Heavy spoilers ahead

Introduction

It’s been just over a month since I started Final Fantasy XII. This time the gap between starting and finishing wasn’t because I lost interest, like it was with Final Fantasy VIII. It’s because I got a new job, and now I only have about an hour a day to play games. Final Fantasy XII took me roughly 36 hours, and that doesn’t count the time the in-game clock lost when I got a game over and had to reload an old save, nor the fact that I had it on X2 speed almost the entire time.

My history with this game is a little textured. I played it when it first came out, and I tried it again five years ago, but both times I never got much farther than the Tomb of Raithwall. It wasn’t that anything was wrong with the game. I was just bored, and a big part of that is that I’m such a character-driven person. The lack of a character driven story in XII always drove me to apathy. I’m quite happy that I finally played it all the way through, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s set the scene.

Story

Final Fantasy XII begins with a royal wedding. Princess Ashe is marrying, promising an age of peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Dalmasca. Unfortunately, the Archadians attack, invading with their terrifying airships and bringing the war to the doorstep of Rabanastre, Dalmasca’s capital. The prince fights valiantly, but Dalmasca’s forces are pushed back to the throne room. Basch and Reks rush through the castle to guard their king, but they’re separated. By the time Reks arrives at the throne room, Basch has slain the king of Dalmasca, ending the war and pushing Dalmasca into servitude to Archadia.

The game flashes forward a couple of years and focuses on Vaan, Reks’s little brother. Reks died after that encounter, but he lived long enough to tell the world what he saw: Basch murdering their king. Vaan is a street rat, an orphan who dreams of becoming a sky pirate. He spends his time screwing around in the city’s underbelly, hunting rats and doing favours for an old man. His childhood friend Penelo is generally by his side, trying to keep him out of trouble.

Archadia’s crown prince, Vayne Solidor, arrives in Rabanastre and assumes government, promising to be a good steward of a country that is now under Archadian rule. There’s a celebration, a gala, and Vaan thinks this is the perfect time to sneak into the castle to steal some treasure. He manages to snag a small gem called the Dawn Shard, and while he’s at it he runs into Balthier and Fran, two sky pirates also seeking treasure. During this heist, a resistance force launches an attack on the castle and throws everything into chaos. Vaan, Balthier, and Fran escape together, fighting over the Dawn Shard and agreeing, reluctantly, to work together to get out of this particular pickle.

The group ends up in chains in the dungeon, and there they meet Basch, the knight who slew the king. He swears he didn’t do it. He swears he was framed, and that his twin brother was the true kingkiller. The group frees him from his chains, they all escape together, and Basch leads them to the resistance, where they meet Princess Ashe, who was presumed dead. Around this time Penelo is kidnapped and held for ransom. The group rescues her and starts to learn about the secrets of the Dawn Shard, the manufacturing site, the terrible power it has, and how Archadia is using it to turn the tides of war.

The rest of the game follows Ashe seeking power to bring freedom to her country. They hunt for more nethicite, find the Tomb of the Dynast-King and the great swords that can destroy nethicite, and eventually find the Sun-Cryst, the source of all the nethicite itself. Working together, they break the Sun-Cryst, hoping to bring an end to the age of war.

While Ashe’s party runs around the desert gathering relics and nethicite, Vayne Solidor kills his own father to take control of the empire. So much of this game is the machinations of imperialism, people who want power for the sake of power. The story comes to a head when Vayne, in the sky fortress Bahamut, declares war on a neighboring kingdom, with Rabanastre caught right in the middle. In fact, the battleground is Rabbinate itself. The party manages to board Bahamut, ascend the sky fortress, and slay Vayne, leaving his little brother Larsa, a friend of peace, to rule and bring an end to the war.

My biggest critique

Much of the story has far less to do with the characters and their individual growth than with the tides of fate and global geopolitics. There are plenty of scenes of people gnashing their teeth and saying the council will never agree to whatever plan they have, and then someone barking back that they are the council, and if the king won’t agree, they’ll just have to kill the king and take his place. Unlike the previous Final Fantasy games, which focused on the characters and the relationships between them, this one is about larger events, and the individual players don’t necessarily matter so much.

That is my biggest critique of Final Fantasy XII: it is not a character-driven game. No one grows or develops. All the characters are largely the same at the end of the game as they were at the beginning. No one faces great trials of conscience, and no one has to give up their old ways to become something different or better. Compare that to Cecil in Final Fantasy IV, who grows from a dark knight into a paladin through a story of atonement and redemption. Or look at Final Fantasy X, with Yuna and her pilgrimage to save Spira, bound by her duty while struggling with her feelings for Tidus. For a series that has done such a great job creating memorable characters over decades, Final Fantasy XII left me a bit puzzled by its focus on grand history instead of the character-driven plots the series is known for.

