Frustratingly good. For every great idea this game has, it has another terrible one to bring it back down. A troubled development process and shipping unfinished seem to be the story all the games in this series share, but you can truly feel the passion the developers had for this game and Ivalice in general.
As a disclaimer, I played this game with the "Final Fantasy XII TZA: Classic Mode" mod, which restores practically everything from the original PS2 release while keeping all of the quality of life from The Zodiac Age, which I highly recommend playing personally.
Before commenting anything about the game itself, Square Enix did an excellent job remastering this game; it's one of the best-looking PS2-era games already, and it looks even better in The Zodiac Age. The fast forward functions are a godsend, as are the improved loading times. These combined can save about 20 hours that you spend walking or loading on the PS2 version. Combined with the existence of the Classic Mode mod, this is the definitive way to play the game on PC, regardless of whether you prefer the original balancing or job system.
This game has some of the best English localization of any game I've played and is combined with fantastic voice acting. Unfortunately, the audio is quite low quality, and it isn't improved in the remaster, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the great dialogue. Gone are the typical tropey anime writing you tend to see in a lot of other JRPGs to be replaced by classical Victorian-era vernacular, and it's spectacular.
However, even with the great writing, the plot points were stretched too thin in the middle of the game to make the game feel grander than it is. To pinpoint an exact part of the game where the story falls apart, it would be after the final Mt. Bur-Omisace visit halfway through the game, where you're asked to walk across the map with very little plot or cutscenes outside of some minor character exposition. The game never comes back from the lowered focus on the story until the very end, after the point of no return, where I felt the game forgot its own tone it set. The characters ended up being too one-note and underdeveloped, with most of them existing for the sake of driving someone else's character arc, though I still enjoyed their dialogue between each other, and liked Ashe, Balthier, and Basch, who feel like the closest to main protagonists.
Nevertheless, I found the intro and credits sequence to be excellent, while the middle of the game had a lot of low points. The music being great is just a Final Fantasy standard, and the ambient tracks were the star of the show for this game. However, I felt like the lack of combat music for normal fights took a lot of intensity out of the game, though I did get why they did it to make the game feel more seamless.
The worst part of the game is how slow it is to play. This game has an excessive amount of walking in it, to the point of having a step counter in the menu. While it isn't a true open world, it's made up of many interconnected zones that have a loading screen in between, which is perfectly fine except for the fact that you walk incredibly slowly and there's no run button outside of Chocobo's in a select few locations. It would also be more bearable if most of the environments weren't just long hallways, deserts, or flatlands. The remedy for this run button is the 2x/4x speed, but I find that more of a band-aid fix than a substitute because it just feels like your time is being wasted exploring the same environments at a snail's pace. The combat also feels incredibly slow. In the beginning, when you do not have many skills, there isn't much you can do other than watch the combat animations and fill the ATB bar, which takes forever even with max battle speed in the settings. 2x with max battle speed on Active Mode is what I recommend for most of the battles in the game outside of boss fights since you do not need to perform many actions if you have your gambits set up properly.
As for the combat itself, it's very unique, but I can see why no game really replicates it. The most apt description I can give of it is that it is very similar to a tab-target game with a long global cooldown like FFXI or FFXIV. Where it differs is in your control of your party members and how you can automate nearly everything in the game with the gambit system, which makes the game feel more akin to a tower defense game where you set your parameters beforehand and then watch your strategy play out. I found the combat most enjoyable when fighting the bosses because you had to adjust your gambits for all of them because usually a simple attack and heal when low setup wouldn't suffice, so you have to find their weaknesses and vulnerabilities to status effects. Though, by the end of the game, I did feel like it did get too easy with you being able to easily stack every status buff before battles with the amount of gambit slots you get, and there was little need to adjust my setup, which is the whole gameplay loop. I also found fighting the normal enemies very boring, as they usually don't pose any challenges, so it's mostly just watching the battle animations play out, so I would recommend fast-forwarding on those parts.
This is a game that lives or dies based on its balancing. The Zodiac Age ends up being too easy, especially when you get two jobs, and that leads the game to play itself with no effort or grinding, while I found the original PS2 version to be much better balanced and offer proper challenges to bosses. It's even arguable that this is the most challenging Final Fantasy game if you don't grind, though that's not much of a high bar, and the game's balancing is easily broken by the end of the game once you get a proper gambit setup going and have access to a majority of the skills.
