Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

If you find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time trying to digest lengthy discourses of overwrought dialogue of grandiose chronic self-importance and pseudo-spiritual ramblings of fate all voiced by acting performances that are the equivalent of having seven gallstones removed from your bladder, there is a good chance you have been playing a Final Fantasy videogame from released sometime in the 21st century.

You know the drill: There’s crystals to be had, a world to save, and a gang of typical Final Fantasy archetypes to play as, including, but not limited to: Royalty in Hiding, Loner Knights, Amnesiac Teenagers, Perky Flowered Females, Thiefs with a Heart of Gold, and Angsty Sullen Nobody Protagonists.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is not much different. The basic premise goes as follows: Two kingdoms are warring and the small kingdom of Dalmasca is caught in the cross-fire. A resistance cell led by Dalmasca’s oft wanted princess Ashe is tasked with revolting against the totalitarianism and injustices of the Archadian Empire before all is lost. This is all pretty normal stuff for the series.

When strolling through subreddits, forums, articles, and musings, one may come to the conclusion that FFXII may be the worst mainline Final Fantasy entry complete with the worst plot, the worst characters, and the worst story. And one would not be entirely amiss in these feelings, though they may be a mit misguided. You see, FFXII actually has an amazing story to tell, it’s just told completely wrong. FFXII has a wonderful cast of characters, they just don’t experience any meaningful changes throughout the narrative. The world of Ivalice is a magnificent space that I enjoy spending my time in. Quite possibly, this is the best world of any Final Fantasy game with some of the best lore, history, worldbuilding, art direction, and writing that the series has ever seen.

It’s just such a shame that the execution here is so half-baked and ultimately, so disappointing.

What we are left with is an overly convoluted mess of a story that takes ages to build any semblance of understanding. It’s filled with characters that I, as the player, don’t immediately connect with (if that connection ever comes at all). It features a protagonist that is so completely inconsequential to the storytelling that it left me frequently scratching my head at his inclusion in the game.

[Just to get it out of the way, listening to our main hero Vaan speak for more than ten seconds at a time makes me seriously consider that the premise of Children of Men may not be so bad after all].

I think it’s important here to define a few key terms before any meaningful analysis can be conducted. Story can be defined as a sort of vague account of fictional events not dissimilar to a premise. Plot is the device in which that story can be structured to create meaning for the audience within the context of the story (rising action, climax, falling action). Both story and plot are necessary in creating an engaging narrative, but it's the last definition here that seems the most relevant. Storytelling is defined as the “activity of telling or writing stories.” Ultimately, any story can be interested so long as it’s structured well and told well. In contrast, as we will see here, any good story can be destroyed through a lack of good storytelling.

Let us start at the beginning. After a grueling eight hours of work followed by a torturous writing session, I felt like I was in desperate need of some cultural nourishment to calm my active mind down while still stimulating my artistic sensibilities. I choose Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, one of the few mainline entries I have never played. I pop the disk into the PS4, crack open a cold can of Coke, and enter into an imaginative world, the likes of which I don’t think I’ve ever seen. Immediately I am greeted with a gorgeous visual treat of cinematics that tries its best to orient me into its dizzyingly story world, inciting incident, central conflicts, and future characters. The problem here, however, is that this is a disorienting mess of storytelling, as this opening cinematic goes on for far too long while shoving so many narrative threads, flashforwards, and fantasy nonsense in my face that it’s hard for me to make heads or tails of what is actually going on. At a certain point, only a few minutes into my new journey, I set the controller down on my lap, cock my head to the left, just grimacing and amazed at the sheer spectacle of it all.

In FFXII, Square Enix made the attempt to try and do something different, to set a traditional Final Fantasy story into a world filled with political intrigue and international conflict. The issue is that in this central political conflict, there is a lack of prior information, a lack of context, and unclear politics. Within the first hour or so, I am presented with a mind numbing amount of fantasy name checking such as Ivalice, Rabanastre, Galtean Alliance, Dalmasca, Vayne, Vaan, Raithwall, Princess Ashe, Archadia, Rozarrian Empire, Basch for Rosenburg, Nalbina Fortress, Necrohold, of Nabudis, Rasler Heois, etc… To me, without any familiarity for these nations, places, people, and factions, it all comes across as utter gibberish being thrown at me which instantly overloads my sense, degenerating into a muddled mess that took me more than a few examinations of plot summaries and various wikis to finally come to terms with what it all means, and even then, it was still a struggle (Who is Ashe the princess of? What the hell is a Rabanastre? Who’s fighting who and for what? Where am I?).

