Story spoilers ahead

Introduction

I almost didn’t play Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. I was mostly just excited to move on to Final Fantasy XIII, and the week that I started playing Revenant Wings, Final Fantasy Resonance had just released. I really enjoyed the demo for Resonance and was very tempted to jump the queue and play it first so I could be a part of the cultural zeitgeist, but I find myself unwilling to pay full price for a game these days. Especially when I have so many other games on my list to play already.

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is one of the few games in the Final Fantasy Catalogue that I actually played back when it was first released, in late 2007. I didn’t remember much about it, other than that it’s a real-time strategy game on the Nintendo DS and that I had managed to get to the final boss, but never managed to make it over the finish line (much like my Final Fantasy X experience, actually). But being fresh off The Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age means that there will never be a better time than now to play through Revenant Wings, so I buckled down and dug out my old 3DSXL. And besides, I was hopeful that the characters introduced in Zodiac Age would be expanded upon and developed further. I realize now that was a bit of a naive hope.

Story

Revenant Wings begins with Vaan and Penelo in their own airship, following Balthier and Fran as they approach and pillage a ruin for treasure. In the treasure room there are two crystals, Vaan and Balthier each grab one, and then escape as the ruins crumble around them. Vaan and Penelo hitch a ride on the Sthral as Vaan’s airship is caught in a landslide and lost. Soon after, an airship of unknown make and origin falls from the sky and crashes outside Rabanastre. Vaan and Penelo, along with their orphan friends from the Lowtown, Filo, Tomaj, and Kytes, sneak aboard and commandeer the derelict airship.

The airship takes the party up to the mythical sky islands, where they meet Llyud, an Aegyl, a winged person who’s entirely devoid of emotion. Vaan learns that he can use the crystal from the ruins to summon Espers to aid them in battle. What follows is supposedly a story of friendship. The crew meets someone called the Judge of Wings, who is trying to destroy the Auralith, large crystals that supposedly keep the sky islands safe and afloat. The Judge quickly succeeds in destroying one, leaving two. At the same time, lots of sky pirates are ascending to the islands looking for treasure and bounty, bringing conflict to the Aegyl.

Being the happy-go-lucky personalities that they are, Vaan and Penelo try their best to prove that not all sky pirates are bad and that they’ll do right by their new friend Llyud. They follow the Judge of Wings toward the second Auralith, where they meet Balthier and Fran, and Balthier is in the process of destroying the second Auralith. Vaan tries to stop him. Balthier rebukes him, telling him to stay out of matters he doesn’t understand, and refuses to explain the situation to his supposed friend. Balthier succeeds in destroying the crystal, and shortly after it’s revealed that the Auralith are instrumental in stripping the Aegyl of their anima, the essence that gives people emotion and humanity. It turns out that destroying the Auralith is a good thing, because the villain, Feolthanos, has been absorbing everyone’s anima for who knows how long.

Balthier and Fran join the party while their airship is under repairs, and shortly afterward Ashe and Basch show up too, because trouble has befallen Ivalice: people are summoning espers down below and they are looking for help. The party flies around, engaging in combat after combat, until they eventually ascend into space, face down Feolthanos directly, and destroy him and the third Auralith. Everyone lives happily ever after, or something.

I apologize if my story synopsis went off the rails for a bit, but that’s honestly how the story felt. It tries to set up dramatic revelations, betrayals, and people who’ve ascended to godhood trying to bring back a fallen loved one, and none of it really hits properly. Part of the problem is that all the characters and dialogue are really childish. The writing portrays them as excited little children, and there’s no depth. They’re ignorant of anything that’s not happening right in front of their little noses.