The other main difference between the PS2 release and The Zodiac Age is the addition of jobs. In the PS2 version, every character shares the same license board (this game's version of a skill tree), but they all start with slightly different skills matching their default armor and weapons. By the end of the game, all the characters have access to nearly all the same weapons, skills, and armor, which some may dislike, but I ended up preferring it since you can completely change your characters on the fly without them having any set roles or having them specialize in different areas. For example, I had Penelo be a mage with high evasion and mystic armor that focused on using white magic with her gambits, while I had Basch be a tank with an axe that focused on buffing himself and drawing aggro away from the rest of the team. Nothing stops you from switching them around if needed, which means you are very adaptable and aren't reliant on any character specifically. On the contrary, The Zodiac Age went with a more conventional job system where you pick two of the twelve classes for your character to specialize in; these jobs would have smaller, more focused license boards that only allow you to use certain weapons and magick compared to the adaptability of the original. The job system seems like it was in the original vision of the game, but due to time constraints they couldn't implement it properly it. Even so, I'm not a fan of the way it's implemented, as it seems the game is balanced completely around everyone having access to anything. The Classic Mode mod also restores the summoning animations for Espers, which adds some flavor to them if they are a bit too long and the summons themselves are not really worth using. The Quickenings also have some of the best animations in the series but also have the same issues as the summon system.
In retrospect, it honestly is impressive how expansive this game is, however oversized it may be. There are so many locations, and the dungeons are so diverse. If you enjoyed the gameplay loop, this game has the highest quantity of side content, with the main focus being hunts. These operate similarly to the Monster Hunter games, where you have to find some kind of enemy to slay in the overworld with information given to you by a bill. These hunts have some of the most challenging boss fights in the game and can give you some of the best items in the game, though by the end I did start feeling like they got way too tedious with the amount of backtracking you have to do for some of them as well as having to go back and forth to people to turn the hunt in. You can definitely see the MMO elements that remained in the game from when it was planned to be one. This is even confirmed by the producer in an old IGN interview where they said: "Back in 2000, when Final Fantasy X, XI, and XII were originally announced as being in the planning stages, X was announced as an offline game while XI onwards would be online games. Obviously, in the process of developing Final Fantasy XII, that changed—it is, of course, an offline game that we have now."
This game is a strange game to recommend because there are a lot of parts that have merit, but at the same time, I can fully understand how people may say the game is boring or a waste of your time. I would say it's only worth playing if you want a slower, more grounded Final Fantasy with a world you can fully engross yourself in, full of things to explore. A game about where the characters aren't the main focus, even lacking a true main protagonist entirely. Instead, it's a return to form for the older games that had a focus on mechanics and role-playing over a finely woven narrative. Final Fantasy XII dares to be different, and that is something I can respect.
As a disclaimer, I played this game with the "Final Fantasy XII TZA: Classic Mode" mod, which restores practically everything from the original PS2 release while keeping all of the quality of life from The Zodiac Age, which I highly recommend playing personally.
Before commenting anything about the game itself, Square Enix did an excellent job remastering this game; it's one of the best-looking PS2-era games already, and it looks even better in The Zodiac Age. The fast forward functions are a godsend, as are the improved loading times. These combined can save about 20 hours that you spend walking or loading on the PS2 version. Combined with the existence of the Classic Mode mod, this is the definitive way to play the game on PC, regardless of whether you prefer the original balancing or job system.
This game has some of the best English localization of any game I've played and is combined with fantastic voice acting. Unfortunately, the audio is quite low quality, and it isn't improved in the remaster, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the great dialogue. Gone are the typical tropey anime writing you tend to see in a lot of other JRPGs to be replaced by classical Victorian-era vernacular, and it's spectacular.
However, even with the great writing, the plot points were stretched too thin in the middle of the game to make the game feel grander than it is. To pinpoint an exact part of the game where the story falls apart, it would be after the final Mt. Bur-Omisace visit halfway through the game, where you're asked to walk across the map with very little plot or cutscenes outside of some minor character exposition. The game never comes back from the lowered focus on the story until the very end, after the point of no return, where I felt the game forgot its own tone it set. The characters ended up being too one-note and underdeveloped, with most of them existing for the sake of driving someone else's character arc, though I still enjoyed their dialogue between each other, and liked Ashe, Balthier, and Basch, who feel like the closest to main protagonists.
Nevertheless, I found the intro and credits sequence to be excellent, while the middle of the game had a lot of low points. The music being great is just a Final Fantasy standard, and the ambient tracks were the star of the show for this game. However, I felt like the lack of combat music for normal fights took a lot of intensity out of the game, though I did get why they did it to make the game feel more seamless.
