Final Fantasy XII : The Zodiac Age - Now with 60% less power crystals

The Price : £17.49 (on sale) The Total Play Time : 77.9hr (achieved 34/41 achievements, beat Yiazmat, pretty proud of that)

The Review:

One of the few JRPGs that's actually worth your time because of how much it respects your time.

When I play JRPGs I brace myself for tedious grinds, repetitive enemies, slow and stilted combat, absurd ‘grand’ plots that quickly lose all sense, and characters that would otherwise be in the top 0.1% of OnlyFans. Depending on who you ask, that last point may not be a complaint but I definitely feel a certain amount of brain rot with neuron activation of this nature. I think a personal truth for why I even attempt to play these types of games when so many of the main tropes of the genre don’t even appeal to me is because I am a complete sucker for cool magic systems and I greatly enjoy the ‘monkey see action’ of damage numbers going up up and up. Combine the two and I am yours, truly.

Final Fantasy XII (12) offers no particularly exceptional magic system nor even an interesting number go up gratification. Why did I love it then? Because it does everything in its power to alleviate and address every single complaint I mentioned prior. I’ll go into more detail in a second but to sum it up, the game is very self aware of what it is, where it comes from, and has an absolute respect for the player's time. The defining result is a combat system I’ve not seen elsewhere or since which is perfectly complemented with a gambit system that streamlines the already smooth process.

Let me first paint a familiar picture for you:

You roam around in a (J)RPG, you get a random encounter, the game stops and transitions you to a fight area, maybe a nice animation plays with a little ditty, maybe the area is in theme with where you were in the overworld. The enemy pops onto the screen with some text announcing what it is, maybe it does a little animation or voiceline itself. It's now time to select your actions, you navigate through the menus clicking, probably spamming, inputs. Maybe you only have to do it for one character, maybe you have to do it for every character. Done. You watch your character's action. Maybe a pathetic animation plays out, maybe a really cool one plays out. The health bar of the enemy empties to nothing, maybe it does a wiggle and death cry. A triumph ditty plays and the game announces to you your xp gains, your loot drops, maybe even character level ups with a small stat screen showing you each stat has increased by +1 or +2 or the ever elusive +3, and then it's over. You transport back to the overworld ready to do the exact same thing again. I reckon this process takes anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.

Now a second painting:

You’re in the overworld, you see an enemy in real time and head to it, your character automatically readies their action and executes it, a simple sword hit all the way to a powerful magical spell. The enemy dies instantly, fades away and drops a loot bag where it died which you can run over to collect. A level up is a passive event. This process takes about 3-5 seconds.

I don’t believe that any of the superfluous flourish in the first example is ill intended, but the nature of these types of games leads to a lot of repetition, which makes it vital to refine systems to be smooth and painless just as much as they are fun and entertaining. Without a middle ground, players will quickly become sick of the very thing that they are meant to be enjoying. The second example recognises this and streamlines the process to be quick, while still putting a lot of work into what the actual payoffs are, chiefly - cool enemies, cool animations, cool music, cool characters, and cool worlds.

The second painting exactly describes FF:XII (12) and its unique combat system. Such a system is actually a peculiar hybrid of turn based and real time. You queue an action and after a period of time determined by your character's speed and perks, it gets executed. That’s it. Simple. The result is that you actually get to watch these really cool and interesting fights happening right before you. Quick fire questions: What if I don’t want to queue the same action over and over? The game uses a Gambit System, a list of fairly robust rules you have full control over for each character that determines what they should automatically do in certain situations. What if I want full control over the actions? Then you can jump right in and manually select actions. What if battles are going too fast to follow? Slow it down in the settings. What if battles are going too slow? Speed ‘em up, baby! Aren’t the battles just playing themselves out? Yeah kinda, but only in the way that fulfils the RPG fantasy of watching really cool fights that you've set up. The beauty of this system is that it recognises that not all fights are equal. When it's about fighting cool enemies, it's about fighting cool enemies, using your cool movesets, thinking on your feet and dropping in to respond to unique attacks and debuffs. When it’s about grinding xp or loot, it's a streamlined system that reduces fluff time to mere seconds so that you can get back to the fun parts of the game. The cherry on top of this beautiful cake is an in-game 2x and 4x speed option to further fast forward tedious parts, should you wish. FF:XII (12) is a game that gives you the keys to its kingdom, and is happy to let you rule however you would like.

