I'm not normally one for JRPGs - this is the first Final Fantasy game I've seriously played that didn't charge me a subscription fee - so it was surprising to see how far I took this one, stopping just short of the final two optional superbosses. One of the first things that caught my attention was the realisation that unlike a lot of video games, I wasn't playing the story of a single protagonist, but rather, a much broader story of a moment in Ivalician history, presented through the trials and agencies of the six characters that make up the party. The game opens with a lengthy montage of military invasion, multiple royal deaths, betrayal and schemes. It's a lot, and there's a certain passion one needs to have for excessive fantasy worldbuilding to immediately get much out of it (I loved it, obviously)
With all of that swirling around, we sensibly draw back to Vaan and Penelo, passionate and principled, but powerless in the face of an imperial occupation of their home. From there, we have a stable grounding from which we can expand back out, capturing pirates and princesses, floating fortresses and resistances, until we're out of the footnotes and into the annals of history. An excellent balance is struck between the immensity of Ivalice's inter-imperial politics and the individual, personal story that acts as the immediate, played narrative. It all connects and coheres, without needing to hold back on introducing characters and locations. Even if it does, at times, feel like the events that are happening on screen are filling space between things that are actually important, and two of the three women in the party have very little to do or say about anything important, it's a remarkable progression that suits the game well
That progression, as with most RPGs, is at the heart of the game, but not in the way I expected. Here, the typically time-consuming and dull number scaling of experience points happens without input - you don't need input, because all of the interesting decisions are on the license boards, where you specialise your characters and find that satisfying synergy that makes building characters so entertaining. Since you (mostly) can't miss any license board upgrades, you're always building your characters up from a sensible baseline, and simple completion of the story has plenty of room for building inefficiently. It takes off a lot of the pressure that normally comes with such decision-making, and creates a wonderful, intrinsic incentive to pursue side content and see how well you do. Not only that, but the gear that you get from pursuing that side content, delving deeper into each of the story's dungeons, is often the best and most interesting in the game.
Which is where we come to my first big issue with this game, and a broader issue I find I have with the genre. As I've discovered in wiki-diving, there's a lot of gear that you'll simply never get, because it only has a slim chance to be obtained from an enemy you only have one chance to fight, or it has a slim chance of appearing in a room you have no reason to walk into more than once. I couldn't tell you what rare items I obtained, because I couldn't tell you if they were rare or not. From my perspective, I just opened a box. Any perceived rarity has nothing to do with what I actually experienced. I earned the gear, certainly, but who's to say what I never even knew I missed out on?
The same philosophy applies to the game's approach to much of its optional content, however. I did my best to take the game as it was, but if your curiosity is peaked by the promise of a new fight or area, there's a good chance you'll have to look up what you're supposed to do to actually get it. For example; there's an optional boss fight in a locked room hidden behind a puzzle, which you can open by getting a key by trading an item (that you got from an unrelated sidequest) to an NPC you've never heard of, who you can't see, in a corner an area that is nowhere near the locked door and you have no reason to revisit, much less thoroughly examine every corner.
I think the intent is that players learn about these things through methods other than just, like, playing the game. Maybe there was a time when hearing about a legendary sword at the peak of the Great Crystal was something significant, and being fortunate enough to find it was a story worth telling. Unfortunately, whether or not it's a fair criticism to put on the game, what that looks like now is just skimming any one of a number of guides available online. There's simply no other way to engage with, frankly, sizeable chunks of the game, even if you do want to take it at its terms. It's a frequent occurrence, and unsatisfying every time.
This method of obfuscation seems to me a very deeply held part of the genre. The nature of Final Fantasy XII is that it's always throwing you at new enemies, new problems to solve with your party of heroes, all without telling you exactly what you're in for. It's something of a double-edged sword; the downside is that every new problem is met with a brief period of experimentation, where you find out what exactly it is you're not allowed to do. So much of the challenge in the game centers on this; the more you delve into the game's Espers and Hunts, the more you encounter enemies who refuse to be Slowed, or Sheared, or affected by most any of the tools at your disposals. Some bosses enter lengthy phases of invulnerability, where you're left more or less standing around and waiting for them to finish. Of course, they have no trouble including enemies who cast spells that simply kills your entire active party as soon as you start the fight. It's often exasperating, and I can't help but wonder if there isn't - in a completely different game, mind - a better approach they could have considered.
The developers do need to do something to force players to change their strategies, though, otherwise we'd just find something that works and stick to that the entire game, which would be a tremendous waste. Developing a strategy in this game is an exercise in flexibility and improvisation, aided by the wonderful specialization of license boards and the frankly brilliant Gambit system. They're so pitch-perfect for this style of gameplay that I'm surprised to not have seen them elsewhere. All of the non-decisions of picking targets to attack, juggling obvious elemental advantages and healing are taken care of, leaving you to focus on the edge cases and complexity that actually make combat interesting. Between that and the generous, welcoming progression systems, it really does feel like developing a party of competent heroes, who have a place in a story of such scale.