If we’re being honest, the party has no real motivation to stay together, nor do they spend any time deeping their bonds to one another. Penelo is only there because Vaan is there. Vaan is there because he wants to be a sky pirate and sticking close to Balthier is a foot in the door. Fran only sticks around because Balthier is here and Balthier is sticking around because he smells treasure. The only character who has real stakes in the adventure is Ashe, and the adventure is just her seeking our relics to build power so she can take back her kingdom. At the end of the game, Vaan mentions that they’re such good friends, but I really didn’t feel it. There’s no side stories or dialogue outside of the main plot that makes you think the characters have developed a bond of friendship. Having snippits of their personalities along the adventure would have gone a long way to helping this, like the Skits in the Tales of series, or the way the characters quip in Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

The villains are all similarly underdeveloped. Vayne has ambitions to bring Dalmasca under his control and commits regicide/patricide to assume power, but he’s never more than a distant threat that shows up in cutscenes. In Final Fantasy IX or VI, Kuja and Kefka were constantly in your face, showing you their power and making you hate them, giving you a reason to want to fight them. Vayne is just, a figurehead to fight in the very end. The judge, Galbranth is a bit more interesting, a former Dalmasican, now a dog of the empire and brother of Basch, there’s more to explore but it doesn’t really get brought up. likewise, the mad scientist Cid is Balthier’s father, they have a couple quips of Balthier running away to be a sky pirate, but no one sheds tears over each other when we slay their kin. The story just moves on because it’s so much less interested in the characters than the grand politics at play.

The World

Every game in the series seems to have, in my opinion, some direct response to the criticisms of the previous game. I felt that Final Fantasy X was too linear, that every dungeon and every map was little more than a straight line from beginning to end. Final Fantasy XII took that criticism to heart. Every town, dungeon, and environment is huge and sprawling. Thank goodness the Zodiac Age has a map overlay that lets you see the entire dungeon in one view, because otherwise you’d spend so much time running around trying to get your bearings.

This isn’t a criticism, by the way. I actually quite enjoyed how it made every area feel like a real place. The world of XII feels real, full, and lived in. Cities are littered with people to talk to and alleyways to explore. Sure, there often isn’t much reason to explore them, but they’re there, and it makes the world feel more textured and fleshed out. That goes for the various races of Ivalice too: the lizardesque Bangaa (never call a Bangaa a lizard, kupo!), the Viera, the Nu Mou, and the large, piglike Seeq. It feels like a fantasy world, and a very well-developed one.

The Gambit System

The gameplay is also quite different from its predecessors. Unlike Final Fantasy X, or anything before it with an active-time battle system, Final Fantasy XII happens entirely in real time. Battles happen right on the main map, with no transition into a separate battle screen. Each character selects an action, and then a ATB meter starts to fill. You can directly control each character, but there’s a robust gambit system that allows you to program each character with a bunch of commands that will automate their decisions in battle, removing the need for constant commands.

The Gambits start off pretty simple. You set a character to target the nearest enemy with an attack, and they’ll keep doing that. When you get some spells, you can set the character you want as your healer to cast Cure when someone’s health falls below 50%. Put that Gambit above the attack Gambit, and now they’ll continue to attack until someone’s health is below 50%, then switch over to curing. It’s all automated and smooth, and it makes running around the map and grinding through battles really easy, especially in The Zodiac Age version, which has a speed-up option.

The problem with this system is that you can set up your gambits to handle a combat, but every combat is different. Even with a good set of all-purpose Gambits, there is a lot of going into your menu and tweaking your actions and triggers to suit each scenario. I didn’t mind it, but I’ve read that some people get exhausted of micro-managing these supposedly automated party members. Personally, I appreciate having so much control over these AIs, as I cannot tell you how many times I’ve cursed a game because my supposedly intelligent automated party members did something completely idiotic.

The License Board

Slain enemies drop two kinds of points: experience points to level up your characters, and License Points to unlock new abilities. Each character has a License Board, and in this version of the game there are 12 job-specific boards to choose from. Every character can use up to two. You can give someone a Monk and Red Mage combination so they can beat down enemies with their fists but pivot to magic when necessary. Or a Time Mage/Archer, someone casting Haste on everyone before flipping over to the bow to slay flying enemies. All of the gear each job can equip must be unlocked by a License, the same goes with all the jobs corresponding abilities.

I remember playing the original North American edition, where there was only every character had their own massive license board that contained everything. Every character had access to every single ability and every piece of gear, should you have the LP to purchase it. You could push each character in different directions to diversify them, but kind of like in Final Fantasy X and it’s Sphere grid, by the end game everyone was starting to overlap. Truly dedicated players could unlock every License for every character. I’m guessing the Zodiac Age’s restrictions are meant to counter that Jack-of-all-trades mentality.

I made the conscious decision to diversify my cast, so I had all 12 jobs covered, even if I felt some jobs were really unnecessary. My Red Mage was basically just a worse White Mage who rarely used any Black Magic. My Machinist ended up as a White Mage by the end of the game, using entirely White Mage focused gear and abilities. But I still enjoyed having each character fill their own role, especially because you do need to swap them in and out of your party. Characters not in your party don’t gain experience or License Points, so it’s pretty easy for the one character who’s always in your party to get really far ahead of the rest. These jobs are the only real thing differentiating each character from one another, so it was worth it for me.