With the combat perfected, what's left of my earlier complaints is the stupid stories these games all seem to have, and the gratuitous sexualisation of so many of female characters. FF:XII (12) manages to have a remarkably grounded plot for its genre. While the plot does get increasingly absurd towards the end; for the majority it portrays an impressive and realistic invasion and resource grab of a powerful nation with power hungry young blood at its helm over its more domestic and traditional peace seeking neighbours. The resource in question is rather clever too, combining the tropes of final fantasy with grittier real world power dynamics. The lore of the world is that a powerful crystal called deifacted (means to make godly or to give godlike powers) nethicite was handed by gods to a king who used it to unite his area of the world and bring about some form of order. In the future, the games present, one faction of this area has discovered a way of creating and mass producing artificial nethicite from more ordinary magical stones, and using its new found industrialisation to power its war machines that it can use to rule over everyone else. I liked the story because, while it was about magical stones in essence, it really felt like they took a back seat in terms of their role in the grander play of geo-political politics and conflict. Such politics and conflicts which are excellently displayed and reinforced in many areas of the game. From foreign guards stationed at every corner of your home city, to the restless and unwelcoming comments of the ordinary citizens when you speak to them, even the stark visual contrasts between the dark, heavy, and armoured design of the aggressor and the lightweight and colourful designs of yours and your own. Everything about them is big, imposing, and a little scary, especially because their motif and context screams they are not from here, and are here by force, and by force will be. Much of the plot is also aided by a lot of cutscenes. I loved how human they felt. They depicted the characters' personalities really well, and were saturated with interesting and well crafted world building. My personal favourites were cutscenes with the main squad, and how they were able to capture their dynamics so well and display them so naturally. For example, the different relationships they had with each other and how they grew together over the story, all of it represented in how they talked to each other, how they huddled together, even through how they walked down a street together in their own sub-cliques. It was rather charming and quite warm.

In terms of character design and typical ‘fan service’, there is really only one character who fits into such a category. She is a scantily clad rabbit-human hybrid thingy called Fran, she looks like a playboy bunny for god's sake. It's genuinely more funny than it is in anything else. Aside from Fran Service, there is an issue (one I’m willing to put down to the games age and allow for the technology it had access to at the time) that many of the characters look very similar to each other. Normally it wouldn’t be a huge problem, but there is literally a plot line revolving around an identical twin, which completely underwhelmed and confused me because everyone looks related anyway. Though it is an issue that is definitely more forgivable because it only extends to their models, and not their clothes or style, with each character still feeling unique in that sense. As for creature design, most fodder is unexceptional if not well done, conversely most bosses were largely very interesting and all were definitely unique. Unfortunately some of the best were far too large to properly fit on the screen so it was difficult to properly appreciate them. An issue present for only a handful of bosses, so it did not mar my experience much.

Outside of characters and plot, there were a few great mechanics that kept you engaged and willing to explore. The most prominent is the Hunt system, in which bills are posted on job boards of various deadly creatures that need taking down. They were enjoyable, involved travelling to the bill poster and hearing a small story about their woes, and then promising to vanquish the beast(s) for them in different areas of the world. Largely optional too, though doing so unlocks more areas and what I'm going to loosely refer to as quests so there is still good incentive to do them outside of the goodness of your own heart. Another system is the Bazaar. It took a little while to get it, but essentially, when you sell loot you may also be fulfilling the criteria for hidden recipes which when complete unlock a new item in the Bazaar. This ranges from common potions to some of the best gear in the game. It is in your best interest to find the rarer drops of monsters because they are all invariably valuable in some way or another. Another notable mention is the incredible music. Each area has its own theme and they are all expertly crafted. All of them. I will say my favourites were the music in low town, Rabanastre, and the hauntingly beautiful music in Necrohol of Nabudis. Just incredible, honestly.

~80 hours is a long time to play a single story, and I would like to say one more thing about how the game manages to stay fresh throughout. Aside from the new music and enemies and aesthetic of a new area, most also incorporated some novel gimmick. It could be as simple as switches that open and close alternate doors, changes in weather that change terrain, pairing strangers conversations together to help people socialise and solve each others problems, a weird quick time event race, or as complex as areas with no maps, areas with secret walls, dungeons with strange mathematical puzzles. Some are hit and miss, but the overall effect is that each area sticks with you in a unique way and you can appreciate it for what it is. Except The Great Crystal area. Seriously that place can fuck off. It's nauseating, claustrophobic, and a little panic inducing. I genuinely felt quite sick having to traverse it, twice even, and was so off put by it that there was an optional boss I wanted to fight but could not stomach traversing it a third time. Apart from that, there is a serious charm to be found throughout all areas of the game.

Some miscellaneous issues that I couldn’t quite group coherently, both because they were largely standalone and Not That Bad ™: it was unfun that some bosses simply became immune towards the end of their fights for the sake of difficulty and challenge, the Bazaar, while interesting, could have been more transparent, there were far too many aspects of the game based around either luck or utterly insane stats (for example a spell that did damage in accordance to how many times you had used a completely unrelated item), there was an inconsistency about how smooth some of the quests were (some would let you teleport back to finish dialogue, others wouldn’t), despite the bestiary, you never really got a sense of any enemy stats which I felt would have helped to contextualise your own stats, instead you relied mostly on a damage number to meaningfully indicate progression. That's about it, anything else I could potentially think of is only along these lines. Nothing here was particularly frustrating, especially in the grand scheme of my entire playthrough, but I feel they were still worth mentioning. Otherwise, FF:XII (12) is a classic, one that deserves at least a look into even if you aren’t overly familiar or even fond of the genre, because I promise you, neither am I, and yet I recommend it wholeheartedly.