There's other things to talk about, like how it's easily one of the most gorgeous games of that entire console generation, or the refreshing and inspired Ivalician aesthetic, or the wonderful blocking in the cutscenes, or how they really didn't have to make all the men in the game as hot as they did, or how fucking ICONIC Fran is, etc. I really wasn't expecting to find so much to love. It's mired in an often frustrating philosophy of obscurity that permeates every minute of actually playing the game, but without the pointless busywork of random battles and grinding, the worst moments are over quickly, and the moments of triumph feel like a direct result of careful planning, quick thinking and versatility.
With all of that swirling around, we sensibly draw back to Vaan and Penelo, passionate and principled, but powerless in the face of an imperial occupation of their home. From there, we have a stable grounding from which we can expand back out, capturing pirates and princesses, floating fortresses and resistances, until we're out of the footnotes and into the annals of history. An excellent balance is struck between the immensity of Ivalice's inter-imperial politics and the individual, personal story that acts as the immediate, played narrative. It all connects and coheres, without needing to hold back on introducing characters and locations. Even if it does, at times, feel like the events that are happening on screen are filling space between things that are actually important, and two of the three women in the party have very little to do or say about anything important, it's a remarkable progression that suits the game well
That progression, as with most RPGs, is at the heart of the game, but not in the way I expected. Here, the typically time-consuming and dull number scaling of experience points happens without input - you don't need input, because all of the interesting decisions are on the license boards, where you specialise your characters and find that satisfying synergy that makes building characters so entertaining. Since you (mostly) can't miss any license board upgrades, you're always building your characters up from a sensible baseline, and simple completion of the story has plenty of room for building inefficiently. It takes off a lot of the pressure that normally comes with such decision-making, and creates a wonderful, intrinsic incentive to pursue side content and see how well you do. Not only that, but the gear that you get from pursuing that side content, delving deeper into each of the story's dungeons, is often the best and most interesting in the game.
Which is where we come to my first big issue with this game, and a broader issue I find I have with the genre. As I've discovered in wiki-diving, there's a lot of gear that you'll simply never get, because it only has a slim chance to be obtained from an enemy you only have one chance to fight, or it has a slim chance of appearing in a room you have no reason to walk into more than once. I couldn't tell you what rare items I obtained, because I couldn't tell you if they were rare or not. From my perspective, I just opened a box. Any perceived rarity has nothing to do with what I actually experienced. I earned the gear, certainly, but who's to say what I never even knew I missed out on?
The same philosophy applies to the game's approach to much of its optional content, however. I did my best to take the game as it was, but if your curiosity is peaked by the promise of a new fight or area, there's a good chance you'll have to look up what you're supposed to do to actually get it. For example; there's an optional boss fight in a locked room hidden behind a puzzle, which you can open by getting a key by trading an item (that you got from an unrelated sidequest) to an NPC you've never heard of, who you can't see, in a corner an area that is nowhere near the locked door and you have no reason to revisit, much less thoroughly examine every corner.
I think the intent is that players learn about these things through methods other than just, like, playing the game. Maybe there was a time when hearing about a legendary sword at the peak of the Great Crystal was something significant, and being fortunate enough to find it was a story worth telling. Unfortunately, whether or not it's a fair criticism to put on the game, what that looks like now is just skimming any one of a number of guides available online. There's simply no other way to engage with, frankly, sizeable chunks of the game, even if you do want to take it at its terms. It's a frequent occurrence, and unsatisfying every time.
This method of obfuscation seems to me a very deeply held part of the genre. The nature of Final Fantasy XII is that it's always throwing you at new enemies, new problems to solve with your party of heroes, all without telling you exactly what you're in for. It's something of a double-edged sword; the downside is that every new problem is met with a brief period of experimentation, where you find out what exactly it is you're not allowed to do. So much of the challenge in the game centers on this; the more you delve into the game's Espers and Hunts, the more you encounter enemies who refuse to be Slowed, or Sheared, or affected by most any of the tools at your disposals. Some bosses enter lengthy phases of invulnerability, where you're left more or less standing around and waiting for them to finish. Of course, they have no trouble including enemies who cast spells that simply kills your entire active party as soon as you start the fight. It's often exasperating, and I can't help but wonder if there isn't - in a completely different game, mind - a better approach they could have considered.
The developers do need to do something to force players to change their strategies, though, otherwise we'd just find something that works and stick to that the entire game, which would be a tremendous waste. Developing a strategy in this game is an exercise in flexibility and improvisation, aided by the wonderful specialization of license boards and the frankly brilliant Gambit system. They're so pitch-perfect for this style of gameplay that I'm surprised to not have seen them elsewhere. All of the non-decisions of picking targets to attack, juggling obvious elemental advantages and healing are taken care of, leaving you to focus on the edge cases and complexity that actually make combat interesting. Between that and the generous, welcoming progression systems, it really does feel like developing a party of competent heroes, who have a place in a story of such scale.
There's other things to talk about, like how it's easily one of the most gorgeous games of that entire console generation, or the refreshing and inspired Ivalician aesthetic, or the wonderful blocking in the cutscenes, or how they really didn't have to make all the men in the game as hot as they did, or how fucking ICONIC Fran is, etc. I really wasn't expecting to find so much to love. It's mired in an often frustrating philosophy of obscurity that permeates every minute of actually playing the game, but without the pointless busywork of random battles and grinding, the worst moments are over quickly, and the moments of triumph feel like a direct result of careful planning, quick thinking and versatility.