[img align=right width=200]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/games/U-072/bf/U-072-S-13000-A.jpg[/img]The Final Fantasy series is one of the longest game series out there. What started as a failing company's "Final" Fantasy, ended up as one of the most succesful franchises of all time, with 12 parts in the main series and dozens of remakes and spin-offs.
Final Fantasy XII (2006) is the second game of the main series on the PS2, after Final Fantasy X (2001) and it's semi spin-off Final Fantasy X-2 (2003).
Final Fantasy XII (FF12) takes place in the world of Ivalice, where two major kingdoms, Rosaria and Arcadia are at war. Our main character Vaan comes from the smaller kingdom Dalmasca, trapped between the two fighting nations. He lives in Rabanastre, capital of Dalmasca, with his friend Penelo, and dreams of one day becoming a sky pirate.
FF12 starts with a small prequel (which serves the function of tutorial), where we meet Reks, the two year older brother of Vaan, who gets murdered in a fight with Aradia. We also meet Bash, captain of the Dalmascan army, who prevents his king from signing a treaty, by murdering him. Because of his action, Dalmasca doesn't become part of the Arcadian empire and a resiliance rises against the opressing nation.
From here, the story continues and it doesn't take long until you meet (in typical FF style) the other characters of your party.
A couple of negative remarkes should be made about this story:
1) The main character Vaan is a pretty ordinary guy who doesn't seem to influence the story all that much. Balthier (and to a lesser extend: Ashe), a member of your party, seems to be making the decisions when it comes to what to do next, which makes me wonder why you don't view the story more out of his perspective.
2) Although the voice acting is fine (with some characters having a refreshing non-American accent) a lot of the sentences spoken, are not. Lots of the "higher" class character speak as if they just walked out of a Shakespear play. This makes the story sometimes hard to follow, especially in cut-scenes where text is being said rather fast. This maybe fun for those who major in english, but for others (and those whose first language isn't english) this can be a problem.
Anyway, enough about the story, let's talk gameplay. For FF12, Square dared to innovate. Whether you like this or not, that's up to you to decide, but certain things have pretty radically changed.
Most noticably: The random encounter, turn-based battle system is gone. Now, you can simply see your enemies walk in the same environment as you, and even avoid them if you don't feel like fighting. The battle system changed aswell. What Square calls the "Active Dimension Battle" (ADB) is a real-time battle system in which your characters and the enemies can freely move. Blue and Red curved lines indicate which char/enemy is atacking another. Because the battle is in real-time, the gameplay is much faster (a good thing) but can get pretty hectic with lots of enemies on the screen or during a boss battle (a bad thing).
Another new addition to FF12 is the gambit system. Gambits are commands your characters (both the character you're controlling and the 2 others) will execute under certain conditions.
Things like "Attack enemy who is HP critical" to "Throw elexir on character with MP>10%". The order in which you place these in the Gambit screen will mark the importance of each action, the highest placed gambit being the most important. Lots of different options make this an interesting system to experiment with, aswell as making the battles more enjoyable; because the player doesn't have to select each action manually.
The "License Board" serves the same function as the "Sphere Grid" in FF10, although less complicated. License Points are required to activate licenses, which you gain next to experience in battle. It's basically a large chess board, with magic spells, augments, armor and weapons on all spots. This board controls what the characters can do/wear, because you can only activate a license that borders a license your character has already learned. In the first 20 (or so) hours of the game, it's important not to waste your License Points, so your characters can wear the latest armor, use the latest spells, etc. So if you want to use the spell "Fira" with a character, you have to activate the corresponding license on the board, aswell as buy the spell in a magic shop. This seems rather complicated, but works pretty smoothly.
A bad thing however is that it's much too easy to complete the License Board. With a character at level 50, he/she will probably have almost the entire License Board activated, which makes all characters identical and renders character tactics completely useless.
Graphics of this game are very good for a PS2 game, with the addition of a fully 3D world where you can control the camera in, something that makes the game much more accesible, and maybe even more mainstream. Also new is that non-playable-characters (NPCs) who have something to say are indicated with a text-balloon above their heads, making it unnecessary to try and talk to each NPC in an area. I have the feeling the amount of CGI has gone down alot compared to FF10, but I might be wrong.
As I said earlier, the voicework for the main characters is done well, apart from the lip-sync being wrong alot, which is a common problem when dubbing a Japanese game.
Music in this game has the typical FF-atmosphere to it, but is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto, instead of Nobuo Uematsu. Don't let that scare you though, because Sakimoto is also responsible for the music of Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) and Vagrant Story (2000) to name a few.
As always, FF12 is filled with side quests and little things you can busy yourself with apart from the main story such as: going on Hunts or finding Unique (rare) monsters.
If you'd like to skip these completely, it'll still take 50-60 hours to finish the game, depending on how much you try to rush your way through it. Doing all sidequests too will keep you busy for atleast 120 hours. In other words, this game is good value for the money.
I can conclude with saying I enjoyed playing this game, despite of the couple faults I named, and think anyone who likes RPG's should get it, aswell as those looking for a game that'll keep them busy for a longer time.
9.1/10PS: I realise now this is no longer a "little" review, but it's hard to review a game like FF12 in only a couple of lines
