Great-but-badly-told story and underwhelming cast aside, this is pretty great. It's wild to me that a PS2 game still has some of the best presentation in the series (and I say this not as a knock against everything that came after, but to praise just how impressive this game truly is). Gameplay-wise, I mean...the Gambit system has had its praises (rightfully) sung, so I don't have much to add there. If there's one huge issue with this game, it's that it's needlessly large. Thankfully the speed-up options in this remaster help alleviate some of the issues that come with that, but it shouldn't be a necessity.

Easily one of the best Final Fantasy games of all time!

The combat system can be tailored to suit a large variety of play styles and difficulties.

I managed to sink over 100 hours in just one playthrough due to the amount of content bundled together in one awesome journey!

Easily my favorite mainline Final Fantasy game.
Stunning visuals that make the most of the PS2 to deliver the most authentic representations of Akihiko Yoshida's art this side of Vagrant Story, an incredible soundtrack, an intricate story with phenomenal voice acting, and one of the best realtime RPG battle systems ever seen. There's so much customization with the gambit system that it's crazy to me it isn't the standard for AI-controlled party members in every RPG by now.
The world of the game is so expansive that it'd be such a waste to just run through the main story. It's full of interesting NPC dialogue that fleshes out the world, obscure hidden away secrets that feel like a treat to stumble across, and an entire chain of harder hunt fights where the meat of the high level play lies.
The Zodiac Age is arguably the best version of FFXII - the visuals and soundtrack have been extremely faithfully remastered and it sees a host of new gameplay options like expanding the IZJS job system with dual classing and a very welcome fast forward option to speed up dungeon crawling and mob fights. The only complaints I could have are a few eh fonts choices (not nearly as bad as some Square Enix remasters in that regard tho) and it'd be nice to have the option for vanilla, pre-job system FFXII (even if I think the game is overall much better with it than without).
I cannot recommend this game enough, it's the magnum opus of Square Enix's amazing PS2 era output.

Depois de me martelarem muito que esse jogo era extremamente focado em política e que isso destacava (e deixava ele melhor) ele dos outros, qual a minha surpresa ao ver que Final Fantasy XII é exatamente Final Fantasy como sempre gostei e diria até em uma de suas melhores formas.

Acho que o descontentamento e a consequente constatação de mentiras sobre o quão cedo ou tarde o Vaan foi considerado a ser o protagonista do jogo vem justamente do fato de ser difícil de digerir que nem sempre somos o protagonista de toda história. Certamente somos o protagonista da NOSSA, mas nem sempre do que acontece a nossa volta.

Para o Vaan, salvar seu país e assegurar seu futuro é uma jornada de conhecimento ao lado de pessoas mais fortes, mais experientes e maduras que ele. Não tem o mesmo peso que tem para Ashe, e tá tudo bem. Balthier tenta nos lembrar toda vez que nós sempre somos protagonistas, mesmo que os outros não vejam assim.

Não me importaria se esse jogo focasse muito mais na parte politica que ele apresenta, mas eu gosto de como ele é familiar e confortável pra quem já está inserido no paradigma da série.

No mais, achei que esse ia ser o único Final Fantasy que não ia chorar no final e desabei igual então eu acho que sou uma tonta completa.

Finished fy first Final Fantasy, XII. Don’t regret playing it, but kinda regret not playing IX, XIII, VIII, X, VI, or even VII first.

What I liked:
+ Characters (none of them are that interesting by themselves but they fit in the story very well)
+ Story
+ Story writing (also the English VA is superior (with the exception of Vaan))
+ Cinematography and cinematics
+ Most locations (nothing mind-blowing tho)
+ Gambit system (cool idea)
+ Speedmode (saved me dozens of hours)
+ Moogles

What I disliked:
- NPCs 😴
- Side quests 😴
- Gambit system (flawed, irritating realization)
- ”Crafting” system
- Espers and quickenings (obscure, boring, and useless)
- Dungeons
- Lack of QoL (maps, quests, and inventory are atrocious)
- Speedmode (is very fiddly because the original wasn’t designed to be played this way y’know)
- MAPS

Everything else is whatever.

P.S. Vaan is cool and not “useless” or “boring”.

My feelings towards this game have changed many times over the years. It was one of the first Final Fantasy games I experimented with, and it gave me a good first impression, but going back as an adult really soured me on the gameplay. Eventually, I found an appreciation for the story, but having now finished it, I’m deeply lukewarm on that element of the game as well. Disappointed as I am to say it, Final Fantasy XII has landed amongst my least favorite games in the entire series.

