitely the focal point for the game. Elements such as world travel that are so central to games like FFVI and FFVII are definitely downplayed. The scaling of the world to be proportionate to the size of your characters makes the world feel both expansive and claustrophobic at the same time, and while the game luckily avoids the "corridor RPG" elements of FFXIII, there's a sense of scope that seems to be lacking in the gameplay. The cutscenes do a good job of world creation (cribbing exclusively, it seems, from the Naboo scenes in The Phantom Menace), and while FFXII pretty well pushes the PS2 to its limits, it feels like the ambitiousness of the game's perspective and progression are hampered slightly by the hardware.
That world is something that FFXII has going for it – Ivalice has a rich history to draw from, and the game's distinctively European air is something drastically different from most Final Fantasies. While it occasionally feels a little too steampunk-y for my tastes, the climate of political intrigue is interesting, if not done as well as in the Final Fantasy Tactics games which inspire it. But occasionally the game gets too wrapped up in the political backstory to bother making a coherent narrative thread that you can actually play through. Too many times it felt as though the game was throwing the characters from place to place with no real consistency threading everything together. Sure, the basic outline – mishmash group of rebels takes on the evil empire – has been done before in the Final Fantasy canon, but too much of the plot boils down to a kind of chase narrative where you're not really sure who you're chasing or why.
None of this is to say that being flung from locale to locale is ever really unenjoyable, per se. It was really only after the fact that I began to question, "why was in that place again? What was I doing?" During my playtime, though, I was too wrapped up in the gorgeousness of each place, the expansiveness of the cities (seriously, the cities might be the best aspect of the game; even though they're hardly interactive, they just feel alive, and Rabanastre, the first city you spend most of the beginning portions of the game in, is a masterwork of architecture in gaming), the kinetic feeling inspired by all that running and all that battling. Games often get criticized for being mindless, but FFXII isn't really mindless – rather, it just inspires you to not really care about all that cruft.
Unfortunately, that doesn't apply so much to the characters. If a game is going to throw a ragtag band of freedom fighters together, they have to have engaging personalities, but unfortunately Square Enix decided to turn the taciturn up to 11. The closest analogue to FFXII's narrative has to be Final Fantasy VI, but FFXII never reaches the charm of that game despite sharing pretty much an identical setup. Partially, this has to be due to the lack of a convincing villain, but the team that you play as doesn't have too much personality. Vaan, ostensibly the main character, isn't as annoying as people have made him out to be, but outside of his, um, distinctive voice acting, he's also too much of a blank slate. Balthier is kind of engaging in an assholish, roguish kind of way, but his counterpart Fran has a horrible Playboy bunny-esque design and a completely wooden personality. Rounding out the group are Basch, who is super gruff and super serious; Ashe, who has very little characterization of note (outside of her stupid outfit); Penelo, the late-period Final Fantasy "chirpy girl" stereotype; and a rotating cast of "guest" characters who never make much of an impression.
It's hard to care about these people saving the world because you never feel invested in them. Partially, this is due to the unfortunately declarative writing style that gets too wrapped up in the political side of things, but the characters just don't have enough, well, character to support a game of this length. I didn't know much more about them than when the game started, and that's a real disappointment. If a game is going to pour so much time and effort into exploring its plot, that plot had better be interesting. I brought up Final Fantasy VI for a reason, and that's a game that makes it clear that Square Enix will be incapable of ever capturing that innocence and idiosyncratic vision for a cast of characters ever again, especially while avoiding the trap of making stereotypes or trite reconstructions of past glories.
When everything's moving at a full clip, this feels like a really satisfying journey through a gorgeously rendered world, and occasionally the political backdrop is interesting enough that you feel like you're part of a massive story. But the problem lies not particularly in the game's construction (even though I've just spent a lot of time discussing that), but in the game's answer to the underlying question of every game in this series: what makes a Final Fantasy game? Not every game needs to be beholden to those conventions that the game seems to hold so dear, but the answer too doesn't just lie in the superficial elements that have held every game together; you know, chocobos and gil and people named Cid. Rather, it lies in a kind of operatic splendour, an opportunity to tell a grand story in a way that invests the player in its proceedings. It's something that every game up to FFXI managed to varying degrees, depending on your responsiveness to their particular quirks, but something gets lost here. It just doesn't feel right. That could easily be attributed to the loss of Sakaguchi, or to the clear decision to move away (almost self-consciously) from the things that have really defined the series, but one thing's clear: a real sense of drama and urgency is missing from this game. That might seem like a good thing (the Final Fantasy games have never been, um, subtle, and truth be told, this game isn't particularly subtle either, though in different ways than the previous games), but I enjoy that operatic sense, that over-the-top need to thrill and provoke while still telling a human story. Final Fantasy XII too often felt like a blip on the radar rather than the opera it could have been, and that can't help but colour my mostly favourable thoughts towards this game with a twinge of disappointment.