Mikey's Review

I wasn't really the one to play this so this review will be brief (take a look at Trips review for something a little more in-depth). I was really really REALLY looking forward to this game, I didn't get into RPG's very early in my gaming life and my first visit to the Final Fantasy world was X on the PS2. It changed my world! Then.... X-2 changed it again and not in a good way!

FFXII was something I yearned to be good, wished for something amazing to leap out and grab me by the short and curlies.

I was slightly disappointed I am very afraid to say. Don't get me wrong, this IS a good game, it's just not brilliant and definately not awesome.

The Story

The weak story is what got to me the most, yeah yeah I know most FF stories are a little strange but most of them you are actually interested in what happens, you can guess plots and have them make you feel happy or sad, angry or frustrated but this, well this is just something I personally could do with out. It's very weak and let's leave it at that and look at some of the other aspects of the game.

The graphics

These are a saviour of this game. They look delicious, surpisingly good for the PS2 which is definatly showing it's age right now. All of the animations are well done and smooth, with vivid colours and huge play areas. As is normal with FF the monsters range from the tiniest Cactoid to the huge Omega Mark XII. All are well detailed and don't look out of place.

Levelling Up

My fave aspect of the FF games! Levels are back with FFXII so you can really see where you need to aim for. As with everything else, getting to those elusive high 90's levels is insanely time consuming, you will not have a life for a couple of months, that I can tell you!

For me FFXII shone in this aspect, and there was one main reason why: Gambits. This basically means that you can get the game to control your characters to a certain extent. Even your main charachter! It basically means it can take some of the mundane and tedious aspects away from your levelling up mission. Auto attack monsters below a certain HP, heal when party members fall below a certain HP, use magic against flying monsters, cast haste, anything you would need to do for yourself you can set up a gambit for it to happen automatically. There is only one problem, the gambits are also part of the game, you will not get all of them until you have completed a hefty chunk of the game.

Don't let this imply that something is taken away from the game, it is not, for harder monsters or ones that provide unique challenges you will need your manual control, for your more aggressive spells or summonings. It just takes out some of the boring stuff, yes, the gambit system I really do love.

Items, Weapons and the such

It's a bit weird to start with, having to learn how to use a weapon before you can equip it but I guess it makes sense, the License Board is actually quite neat, allowing you to learn pretty much any magic, armor or shield with any person. It just takes time. You get License Points in the same way you get EXP from levelling up.

Conclusion

As I know Trip will give some more detail about the other aspects of this game such as the battle system, summons and espers I will gladly sum this up now.

If you love the FF genre of games and fancy something new with lots of really good tweaks to make the user experiance a dream then this game is for you, providing you dont actually care about the story and just want to max out all the stats, kill all the monsters and generally eat up quite a substantial part of your life.

Trip's Review

It's time to put your Chocobo underpants back on, an all new final fantasy has just been released here in the UK. Yup that's Final Fantasy 12!

You may have noticed on this site a bit of affection to the final fantasy series, so this game has been highly anticipated, with 12 being hailed as one of the best ever in the series by a lot of web sites, we we expecting a lot, lets see how it went...

If you're a hardcore final fantasy fan you love the games for power levelling, finding as many secrets as you can without having to forcefully remove your hair, and the usually awesome stories, thankfully these are all present in this game.

A bit of a disclaimer I'm only 17 hours in (give me a break, it's been 2 days and I've been working one of those), so I can't vouch for a lot of the game yet, this is just my initial view.

FF12 has done away with a few things, the main one being random battles, infact the pseudo turn based nature of the series has gone entirely, now it's an "Active Dimension Battle" (ADB) system, which is SquareEnix's way of saying it's just like Knights of the Old Republic style combat. This means you now wander about freely, with no random battles, no transition between walking about and fighting monsters, so if you see a monster you either run up to it and beat the crap out of it, or be a wuss and sneak around it. When you do decide to encounter an enemy you can pause the game and then issue commands to your party, telling them what to to (attack, use magic, an item etc...) which all then play out in real time.

Part of the ADB system is the 'Gambit' system (nothing to do with the X-men, honest!), which allows you to give basic logic to you characters, for example you can have "ally HP < 30%" then... "cast cure", which means a bit less micromanagement of characters and removes a bit of the potential tedium of having keep doing the same actions over an over again manually. As you progress through the game you unlock more of the slots to allow you to give complex instructions to you characters for almost every eventuality.

The gambit system is both the best thing and the worst thing about the combat system, while it gives you the flexibility you want to get your characters doing what you want automatically, it means once you've got them set up right it gets a bit tedious, you end up just walking about just pausing to beat things up. Thus the gambit system gets a new title... the 'auto-rape' system, allowing you to decimate any creature in you way, and it also lets you get your characters to level 99 automatically with little issue if you know where you can find re-spawning monsters (there is one place in the game).

Anyway... what else is there to this game? I'd talk about license points, but they become pointless after about 30 hours of game play... story? epic scale, poor main character, lack of individual character focus, overall poor... Hidden stuff/mini games? ok to poor... compared to FFX which had a fully fleshed out sub game, the fishing in 12 is just appalling.

Overall? Pretty good.

While the ADB/auto-rape system has it's ups and downs it's still worth the time playing about with and seeing what works best. The story while not the best is still engaging, and with one secret/side quest containing the voice of John DiMaggio? you know you'll want to get most out of the game.

A good final fantasy game, but not the best, worth while if you're a fan of the series.

Knifeh's Review

Ahh Final Fantasy XII, a long awaited game in this household where Trip litterally had it on pre-order from Play.com for over 2 and a half years lol.

Sadly in my opinion this game was not worth the wait.

Dont get me wrong, this game is a good game and I would have to say it is my third favourite Final Fantasy (next to VII and X of course) but only becuase of the wonders of the gambit system making this game a real joy to play, knowing that you dont have to initiate the same offensive and defensive strategies over and over again. The free roaming style of combat didnt kill the game as much as I though it would and the nice touches of the modified sphere grid for FFX where you learnt abilities was a plus for me.

The downside, and I think we can all agree on this, is the frankly piss poor voice acting complemented with the already previously slated weak story line was the real killer

Imagine a thespian B movie with a seven year old director and your pretty close.

Without given any spoilers I will say the the story is very forseeable, with really cringe-worthy comments and explaination of events that happen within the game which is a real shame.