Final Fantasy XII
Tragically Flawed.
A new core Final Fantasy title is always a massive event and this was especially true of XII. Coming on the heels of the wonderful FFX (XI was a MMORG), expectations were exceedingly high. What finally appeared was a game that successfully innovated and improved on gameplay, but collapses under the weight of a pondering, poorly executed story.
Set in the world of Ivalice, FFXII puts us in the shoes of Vaan, a street urchin from the distinctly Middle-Eastern flavoured city of Rabanastre. After breaking in to the Royal Palace one night, Vaan falls in with a couple of dare-devil sky pirates, a deposed princess, and a grim soldier with a shadowy past: all tied together by a power struggle between two great nations vying for control of Rabanastre.
First, the positives. I have always had a thing against ‘random battles’. Few things are more frustrating than realising you forgot a key item on the other side of a field and knowing you will have to endure 4 or 5 randomly generated battles on the way across, then tackle the same again on the way back. FFXII takes the bold step of doing away with these entirely.
Monsters are encountered in the open world map (and can thus potentially be avoided) while the new combat system seems inspired by World of Warcraft (WOW). The player characters will attack the monsters in real time, striking when periodically after the cool-down on their weapons expires. New layers of strategy are introduced through ‘Gambits’, preset commands to your characters to perform certain actions when certain circumstances arise, for instance my healer might have a gambit to heal the party whenever anyone’s health drops below 40%. This system encourages careful planning and a good player will modify his Gambits depending on the opponents they face. There would be some truth in likening the game to a single player WOW, although FFXII boasts far more strategic depth.
Visuals are breathtaking as ever, and FF fans are kept happy by the familiar Moogles, Chocobos, and even two guys called Cid.
With the battle system greatly improved, this game had the potential to be a classic, but at the heart of every good FF is a great story, and here is where FFXII comes up short.
The principal problem with in FFXII is that the main character never seems important. Vaan is introduced at the start as the principle character in the same mould as Tidus or Cloud. Indeed it is not until a good while later that you pick up other party members. Yet the main story is largely focused on Basche, the disgraced soldier seeking redemption, and Princess Ashe and her quest to reclaim the throne. Seeing the world through Vaan’s eyes you feel like a spectator to events, when you should feel like an active participant.
This is made worse by the ‘expansive’ storytelling style. The action is regularly broken up with cut scenes of various political machinations unfolding in far away capitals. Interesting as these may be, it usually feels like these have little to do with your party’s immediate quests and it is only rarely that you feel your characters are that actively involved in the big picture. It all makes for a very detached experience.
So many aspects of the story feel like the creator’s had a great idea, but then pulled back in order to play it safe. One has to wonder if the writers initially envisaged Basche as the protagonist, only to awkwardly switch focus to young Vaan for fear that the target audience could not relate as well to the older man. The Middle Eastern feel to the initial couple of cities felt genuinely fresh in the same way the tropical/Okinawan feel of FFX, yet after the first few locations it largely abandons this for more pedestrian FF fare. If only they had been as adventurous with the story as they were with the gameplay.
What makes FFXII so tragic is that if the story had been of the calibre of FFX, we would have had an absolute classic on our hands. However, an RPG will always stand or fall on the strength of its story. The gameplay deserves high praise but the experience as a whole feels distant and hollow.