It can be frustrating that when you unlock the license for a technique, ability, or gear, you then need to find the associated skill or equipment out in the world. The reverse is true, when you find a new weapon, you’ll need to go into your inventory, go to the bottom of your weapons list to see what license it needs, then go into the specific characters license board and buy the license before you can equip it. It’s fairly tedious, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the feeling of unlocking nodes on the license board. Sometime in the latter half of the game however, I managed to hit everyones stat bonuses on their license boards, and then I really stopped caring about preemptively buying licenses until after I found the equipment or skill. I’d be sitting on hundreds of LP for each character, just waiting for the next piece of gear that needed unlocking.

Loot, Chests, and the Bazaar

You find some gear lying around the world, but you have to be aware that a lot of the treasures comes down to some pretty nasty randomness. When you enter an area, most chests have only a certain percent chance of spawning, and many of those chests only have a certain percent chance of containing good gear. This is particularly atrocious in one part of the game near the end, which has nearly one hundred chest scattered around about five sections of the map. Each chest only has a 15 to 20% chance of spawning, and each one only has a 5% chance of holding the item you’re looking for, while the other 95% change will have a range of Gil. That mentality is prevalent throughout the entire game. Sometimes you’ll be running through a forest, spot a treasure chest, open it, and find a mere 5 Gil. Really not worth the time.

So if the chests are random, where does the good gear come from? As per Final Fantasy tradition, a number of great gear can only be acquired by stealing it, which is never my favourite thing to do. But Final Fantasy XII introduces the Bazaar. At every shop in the game, you can sell the various loot the monsters drop, and if you sell the right combination of loot, the bazaar will have an item up for sale. Some of the best weapons in the game are acquired only through the bazaar, but they require some serious hunting for specific loot. I never found any in-game resource for the bazaar recipes, it’s almost like Square Enix expected you to have a guide or go online to find exactly what types of goods to sell to get the items you’re looking for.

Hunts and Difficulty

The main storyline of Final Fantasy XII was fairly easy. None of the bosses on the main quest gave me any trouble. But there’s a Hunt system, where the game gives you specific marks to seek out. These Marks often representing some pretty serious challenges, especially if you take them on as soon as they become available. While the Gambit system automates so much of the combat, what I really liked was thinking, before going into a battle, about what kind of Gambits I’d need. You can use the context clues the hunt-giver provides to guide your strategy.

The annoying part of the hunts is that every hunt requires 4 steps. First, you need to accept the hunt from the board in the various pubs in the towns you’ll visit across Ivalice (or accept them from Montblanc). Then, you’ll need to find the hunt requester, somewhere in the world. Once you trek over to the requester, you then need to go find the monster somewhere else in the world. And finally, once you’ve slain the beast, you need to return to the hunt requester to claim your reward.

All I can say is there’s a ton of back tracking in the Hunt System. You’ll think yourself done with an area, but these hunts will have you running right back of the path you just completed to find the requester or mark. There is a teleportation system, but it uses a consumable resource, so I never really liked using it. Likewise, each of the cities in the game contains an aerodrome, allowing you to pay a small sum to fly between towns, but there’s a ton of world inbetween locations. Once again, thank goodness for the X2 speed up.

Final Thoughts

I’m happy I finally played and finished Final Fantasy XII. It’s ultimately a great game. The visuals are stunning when compared to even Final Fantasy X and X-2, the music is brilliant, the world feels real and fully realized, and the gameplay is interesting. I never really felt frustrated. The dungeons were large, sprawling, and interesting to explore, and I like exploring the world of Final Fantasy XII, especially when my pacing isn’t thrown off every three seconds by a random battle transition and me mashing the A button to get through the random mobs.

That said, I have a hard time believing this will be anyone’s favourite Final Fantasy, especially if they’ve explored the games that came before it. I could see it being the favourite of someone if it’s the only Final Fantasy game they’ve ever played, because it is a very solid game. The systems are deep and invite you to explore and plumb their depths, and there are plenty of side dungeons and bonus content to engage with.

But for me, the lack of character development and character-driven story means Final Fantasy XII doesn’t rank very highly on my list. It’s below X for sure, below all the SNES games, probably below at least VII, and maybe below VIII and IX, too. Like I said, I never felt frustrated with it, and I don’t have any real reason to pan it critically. But I also don’t see myself coming back to this one. I’m happy I played it, I’m happy I’m done, and I’m ready to move on to Final Fantasy XIII.

Or Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. That’s another game that I had when I was a teenager, and the only thing I remember is that I managed to get myself right up to the final boss, but never managed to summit that challenge. Perhaps this is the time to give it another shot, while the story is still fresh in my head.