Let’s start with the gameplay, which has always been a huge point of contention. Lots of people love the gambit system, and in theory, I can see why - the idea of finally being able to manually program those stupid AI companions that are always acting like idiots seems so appealing on the surface, but in practice, it creates far more problems than it fixes.

I’m just going to get this out of the way: for 99% of its runtime, Final Fantasy XII is a game that plays itself. I may be somewhat biased against this style of game, because I write code for a living, but the gambit setups required to breeze through the main story while almost never issuing a single command in battle were laughably rudimentary. At the start of the game, watching the party execute their gambits was vaguely satisfying in a sort of Rube Goldberg-esque sense, but the novelty quickly wore off as it became clear that I would almost never have to touch those gambits again. Almost every single encounter in this entire game boiled down to “walk at the enemies and either press fast forward or put down the controller”. With how massive some of the explorable dungeon-type zones were, this resulted in an utterly astounding amount of dead time where absolutely nothing interesting was happening for literal hours on end.

The most egregious consequence of the battle system is that it completely deflates the tension at key moments in the story. The fast forward function in the Zodiac Age remaster exacerbates this issue, but it’s a problem regardless; there were multiple story-critical boss battles that had huge amounts of buildup and epic cutscenes leading into their fight, but which could be defeated with literally no input whatsoever. Even walking forward was unnecessary; the boss was close enough that the party would immediately aggro on the boss, and the gambit system would cause them to kill the boss without any effort at all. For as threatening as some of these antagonists were built up to be, having their battles end with so little fanfare absolutely ruined the moment.

Most games in the Final Fantasy series have pretty shallow battle systems in practice, and rarely require you to switch up your strategy. Generally, they make up for this with thoroughly engaging stories, or by making the RPG elements deeper and offering more customization. Unfortunately, though an admirable attempt is made, neither of those things happen here.

The License Board has a critical flaw that made it really underwhelming after the first few hours of the game: it is simply far too open-ended. Most upgrades of the same “category” are placed in sequence, and this becomes a problem because there is a very clear hierarchy of which category of upgrades are the most important. As a result, the player is heavily incentivized to rush down the strongest upgrade categories as quickly as possible, which is satisfying for the first third or so of the game, but results in the License Board unlocks becoming much less satisfying to acquire as the game progresses. By the last third of the game, I stopped caring about the License Board altogether, which is not a good look for a game leaning so heavily on its RPG systems.

Many defenders of Final Fantasy XII’s gameplay cite its optional content, and in particular the experience of challenging it as early as possible, as the “fun way” to play FFXII. While I did not challenge it as early as I possibly could have, I did go out of my way to complete all of the content possible before the guest character Larsa permanently left the party. What I discovered during this experience was indeed the strongest content in the game mechanically, but still ultimately disappointing.

I do appreciate the structure of FFXII’s world. On principle, I like that you can access very threatening areas early on, and on occasion exploring them was even somewhat interesting. Unfortunately, because the core of what you do while exploring these areas is so banal and tedious, it is difficult to truly appreciate in the context of the wider game.

Here’s the thing: when tackling difficult content in FFXII, you are forced to adapt your gambits somewhat. Several strategies, like using the green magick spell Decoy to ensure all enemies attack your tank, become practically necessary in order to succeed. The problem is that any requisite tactics beyond the universally applicable ones are typically blindingly obvious as soon as you begin an encounter, and there is still an extreme lack of dynamism in how these encounters need to be approached. Once you have set up the right gambits, you will most likely never need to manually input anything again. In addition, you are heavily incentivized to make use of the Quickening system, which is easily among the worst designed game mechanics I have ever encountered.

Quickenings are this game’s equivalent to Limit Breaks in FFVII or VIII, or Trances and Overdrives in FFIX and X respectively. Each character has access to them, and in this game, activating one begins a chain wherein each active party member has the opportunity to use a Quickening of their own in sequence. Upon the start of a Quickening animation, options for the next Quickening to use appear along the bottom of the screen, and the player has a set window of time in which to choose which one to continue the chain with - this window becomes smaller as the chain grows longer.

If no Quickenings are available, the player can “shuffle” the options, which has a random chance of enabling a party member to use a Quickening, but it’s possible to roll terrible RNG repeatedly on the shuffles and have a chain end after only three hits with nothing you could have possibly done about it. This loses out on a potentially enormous amount of damage, as there is a damage multiplier which grows as the chain continues.

