Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age Review

A New Age:

When asked ‘what is the greatest Final Fantasy game ever made?’, people will hardly ever provide the right response. Ever since Square Enix started pumping out re-releases and remakes, I’ve had my fingers crossed for Final Fantasy XII to be given another crack at earning some well-deserved fan-favouritism. It is, objectively, and by every conceivable metric, the greatest Final Fantasy game of all time – and consequently, one of the best JRPGs to ever exist.

Passionate hyperbole aside, Final Fantasy XII is great, and is indeed my favourite of the series. Returning to the world of Ivalice was a treat I’ve looked forward to for years, but it’s a little worrying that Final Fantasy XII feels as refreshing today as it did more than a decade ago. It speaks to how little the industry paid attention to FFXII’s phenomenal gameplay mechanics, and how stagnant the JRPG genre has remained in the intervening years (with some spectacular exceptions).

Story:

Final Fantasy XII shares its world of Ivalice with a couple of other Square RPGs, namely Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics (both phenomenal titles in their own right). Much like these games, FFXII’s story is dense with political intrigue – full of warring countries, royal assassinations and important looking people talking about important sounding things: things that aren’t always easy to keep up with should your attention start to waver. In the game’s opening moments, before we get to the story proper, FFXII throws lore and history at you in the hopes that you’ll absorb some of it, but it gets pretty dense.

What it distills from all this worldbuilding however is a great story anchored by a small group of believable and, more importantly, likeable characters – with one exception. Our ‘main character’ often feels anything but: Vaan, a clichéd street orphan who channels Disney’s Aladdin at every oppurtunity, is a rather bland protaganist who I consistently left out of my party (and who the story constantly sidelines). He’s a strange but prominent blip in a cast of otherwise fantastic characters. The gentleman Sky Pirate Balthier and his bunny-girl companion Fran absolutely steal the show with an overabundance of charm that really should have been shared around more evenly, whilst the politically inclined Basch and Ashe make sure to keep pushing the plot in the right direction. Childhood friend Penelo rounds out the cast, who takes turns being fiercly loyal or reproachful to the childish Vaan, and boasts the cutest FF outfit to date.

Thanks to the grounded nature of the story – we’re dealing with warring states rather than world-ending catostrophes here – FFXII curiously feels like it carries more weight than your standard JRPG fare. Consequently it lacks a bit of the granduer we’ve come to expect from the Final Fantasy series, but I never missed it during the lengthy time spent with the title.

Gameplay:

Not content with only mixing up the narrative tropes we expect from its numbered kin, Final Fantasy XII also radically reworks the way players think about battle: on the surface, FFXII seems wildly different to its predeccesors. Random battles are a thing of the past, there are no scene transitions for battles and you’ll have full control over your characters movement in the 3D space whilst fights rage on. Despite these (at the time) genre-busting changes, however, FFXII plays similarly to what has come before. You still fight by bringing up a menu – you can choose whether this action pauses time or not by selecting an ‘active’ or ‘wait’ system – and are presented with standard attack, magic and item options. Whilst you’re only in direct control of one character at a time, and other characters will happily fight using their own logic, you can issue commands on the fly if you’re really in a pinch.

In the right hands, however, FFXII plays almost like a ‘Final Fantasy Manager’ sim, allowing overly prepared players to invest deeply into the game’s stellar Gambit system and go entirely hands-off during actual battle. Gambits is where FFXII really deviated from what we’ve come to expect, and are what set FFXII apart for me a decade ago. I’m thrilled to say I love the system even more now thanks to a couple of small but important tweaks this rerelease brings. Gambits essentially work like simplistic coding, allowing players that are so inclined to script conditional statements to each character. Conditions such as ‘If an Ally’s health drops below X%’ or ‘Attack target:’ can be paired with commands such as ‘use potion’ or ‘foe: lowest HP’ respectively.

It’s a initially daunting system that pays endless dividends to the determined: savvy players can craft a list of prioritized ‘if’ commands to make a perfect healing unit that will always keep them and their party healthy, regardless of debuffs or depleted mana, or an assassin who seeks out the weakest foes or distracting mobs and dispatches them so you can focus on more important enemies. Final Fantasy XII allows you to use these systems to not only gain the upper hand, but often break its fights wide open. After hours of buying new command phrases and perfecting my gambits, I was able to craft a robust party that could take out most enemies withouy any player input. Instead, I could bump the game to 2x or even 4x speed (a new, invaluable inclusion) and let fights finish themselves lightning-fast, gaining me loot and EXP in the process.