Final Fantasy XII Review by Sky Render Tagline: Whose bright idea was it to turn this game into an unfun exercise in tedium? Graphics - 7/10 Yes, 7 of 10. Why? While it cannot be denied that the quality of the game's graphics are very good, there are a few... issues with them. The first: the "jaggy factor". Everything looks remarkably pixelated whenever you move about in the field. Though cutscenes generally look very nice, there's zero quality-improving graphics filters going on outside of them, so you get an effect not unlike what many PS1 3D games have with their visuals. Second: the "monochrome factor". It hardly matters that the environs are so detailed when the color palette is about as diverse as the original Unreal's. Most areas are painfully brown, and what other colors there are end up being very washed-out and dull. It's like looking at the game's world through a dirt-smeared lens. And three: the "overload factor". There's simply too much stuff on-screen at one time in conjunction with these other two problems to be able to effectively find... well, anything. What does it matter that the visuals are detailed if it means that you can only tell there's a passage to your left by checking the minimap, thanks to it just looking like a mess of brown pixels on-screen? Sound and Music - 6/10 Definitely not the usual FF faire. Hitoshi Sakimoto is a very talented composer in his own right, but something about his work on FF12's soundtrack feels lifeless. It's like a caricature of actual music, with no real harmony or melody to it. It sounds like a mish-mash of random instruments, basically, not like actual songs being played. There are exceptions, of course (such as the classic FF tunes, and the ending theme), but most of them weren't composed by Sakimoto himself. It's rather odd to see such a skilled composer produce something so... empty. As for the in-game sound effects, I'd call them neither impressive nor especially annoying. They're just there, doing their job, and not really that important on the whole. The voice acting ranges from a bit amatuer to very professional, but usually falls somewhere around the acceptable mark. I did notice that the VA often did not match up with the subtitles, but that's largely a minor concern. Gameplay - 4/10 The game has the potential for greatness, but it just plain falls flat on its face in the end due to sheer tedium, annoyance, and underdevelopment of its systems. Most enemies (read: 98% of them) give out paltry experience and LP, and no Gil at all. You instead have to sell their dropped "loot" for money, and said loot is usually not worth more than about 1000 Gil at best (usually 10 to 50 Gil). Given that items start spendy and become downright overpriced (50,000 Gil for a piece of middle-of-the-line armor?), this means that you're basically expected to kill at least a HUNDRED enemies each and every time you reach a new area. This wouldn't be quite as bad in a traditional FF, but in this one, you're basically going three-on-one against single enemies at a time. If you figure it takes a little under an hour per level-up overall, and the game expects you to be at least 55 or so by the end, that's a good 50 hours right there dedicated solely to level-grinding. Sounds like a MMORPG, doesn't it? Well, FF12 is often called an offline version of FF11, and for good reasons... But there's more. Staying true to its online game roots, enemies also can and will wipe up the floor with you and your party regularly. The difference being that you don't automatically reappear at a set location with reduced exp when this happens; instead you get the bane of gamers, the Game Over screen, and have to reload from your last save. Expect to lose a LOT of progress, unless you're so over-leveled or so incredibly lucky that you never have an enemy go Ides of March on you. Also expect to trigger an unholy number of instant-death-to-your-entire-party "sten needle" traps. Frequently found right in front of save points, or along any and every step of the way in a dungeon. Did I mention they're usually generated randomly when you enter an area, so you can't just memorize where they were last time and avoid them? Yeah, you'll want anti-trap boots equipped as soon as you can find them. Oh, and FF12 also sets the bar for annoying mimic enemies to a new high: there are mimic save points. And these aren't token battles; oh no, not even close. The mimic save points can and will rip your party into tiny slivers if you give them half a chance. These factors are not conducive for actually playing the game. Great for seeing lots of Game Over screens, but who plays a game to lose? That's something to do in your spare time, and should not be the main "appeal" of a game. Some other annoyances: chests contain random contents, so if you're after a particular item, good freaking luck; odds are you'll just get paltry Gil quantities, weak status-healing items, or a Potion. Not that you can ever know what a chest can contain as its best item, of course; they clearly expect you to buy a guide or use an online one the whole time you play this title. You cannot purchase any truly useful Gambits until the game is basically over. Enemies can and do relentlessly pursue you upon sight, and will attack you the whole time if you try to run from them. All actions, Gambits included, are disabled while fleeing, so you have to stop to heal your characters (meaning you'll inevitably end up fighting whatever you're running from anyway). Boss difficulty scales up astronomically fast, going from sub-20,000 HP to over 100,000 HP each within the span of 3 bosses. Undead enemies can and do swarm up all at once from the ground in many areas and overwhelm your party with a flurry of attacks. And there are a number of points where you have to traverse a long dungeon with no additional save points before the boss; the save point is instead AFTER the boss, illogically enough. Also, the majority of boss fights are totally unexplained and seem to largely have been put in there as some sort of fulfilling of an obligatory "every dungeon must have a boss" rule. There are a few redeeming factors to the game, but they have some serious flaws, too. The Liscense Board is an interesting idea (if more or less a direct rip-off of FFX's Sphere Grid), but you get LP too slowly to use it well. The Gambit System is both liberating and frustrating in turn, as it causes your allies to not have to