It was at this moment that I figured I could do one of two things: (1) Roll my eyes and continue onwards hoping against hope that it all comes together in the end, or (2) Become increasingly frustrated, confused, and discouraged to the point where I smugly laugh this plot back into the hollowed abyss from whence it came and finally get around to playing The Outer Wilds.

I rolled my eyes and carried on.

The parallels between Final Fantasy XII and Star Wars (1977) have been noted so many times that I almost feel like it’s cheap to bring the comparison up here, but I believe it’s necessary in understanding how a fairly unoriginal story can be told well. In both narratives, we have a whiny blonde teenager in poverty, a princess being hunted, a sky pirate (or space pirate) who cares much more than he lets on, and an Evil Empire with a capital E. This is a fine premise for a story and holds the potential to become something engaging and original if told right.

However, in order to pull this idea off, you need to frame it with an engaging villain, ideally someone who wants the same thing that our heroes do. In the example of Star Wars and the trilogy as a whole, the object of desire is Luke’s force power. In Star Wars, it takes all of sixty seconds to introduce our antagonist in Darth Vader, establish him as evil, and give the audience a motivation for wanting our heroes to triumph despite not even being introduced to them yet.

In FFXII, the object of desire is militaristic control of Dalmasca and the three shards cut from deifacted nethicite (don’t ask) which hold some unclear metaphysical power over the nature of reality itself and FFXII has no one similar to Darth Vader or anyone that could act as a visual representation of the roadblocks our heroes face.

In fact, it takes what feels like for FFXII to introduce our primary villain in Vayne Carudas Solidor, and even when he’s introduced, he is not established as some malevolent force of wicked intent. Rather, he is painted as someone who is underdeveloped, slightly boring, and maybe a little more than morally ambiguous; and it isn’t until way later in the game that it is established fully that he is our primary antagonist without a shadow of a doubt. It’s kind of like if Darth Vader entered Tantive IV in the opening of Star Wars, negotiating with the rebel soldiers, peacefully exchanging for Leia, speaking pleasantries, shaking everyone’s hand and it’s not until the end of Empire that his true intentions are revealed as Evil. This sort of moral ambiguity does not work in a story of this nature. Without any clear antagonist to fight against, the whole good-versus-evil struggle of a ragtag team fighting against an all-powerful empire that this story hinges on falls apart completely.

In fact, the only reason I am fighting against the Archadian Empire (it took me about two hours to figure this out) is because the game is telling me that this Empire is very, very Bad. Contrast this with the opening hour of Final Fantasy XIII (another much maligned entry to the series) in which the game shows me the evils of PSICOM as they send citizens to underworld concentration camps and gun them down in cold blood. This is the difference between telling and showing.

Our playable main hero, Vaan, whose whole purpose for joining the resistance because the Evil Empire murdered his brother. This sort of logic does not work in the context of a story like this however, as Vaan’s brother died in wartime. I do not hate the Japanese because my great grandfather died in World War II, and thus, Vaan’s entire motivation in the plot comes from a poor argument to set the story forward.

The player’s motivation to continue throughout the story is based upon the elements of narrative (or lack thereof), while the player capacity is how the player’s own agency controls and determines the outcomes. FFXII fails on both fronts by providing a completely linear experience handed out by the Arbiters of Fate while also lacking a cohesive, engaging narrative that I can get lost in. I can either fight this Empire without understanding why, or I can turn the game off.

In order to kickstart the story proper, our sewer rat street urchin protagonist decides that he is going to sneak into Empire’s Palace during a coronation event so he can steal an heirloom in order to get revenge? As far as inciting incidents go, this one is pretty absurd and makes very little sense in terms of motivation and execution. Of course, as a player I realize that the only reason the game shovels me down this path is to introduce me to the other four characters in the game: Balthier, Fran, Ashe, and Basch while folding Vaan into a little paper boat so we can watch him float down the River Plot.

As with many videogames and films of its type, plot holes are covered up with music (top notch here, by the way) and visceral emotional impact. I mean, c’mon, you’re going to tell me that this military leader is just going to let his teenage niece and her degenerate friends take complete control over this pivotal battle that would not only decide the future of your nation, but potentially of the world at large?

