Was excited to play this game during my explorations of the mmo final fantasies to see how it stacks up. I find it rather dull. The opening was amazing, and it steadily declines in interest after that. I enjoy the design of the world and lore, and I like the feeling of exploring outside with those large crystals gleaming over the horizon.

However, I think the dungeons are an awful slog. I played up to escaping the underground mineshafts after being imprisoned. They are excessively long, mostly linear, and almost all the fights play out the same way. I set up some gambits, sit back, watch, and occasionally cast a spell. I specifically chose to try the ps2 version to try and see the merits of the original license board and flexibility of the system, perhaps thinking it might have been part of the original vision of the game. I also heard that the zodiac age had a nerfed difficulty, and I prefer my rpgs to have difficult combat. The original license board is a mildly interesting system, but it doesn't help the autocombat battles at all. I had heard people say everyone plays the same at the end, but I was feeling it already in the beginning. It's interesting how random actions and interactions in combat affect character stat increases, and certain weapons and equipment change things like evasion, magic resist, etc which combined are meant to be a kind of invisible class diversity, but playing the game just felt like I had 4 characters who do slightly different things, some of them hit slow, some of them evade more, some of them have lower health. But unlike FFII you don't really feel the differences when combat runs automatically, because it's mostly a process of waiting for the enemy to die and making sure nobody is in too much danger. ​It just felt repetitive and a little meaningless.

I think if the dungeons were either shorter, or has more options per minute of gameplay they would be a lot more entertaining. Older final fantasy games had either short linear dungeons with occasional divergences and dead ends, or in the NES days, tense and dangerous dungeons where running from battle and prioritizing a few treasure rooms and then leaving before death and coming back again later were common affairs. Even dragon quest viii, which came out around the same time, had dungeons way smaller in comparison to ffxii, but still felt like they had better exploration, more interesting designs, more choices to make, and were more dangerous.

Even when I fought the bosses and barely survived the encounters, it still felt dull using items on fallen characters and pausing to edit gambits when they ran out of mp. So maybe a higher difficulty isn't what this kinda game needs after all. I plan to try the zodiac age to see if it manages to make these systems and dungeons more fun with a class system to build toward something rather than just buy licenses for weapons I find and things I don't have yet. I think the zodiac age starts you off with more gambits too, which might give me more choices to make earlier. It's ironic but I found the combat of both mmos more engaging than this version of xii's single player mmo style combat.

Regarding the other aspects of the game, I liked the characters all a mild amount, but it doesn't feel like it stacks to the amount of intrigue other games in the series manage to build early, and they don't give enough to tide over the lackluster systems and slog dungeons.

Ok, there's only so many chopped-up women I can stomach without thinking the game has an issue. Even though they always killed one and the same person. Kinda makes it worse though.

The game has its charms with weird 2D-sequences, the OST, the sometimes funny dialogue and the weird storybooks you find in-game.

And even though the game seems to be self-aware of its own pulpiness, it's not aware of other things it did, that I really hated: sexualizing, killing, and - third time's the charm - CHOPPING UP the main female character. I get storywise why - but that story was a choice Suda51 made and that I had to play through to move on in this game.

There's too much of the old "woman dies so the man gets something to do" going on for me, which is why I didn't finish it.
Got to the last bit of the game and called it quits then.
Looking up the ending I'm glad I did.