be babysat every two seconds, but also causes them to be incredibly limited in how they can react to situations automatically. The switch to a mostly real-time system does seem good at first, until it becomes obvious that the system is flawed at best. Most enemies have a Rush attack that has zero charge time and can be repeated endlessly (and they will, rest assured). And enemies are very prone to getting multiple hits (I've seen them do as many as 12(!) in a single turn), while your characters rarely hit twice in a turn (let alone 5 or 6 times, which seems to be the player maximum). Most spells cannot be cast simultaneously, meaning if you focus heavily on magic, you can expect to wait a long time before your characters finally get their turn to fire off their spell. Meanwhile, the enemy will have gotten in a good 10 to 20 (I exaggerate not) attacks in on you. And to top it all off, good status effects last about 30 seconds each, while bad ones wear off in about 10 minutes if you're lucky. Story - 3/10 "Disappointing" is a good word for this game's tale. Like many games set in Ivalice, it concerns a side-plot of a much grander (and ultimately more interesting) tale of war and vice. The big difference here is, FF12's story feels entirely unnecessary compared to, say, FFTactics' or Vagrant Story's. The main cast appears to by and large have no reason to even be on the quest in the first place. Vaan, the supposed main character, basically gets dragged into the mess during unrelated shennanigans and tags along for the ride. Penelo really DOES just tag along, joining the party only because of Vaan, and contributes little to nothing to the game's actual plot. Basch is a tag-along of a different nature, and while his presence is more justified than Vaan or Penelo's, he still ends up having almost nothing to say or do for most of the game. Ashe is the only one with a definite reason to be on the quest. Balthier and Fran are the only ones besides Basch with convincing reasons to come along with her (they're in it for the money, go figure), and also the only ones besides Ashe who contribute anything interesting or worthwhile to the story. Overall, not a very solid cast of characters... Since the game is basically following a band of misfits unrelated to the main conflict of the game's story, you end up spending most of the game going to the middle of nowhere to do some menial task. Thus you find out what happened in the rest of Ivalice during your time in Sea-of-Brown Dungeon #863 via the nearest convenient plot device... I mean, important character. You only hear of the interesting stuff that happens in the game after the fact, and usually in boring dialogue scenes with little to no action going on in them. And of course, the main characters don't really re-merge their story with the overarching story until the game is 95% over. On the whole, the story feels tacked-on and ill-thought-out. Like they came up with a great tale to tell, then decided they should instead talk about the group of nobodies who went and caused a pre-emptive and anticlimactic end to the story halfway through it. Replay Value - 5/10 I personally never want to put this game in my PS2 again, if I can help it. That said, I can see how somebody with a particularly massochistic streak could find replay value in this game (marginally speaking). There's about a hojillion side-quests, most of which can be missed permanently if you do something so foolish and unwarranted as "collect treasure chests" or "advance the plot". They much remind me of FF9's side-quests, actually: mostly rumor-mill-esque material with excessive effort required, and almost always no logical reasoning behind WHY you have to do certain things for them. And, of course, no practical way to know when or where you can do any of the quests unless you basically backtrack every time a story event occurs and talk to every single NPC and check every single notice board in the game up to that point. Not my idea of "replay value", but I'm sure somebody out there would be delighted to go through such repetitive suffering. Overall - 5/10 FF12 appears to have been designed not so much as a game to be played as it was a game to be suffered. The excessive focus on level-grinding, dungeon-crawling, and unfairly high levels of luck are in no way balanced out by the game's plot, which ends up being insultingly trite and focuses on all of the most boring events. The visuals and music alike feel devoid of something, the cast of characters is clearly devoid of a fair amount of personality and develoment, and the gameplay is devoid of anything resembling thoughtful balancing or consideration for the player. About the only sort I could recommend this game to is the sort who doesn't mind dedicating an awful lot of time and effort (experiencing an incredible amount of frustration in the process) in return for very little. Pros: + Some of the best graphics on the PS2, especially in FMV and cutscenes + A long game; expect to actually clock 50+ hours, like it says on the box + A pretty feature-laden gameplay engine + Many, many things to do besides the main quest Cons: - Graphics look downright ugly outside of cutscenes, with washed-out and very brown colors making it hard to make anything out clearly - Music quality is decidedly sub-par - Dungeons are by and large long, plotless and boring crawls; the dungeons themselves also tend to be less than interesting to look at - Repetitive and often boring gameplay; the game just sort of plays itself most of the time - Most of that 50+ hours will be spent level-grinding, perhaps one of the least engaging or interesting RPG experiences ever - The game hates you: traps everywhere, enemies get way more turns than you do, there are mimic save points, etc. - Lacklustre and uninteresting story that's told very amatuerly - Most sidequests are downright rumor-like in how they're found and completed, meaning you can fully expect to miss most of them if you don't use a guide Target Audience: Definitely made with the hardcore MMORPG player in mind, this game is intended for people who enjoy getting minimal rewards for maximum effort. An enjoyment of abuse (both self-induced and game-induced) will also heighten one's appreciation of this title. Buy or Rent? Is "Neither" an option? If you're not sure you'll like it, you'd do well to rent it first. Because if it's not your kind of game, it's REALLY not your kind of game...