Eventually, after spending enough time within the gameworld, talking to NPCs, reading enough lore, and becoming acquainted with my party members and their relationships to the larger political conflict, the story begins to pick up. At a certain point, it even begins to make a moderate amount of sense. Still, I can’t help but feel that Final Fantasy XII is asking far too much of me and my time before any payoff comes to fruition, and even when that payoff is delivered, it still feels underwhelming.

After completing the game and the majority of its side content, I am convinced that Final Fantasy XII suffers the most from bad structure and horrendous pacing, long barron stretches of gameplay in between story beats that end up falling flat, and doing this cycle over and over again until the completion of the game.

I should be clear though, I do not believe FFXII to be a bad game by any means, I simply think that it is a bad narrative, one in which the six party member characters remain static for most of their journey. They make choices to band together to achieve their goals, yet their reasoning to do so is more of plot convenience rather than any organic decision making process that a normal human being would make. Aside from Ashe and Basch, none of the other four really feel like they truly belong within this story. The most egregious of this example is Panelo, the Spunky Female Companion (Selphie, Rikki, Vanielle, etc…) who is given no characterization and no reason to exist besides being “Vaan’s Childhood Friend.” The story is making decisions for her as opposed to Penelo making decisions that affect the narrative as a whole.

At the end of all of this, one of my main takeaways is that using Vaan as our main hero is the wrong framing for this narrative. This is the story of Lady Ashe returning from the ashes (no pun intended) to rule her kingdom. This is the story of the disgraced knight Basch refusing to let the rumors of his dishonor drown him. Deciding to use Vaan as our focal point of characterization, the lens in which we view the narrative, is akin to retelling Star Wars through the eyes of Uncle Ben tagging along with our real heroes as they seek to take down the Empire. Aside from Ashe and Basch, none of our other characters seem to serve organically within the storytelling framework and none of them interact with each other in any meaningful way.

While the writing and voice acting have a surprisingly good English localization here, especially for a game of this type, it’s not enough to cure this installment from its many, many woes. Frequent big character developments lead absolutely nowhere. Character arcs are sometimes started and then flicker out of existence just as quickly as they began.

Take for example a moment later in the game where Balthier, one of the more enjoyable characters on display, stands solemnly on a sandy beach overlooking the horizon. He begins speaking with remembrance, opening up to Lady Ashe about his past. It is a moment that could be powerful, a moment that could convey a sense of loss, a moment that could connect me with who Balthier is as a character and why he has made the choices that he has made thus far. Yet, it does not, mainly because the work that was put into developing his character was not enough to justify the gravitas of this moment. The entire “Thief With a Heart of Gold” trope falls flat because we never see Balthier at his lowest point when he was greedy, selfish, spiteful, or callous. We never see Balthier at his worst, so when his best crops up on the screen, it doesn’t have any impact. This moment could have been great. This should have been a dynamic paradigm shift in his character development similar to Han Solo’s “I know” moment, but because a well-thought out setup of his character never took place in the writing room, I end up staring at the screen passively, petting my cat completely disengaged, listening to missed potential after missed potential while waiting to retake control of the game.

It’s a real shame, because once I hit the thirty hour mark, the story began to pick up considerably. At the forty hour mark, despite the usual JRPG fantastical apocalyptic mist and sun-crysts (because of course), I actually began to become extremely engaged in this tale. It’s a world that I genuinely want to spend some more time in. Regrettably, this is a feeling that I could have potentially been experiencing throughout the entire videogame had the storytelling been better, had the pacing been improved, had the structure been coherent, had the characterization been deeper, and had my motivations been clearer.

The fact that it takes dozens of hours before the story finally comes together is not the intricate design of some intriguing mystery but rather a failure on the part of the narrative team.

I do give Square Enix credit where it’s due however. At least they had the courage to try something new in the storytelling department. A new world with a complete set of lore and a more intricate political dynamic outside of Shinra is the Evil Corporation schtick. Despite all of its failures, Final Fantasy XII still manages to feel fresh and interesting throughout. Even though I knew how the story would play out, I still couldn’t help but get wrapped up in it all. Even though the characters are mostly static, I couldn’t help but root for them at its climax.

In the end, I began to count their victories as my own, and that’s why in defiance of its missteps, I still wholeheartedly recommend this beautiful mess of a videogame.