The biggest problem with this system, though, is the Quickening animations themselves. Each one takes an absolutely ungodly amount of time, and they are entirely unskippable. Even the fast forward function does not speed them up in any capacity. For longer chains, this can result in the entire process taking UPWARDS OF TWO MINUTES. As a reminder, the game heavily incentivizes the use of these, because they are essentially free damage, as during the animations no enemies are able to move at all. I cannot begin to describe the degree to which this obliterates any sense of pacing in harder fights. Certain hunts, like the Antilion and White Flan, which would have otherwise been fairly decent encounters, became an absolute slog as a direct result of this system. It is truly abhorrent.

While I did not tackle any of the endgame hunts after Larsa permanently left, I honestly cannot see how they could possibly be any better than this, because the system simply isn’t deep enough. The dominant strategies are so astronomically more powerful than anything else that a battle capable of beating them could only possibly come down to luck.

I’m not even convinced that forcing manual input would be an outright improvement, because this game is not designed around manually inputting commands. The menu system, and the relative frequency at which actions occur in FFXII, make it so that manually controlling any party member for any length of time quickly becomes astoundingly fiddly and tedious. On a couple of my attempted playthroughs, I tried manually inputting everything towards the start, but quickly switched to using gambits because of how awful it was. I legitimately chose to have the game play itself rather than play it manually. I can’t think of a more damning criticism of a game’s mechanics.

For a while, I thought that Final Fantasy XII was really elevated by its story. Towards the start of the game, I still feel this to be the case. Its protagonists are introduced in a compelling way, and for a time are very well characterized and given interesting conflicts to overcome. To an extent, this continues to be the case with regards to Balthier and Ashe, but just about every other major character stagnates considerably by the midpoint of the game. Certain side characters like Larsa have compelling stories, but there are issues there as well.

The biggest problems with the game’s story are ultimately its plot and themes. Simply put, the most interesting parts of the plot don’t get the focus they deserve, and the story on the whole has very little to say.

Plot-wise, there is a thoroughly fascinating political story happening with Vayne, Larsa, and the rest of the Archadian empire with what are, on paper, interesting twists and turns built off of complex character dynamics. In practice, we get glimpses of this story periodically throughout the game, but the story that makes up the overwhelming majority of what we actually see almost never intersects with it. The world of Ivalice is excellent, but it’s introduced in a very unnatural way through the eyes of the protagonists as they carry out a series of what I can only describe as MacGuffin hunts that takes them to various regions and locales. The sense of adventure is there, but the momentum of the plot feels artificial and forced, and by the end of the game wholly unrelated to the political games happening in Archades.

Thematically, the game does attempt a “revenge is bad” plot in its final act, but it’s such a shallow exploration of the consequences thanks to the black-and-white situation it lays out that I found it difficult to get invested in the moral “dilemma” in any capacity. Beyond that, the theme of the game is a very basic “security vs freedom” story where the villain’s cruelty and desire for world domination annihilates any moral ambiguity that could otherwise have been possible.

I will say that Final Fantasy XII is reasonably strong in terms of presentation. The visuals, especially in the Zodiac Age remaster, are fantastic thanks to the distinctive and unique art style, and the soundtrack is fairly strong on the whole, even if it’s not my favorite. As previously stated, the world of Ivalice is excellent - it’s just a shame the experience of exploring it is not.

Where the game really fell apart for me was in its ending. The penultimate dungeon was a complete slog that introduced nothing new except for some annoying trial-and-error “puzzle” mechanics and was visually repetitive throughout, and the final dungeon was extremely short and uninteresting. The final boss, while probably the most interesting encounter in the main story, was still extremely simple and made for an underwhelming fight just like all the others.

I did not enjoy Final Fantasy XII. I tried - I really tried - but in the end I had to conclude that this game is just a failure on almost every level. While flashy and fun on the surface, any attempt to explore deeper just reveals nothing of substance. If you enjoy this game, I’m genuinely glad that you got more out of it than I did. For me, it’s easily one of the worst games I’ve ever completed, which is a shame for an entry in a series that I love as much as I love Final Fantasy.

There was a lot I liked here but a lot that I didn't. I loved the soundtrack, the gambit system was one of the most unique and entertaining combat systems I've played, and I enjoyed exploring the world. That being said I did not care about the story. It's extremely politics heavy and I had trouble keeping track of what was going on; making some of the later moments of the game fall a bit flat for me. I also felt it lacked many compelling characters. Besides Balthier who I loved; most of the characters in the game just don't have much about them I find likable or interesting. The English voice acting also felt hit or miss to me; with performances sounding either pretty good or devoid of emotion (the low audio quality doesn't help). Like I said the gameplay was great, but in a series that can have some really good stories, I felt just a bit let down by 12 even with all the things it does great.