The worst part of the game is how slow it is to play. This game has an excessive amount of walking in it, to the point of having a step counter in the menu. While it isn't a true open world, it's made up of many interconnected zones that have a loading screen in between, which is perfectly fine except for the fact that you walk incredibly slowly and there's no run button outside of Chocobo's in a select few locations. It would also be more bearable if most of the environments weren't just long hallways, deserts, or flatlands. The remedy for this run button is the 2x/4x speed, but I find that more of a band-aid fix than a substitute because it just feels like your time is being wasted exploring the same environments at a snail's pace. The combat also feels incredibly slow. In the beginning, when you do not have many skills, there isn't much you can do other than watch the combat animations and fill the ATB bar, which takes forever even with max battle speed in the settings. 2x with max battle speed on Active Mode is what I recommend for most of the battles in the game outside of boss fights since you do not need to perform many actions if you have your gambits set up properly.
As for the combat itself, it's very unique, but I can see why no game really replicates it. The most apt description I can give of it is that it is very similar to a tab-target game with a long global cooldown like FFXI or FFXIV. Where it differs is in your control of your party members and how you can automate nearly everything in the game with the gambit system, which makes the game feel more akin to a tower defense game where you set your parameters beforehand and then watch your strategy play out. I found the combat most enjoyable when fighting the bosses because you had to adjust your gambits for all of them because usually a simple attack and heal when low setup wouldn't suffice, so you have to find their weaknesses and vulnerabilities to status effects. Though, by the end of the game, I did feel like it did get too easy with you being able to easily stack every status buff before battles with the amount of gambit slots you get, and there was little need to adjust my setup, which is the whole gameplay loop. I also found fighting the normal enemies very boring, as they usually don't pose any challenges, so it's mostly just watching the battle animations play out, so I would recommend fast-forwarding on those parts.
This is a game that lives or dies based on its balancing. The Zodiac Age ends up being too easy, especially when you get two jobs, and that leads the game to play itself with no effort or grinding, while I found the original PS2 version to be much better balanced and offer proper challenges to bosses. It's even arguable that this is the most challenging Final Fantasy game if you don't grind, though that's not much of a high bar, and the game's balancing is easily broken by the end of the game once you get a proper gambit setup going and have access to a majority of the skills.
The other main difference between the PS2 release and The Zodiac Age is the addition of jobs. In the PS2 version, every character shares the same license board (this game's version of a skill tree), but they all start with slightly different skills matching their default armor and weapons. By the end of the game, all the characters have access to nearly all the same weapons, skills, and armor, which some may dislike, but I ended up preferring it since you can completely change your characters on the fly without them having any set roles or having them specialize in different areas. For example, I had Penelo be a mage with high evasion and mystic armor that focused on using white magic with her gambits, while I had Basch be a tank with an axe that focused on buffing himself and drawing aggro away from the rest of the team. Nothing stops you from switching them around if needed, which means you are very adaptable and aren't reliant on any character specifically. On the contrary, The Zodiac Age went with a more conventional job system where you pick two of the twelve classes for your character to specialize in; these jobs would have smaller, more focused license boards that only allow you to use certain weapons and magick compared to the adaptability of the original. The job system seems like it was in the original vision of the game, but due to time constraints they couldn't implement it properly it. Even so, I'm not a fan of the way it's implemented, as it seems the game is balanced completely around everyone having access to anything. The Classic Mode mod also restores the summoning animations for Espers, which adds some flavor to them if they are a bit too long and the summons themselves are not really worth using. The Quickenings also have some of the best animations in the series but also have the same issues as the summon system.
In retrospect, it honestly is impressive how expansive this game is, however oversized it may be. There are so many locations, and the dungeons are so diverse. If you enjoyed the gameplay loop, this game has the highest quantity of side content, with the main focus being hunts. These operate similarly to the Monster Hunter games, where you have to find some kind of enemy to slay in the overworld with information given to you by a bill. These hunts have some of the most challenging boss fights in the game and can give you some of the best items in the game, though by the end I did start feeling like they got way too tedious with the amount of backtracking you have to do for some of them as well as having to go back and forth to people to turn the hunt in. You can definitely see the MMO elements that remained in the game from when it was planned to be one. This is even confirmed by the producer in an old IGN interview where they said: "Back in 2000, when Final Fantasy X, XI, and XII were originally announced as being in the planning stages, X was announced as an offline game while XI onwards would be online games. Obviously, in the process of developing Final Fantasy XII, that changed—it is, of course, an offline game that we have now."
This game is a strange game to recommend because there are a lot of parts that have merit, but at the same time, I can fully understand how people may say the game is boring or a waste of your time. I would say it's only worth playing if you want a slower, more grounded Final Fantasy with a world you can fully engross yourself in, full of things to explore. A game about where the characters aren't the main focus, even lacking a true main protagonist entirely. Instead, it's a return to form for the older games that had a focus on mechanics and role-playing over a finely woven narrative. Final Fantasy XII dares to be different, and that is something I can respect.