Mega Derived

Final Fantasy XII (that’s twelve) is a delightful and, at times, odd mash-up of traditional Japanese RPG conventions meeting a westernised approach. What does that mean to us? The game looks like World of Warcraft, but plays like Final Fantasy. It’s a striking decision and it marks a big departure from a very established series yet, at heart, it remains true to the former games whilst managing to work a new approach that should entice many new fans as well as encouraging fans disgruntled from former games to shell out another thirty quid.

The two opposing schools of thought that have been running in Final Fantasy games are choice against structure. Games like FFVII and VIII allowed you to customise your party to, pretty much, your own specifications. For instance, each character could perform magic attacks, provided you had enough free materia slots in your weapons. FFVII operated in a way that forced the character to bind (temporarily, these choices weren’t permanent) various spells and abilities to the weapons themselves before they were allowed to be used in battle. You could pretty much run around however you wanted. VIII continued and expanded on this ideal, creating a rather convoluted system of ‘drawing’ magic out of various enemies before you could use it in battle. This afforded us, the player, greater sense of freedom in comparison to games like FFIX and X, where your hand was forced into character classes. Yuna from FFX is the healer of the party, Vivi from FFIX can only function as the offensive magician. Even the weapon choices are fixed: Steiner (FFIX) can only equip swords made explicitly for Steiner. There are ups and downs to both systems and, indeed, middle-ground games such FFV – where your characters can pick and choose from certain classes to be during the game itself – that mostly come from these various contrasting ideologies: by allowing the player freedom, the developers afford us a greater sense of exploration and adventure but remove the sense of purpose, simplicity and individuality that the rigidity that a fixed-class system allows. As the first real sequel to FFX, then, FFXII serves as a foil to FFX’s rigidity: characters are now free to perform whatever tasks they wish, however they would like it. My healer, for instance, ran around for the entire game armed with a gun instead of the traditional staff. And I very much enjoyed having my shotgun-toting princess firing off a powerful boomstick in-between casting Curaja. The game, however, makes no effort to explain this system to you. If you’re not willing to explore the various weapon classes, the game is unapologetic. But it’s worth it, believe me. It’s almost impossible to get a good grasp of the weapon system without consorting an FAQ (although I’m sure the developers would prefer you purchase the official licensed strategy guide) as the games “attack power” rating on weapons is useless when you compare them to one another. If you’ve got a gun with an attack power of 30, it could do similar damage to a one-handed sword with an attack power that’s doubled. So you’re left alone, to your own devices, in a world of multiple weapon types and limitless opportunity to equip them onto any of the six members of your party. Bewildering? Certainly.

Combat is handled in a seemingly real-time affair, looking suspiciously similar to World of Warcraft in its third person, one-character centric view. Soon it becomes obvious that this is just a clever way of presenting the established Final Fantasy combat, as the familiar ‘small bar at the bottom of the screen’ fills up to completion, signalling that your character (of which you can have three active at any one time) can now attack. The only thing they’ve removed is the box that asks you every single time the bar is full if you want to attack or not, now simply assuming that, yes, you’re very much into the idea of smashing your current foe into itty bitty bits and just gets on with it, leaving you to pause the combat with a tap of the X button when you want to issue new commands. It creates a much more fluid gameplay experience and a very enjoyable one. Characters can even be ‘programmed’ with Gambits, a fancy if/then system placed into the game. All of the characters can perform certain tasks: if a party members HP is below 40%, for instance, you can set another character to automatically cast Cure on them. Characters can be told to attack the nearest foe instead of waiting for you to tell them what to do. Things have become more streamlined, leaving you more time to watch the battles unfolding than scrolling endlessly through menus. Whilst it sometimes puts itself in danger of having the player do absolutely nothing apart from run forwards until the end of the dungeon, the game never makes this feel like its boring. For some bizarre reason it works. And it’s good.

It’s hard to dredge across a fifty hour experience without a good hook, however. The visual style shines through in FFXII, lifting the game into a visually enticing nugget of traditional Japanese-fuelled soap-opera tales of woe, rebellion and destiny. The protagonist this time round is perhaps the least mentally disturbed of the whole party, assimilating himself into a ragtag group of citizens fighting an empire whom invaded and conquered their country two years previously. The visual styling is magnificent, with grand cityscape’s spiced up by the addition of flying vehicles, a seamless juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy. CGI scenes that are epic in their construction bind the game together, presenting a feeling of grandeur similar to that of Star Wars. It looks good even now, in an age of HD gaming on consoles that far outperform the capabilities of the PS2. Character designs are enticing and, even though you get minimal time to learn about them via cutscenes – at least in comparison to previous Final Fantasy games – they will win you over. The only insufferable one is Penelo, a girl who has no purpose from the minute she’s introduced in the game to its conclusion. Still, the other five are fantastic. Good art design can compensate a lack of graphics, and it’s shown here. The script is beautifully translated, too; chock full of archaic language and the voice actors work well alongside it to seal the deal. There are a few minor problems. Compared to previous games, the plot can sometimes feel a bit thin and it’s not until the end of the game that you know exactly what’s going on. For some that will create an air of intrigue but it will distance others. Also worth noting is that much of the main quest is quite simple to play after you’ve learnt a few basic tricks, as you can just repeat them endlessly. If you try it on the optional bonus quests you’ll get destroyed, however. But, still, minor flaws aside, Final Fantasy XII sounds good. It looks good. It plays good. Squeenix have created what is, quite probably, the most fun you’ll ever have watching a game virtually play itself.