There’s one point where Penelo attaches herself to someone they meet along their journey for a single night, and then that person is taken away by the Judge of Wings. Penelo falls into the depths of despair, saying she’s tired of everyone being torn away from her. It was a moment of dissonance for me, because we as players haven’t been shown Penelo’s losses at all. So many other characters in the Final Fantasy series earn that kind of statement far more. I’m thinking of Cyan in Final Fantasy VI, who watched his entire kingdom fall to Kefka’s evil plots, and saw his wife and child perish right in front of him. Or Cloud in Final Fantasy VII, who lost Zack and Aerith during the game. I know Penelo lost her parents during the war before the events of Final Fantasy XII, because the exposition told us, but so many other games in this series have done such a good job of showing us loss, that this was a moment where I didn’t feel Penelo had earned that statement.

There’s also some narrative dissonance in how the game treats its central risk. Early on you’re warned that using the crystal to summon Espers costs you part of your anima, and that if you use it too much you’ll be robbed of your humanity. But there’s never any consequence for summoning, or for just playing the game. The story tells you this is a risky endeavor, but the gameplay never feeds into it. Much like in Final Fantasy XII, the characters at the end of the game are largely the same as they were at the beginning. No one experiences great loss or growth. At the very least, there were a lot more little vignettes of the characters interacting with each other. The dialogue was never deep or impactful, but those interactions made them feel more like friends.

The Gameplay

Revenant Wings is an Real Time Strategy game. You control five leaders in real time, and each leader has a number of minions in their squad. The Minions come in three types: melee, ranged, and flying. There’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic at play between these types, where melee units are strong against ranged units, ranged units take down flyers, and flyers are really good at defeating melee. There’s also a secondary cycle of elements (fire, water, thunder, earth), with units resistant and weak against each other.

Before every battle you get a preview of the leaders and minions your opponents have, and you set which five Espers types you want to bring. I kind of like this in theory, but in practice it’s more fiddly than it should be. It’s annoying that the game doesn’t show you the incoming enemies while you’re choosing which minions to take. You need to remember what types and weaknesses the enemies are bringing and build your loadout accordingly. I ended up needing to flip back and forth a lot just to remember who I needed to counter, It’s mildly tedious.

Every battle starts out roughly the same. Your five leaders, each bringing two minions, are set off on a sprawling map to overcome overwhelming odds. The enemies are spread all over the map, and the goal is to pick them off one by one, or in small groups, so you aren’t overwhelmed yourself. Most maps have a summoning gate that you can capture with your leaders to summon reinforcements, though there’s a limit to how many Espers you can summon, meaning you can’t just Zerg rush the enemy. Some maps also have soul crystals, which respawn leaders if they fall in battle.

Each of your leaders have unique abilities, and will acquire more as the game progresses. You can set one ability on each character to auto-fire through a “Gambit”, but calling it a Gambit feels disengenous. The Gambits in Final Fantasy XII was a clever series of If/Then statements that you could curate and manage to control how your companions behave in battle. Here, a ‘gambit’ is just ‘trigger this ability as soon as it’s ready’. There’s no logic or context for the gambit, just, spam this one ability.

Every other ability has to be triggered manually: tap the hero, tap ‘abilities’, choose the ability, tap the target. That ends up being a lot of taps per ability, especially when each character has 8 abilities and you have 5 characters to manage all at the same time. And choosing your target can be impossible when you have 15 of your little guys running all over the map and engaged in massive cluster of a battle with 10 enemies. It becomes frantic and unwieldy. I spent the vast majority of my playthrough just using Kytes and his AoE spells to blast enemies with their weaknesses. It was pretty rare that I needed to dig into the other characters’ abilities, with the exception of Penelo and her Raise.

Some characters have an ability that’s just so good it always has to be the Gambit. Penelo, the White Mage, was always casting Curaga, which heals a group of allies over a wide area. I always want that on, but she also has other good abilities, like buffing strength or magic, and using those means remembering to trigger them manually. That often meant taking my focus away from the battle and then trying to control Penelo manually. Because she can cast her healing at a range, if I wanted her buff to hit my melee and flying characters, I’d have to manually move her closer, then hit the buff button before turning my attention back to the characters doing the battling. And often, by the time I did all that, the battle would be over already.

