This game could have perfectly been the best Final fantasy but it failed in a couple of very important things: the characters and the story.

It has in my opinion the best universe of all, Ivalice.
The world is full of side content and variety in characters, races, monsters, cities, fields, deserts, beaches, mines, caves etc etc etc etc.

The battle system changes drastically with respect to the previous games by introducing the Gambits system, with which you can program quite precisely how you want your characters to act in any situation.

The progression is also interesting, based on a board that you have to fill through experience to equip yourself.

However, as I said, the characters are irrelevant and boring except for a couple of them, and the story is a simple political brawl.

Final Fantasy XII is one of my favourite games. Top 50 material, likely. But this latest exhaustive playthrough of The Zodiac Age has allowed me to deeply contemplate the problem with FF12’s systems– stuff that’s present in the original and TZA.

For example (and this is an obvious problem) the game’s dripfeed of reward for sidequests and hunts is really discouraging. Most of the benefit that comes from doing them is the EXP, LP and gil you obtain by travelling across the world and beating enemies along the way. The main path’s enemy strength grows pretty quickly so doing the bonus stuff is pretty mandatory but completing a single sidequest should have a bigger jump in strength. It’s just annoying how much stuff you get that’s trash. Even in the post-game I was opening treasure chests and getting Dark Motes or receiving Hi-Potions from the fishing minigame. Most of the gil payouts are pretty stingy, too.

The gambit system, although relatively functional and innovative for 2006, has a lot of holes in its command set, stuff like how you can’t program a character to steal only from enemies that haven’t been stolen from yet. It got pretty annoying to go back into the gambit menu again and again, too. There should have been more ways to copy and reuse gambits too. There’s a lot of things you do in menus and that’s especially exhaustive when the menus themselves have this sluggishness to them, adding a couple frames to every button click. Even if the original was held back by the hardware, that doesn’t make it less annoying nowadays.

It’s also a big problem how some items cannot be purchased (or in the case of the Serum consumable, purchasable only in one obscure place). I had millions of gil at the end of the game and although I wanted to spend on Elixirs and Megalixirs, you cannot.

Getting into presentation stuff, the story is a very streamlined political drama with some nuance especially around the character of Vayne. Special shoutout to Ivalice. Oh, Ivalice. What a beautiful world! It’s so rich and realized that I’ll read NPC dialogue just to get another detail of this world. Easily my favourite fictional setting. It’s helped by Sakimoto’s score which is perfect for this world.

The game is vast. There are so many details in the locations and enemies, giving these places more description than your usual RPG fare. Even if they don’t give the best rewards, I’ve always loved how many small sidequests that you can just miss. This playthrough was the first time I did anything with that fishing sidequest. I kinda love it. This was before JRPGs imported Elder Scrolls-style quest logs so the fact that those mini-quests don’t call out to you makes them feel less gamey and helps the world feel alive.

I guess that’s a good note to go out on. Even if this game has problems, the world of Ivalice, or specifically this incarnation of it, is astonishing and so easy to get lost in.

The original PS2 release of this game is what put me off the franchise for a while. I did not like the gambit system and watching the game play itself. Thankfully I turned around on this game a little more than a decade later when the Zodiac Age remaster came out that fixed just about every issue I had with the gameplay.

I still wish the main party got to know each other more and that Vaan and Penelo mattered more. There are a lot of things this game was setting up that it couldn't fulfill due to development woes. Really curious what this game would be like if they could have implemented more of what they had originally planned.

Nunca entendí bien el hate a ésta entrega numerada de la saga, en serio, se qué no es perfecto, pero sí lo vemos en retrospectiva era un juego tan adelantado a su tiempo qué dios, pero fuera de eso tenemos un mundo abierto qué se siente vivo y por cosas interesantes qué explorar, con mucha variedad de entorno y un mapa extremadamente grande.
Su jugabilidad sigue siendo una maravilla y sí le agregamos qué fue la base para tantos juegos posteriores de otras franquicias.
Tiene una historia un poco irregular, pero qué tiene sus momentos y aunque no todos sus personajes brillen, lo qué se llevan el show son realmente geniales.
Gráficos de ps3 para un juego de ps3 y una banda sonora fantastica.
Jueguen final fantasy XII es toda una experiencia.