Trying to utilize the abilities of all five characters and trigger them all at the right time turns the game into a furious screen-tapping mess. I understand that in RTS games the victor is often the player with the most actions per minute, but it just doesn’t work well here, especially thanks to the DS format. Triggering every ability takes four taps at the least, and by the time you’ve finished tapping through two abilities, the first one has cooled down and reset. If you forget what an ability does, by the time the tooltip scrolls up and tells you what it does, someone is dead, or the situation where that ability would have been useful has passed.

Pacing and Difficulty

Every battle in Revenant Wings is slow. It takes time for your troops to stomp across the map, time to summon reinforcements, time to capture a gate, and time to command your army to engage an enemy and watch that little red health bar tick down bit by bit. Because every battle takes so long, I was never inclined to grind. On every map I collected all the materials scattered about and every treasure, and I even did all of Tomaj’s side missions outside of the story missions, all the way up through chapter 9.

Chapter 9 is my biggest qualm. The difficulty spikes dramatically. Maybe I missed something, but all the enemies and my characters had been around level 38 to 40, and then all of a sudden the enemy level jumped to 50 and I was getting smoked. There were no more side missions to do and no more main missions to attempt other than the one I’d hit a stone wall against. My only option was to bash my head against that mission, accrue experience from losing, slowly level up, and eventually win.

Sometimes you can go into a battle with the exact same characters and the exact same build and have a wildly different outcome depending on which enemies attack whom, and when. More than once I had to scrap a mission because Penelo got blindsided and knocked out, and she was my only character with a revive unless I also brought Llyud. It feels insane to me to have only two characters with that ability. There’s no option for items such as Phoenix Downs, and really nobody else to pick up the slack if your healer (Penelo) gets ganked. Llyud is also a front-line character, so it’s not uncommon for him to die when a couple of ranged characters get behind a melee unit he’s fighting. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s frustrating that I have to always bring Llyud and Penelo, or else as soon as I Penelo gets hit, I have to scrap the whole battle and start again.

Graphics & Music

The graphics are honestly fine. Most of the character sprites were taken directly from Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced or Tactics Advanced A2, and a the sprites of the characters that came from Final Fantasy XII looked like their PS2 counterparts. The character portraits are pretty flat and featureless, which might be a style choice, but I found them much less interesting than they could have been.

Every now and then throughout the story there’s a FMV cutscene, much like in XII, and I was surprised to see the full-motion video on the DS. It does run at like, 15 frames per second, and some of the character models look like wax figures compared to how they looked in Final Fantasy XII. One thing I really didn’t like was Penelo’s new outfit, where she’s basically wearing nothing from her ribs down to her pelvis. Especially because she looks and acts like a child, it’s just uncomfortable.

The music is all straight from Final Fantasy XII, but using the DS’s dramatically reduced sound capabilities. They’re cheap, tinny facsimiles of the gorgeous music that the original game had.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think Revenant Wings is a game that’s okay being lost to time. RTS is a challenging genre to implement well, and the DS isn’t the best form factor for it. It’s probably better than any other console would be, since you can tap the screen, but it’s still not ideal. The game doesn’t add anything substantial to Final Fantasy XII and doesn’t really build on the foundation of the main game. It feels like a cheap side-story spin-off, more fanfiction than cannon.

I don’t think Revenant Wings is worth anyone’s time today. If you like RTS games, this one is a hollow shell of what the genre offers. The story is childish, but the difficulty is such that I don’t think any kids are going to beat it. I know back in 2008, I sure didn’t. There are so many better games in the Final Fantasy franchise, and in the end this one just isn’t interesting or intriguing enough to justify suffering through all the frustration points.

But I am glad to have finally ticked an unfinished game from my childhood off the list, and it’s another step completed on my Final Fantasy pilgrimage.