Electric Dreamstate

Final Fantasy XII has been reviewed in numerous places (like here), so I'll just rifle off some points about the game that aren't covered everywhere else.

• The new battle system is really the same underlying engine as the old one, but with an entirely new system of how that engine interacts with the player. It really reminded me of Knights of the Old Republic, only that the Gambit system of assigning tasks to your characters (such as "heal if your ally has less than 50% health") gives you much more control over the proceedings.

• Although the different races you find in the game world have different basic temperaments, there is a great deal of variety in their presentations. For example the Banga race have characters as varied as an evil group of bounty hunters who chase you to the lovable merchant Migello. This is different from the basic "Vucan's are all logical" examples of races given in most games.

• The world is huge. This is partially because of the fact that most of the zones are designed in a relatively non-linear fashion, and partially because there's simply so much real estate to cover. Although the large zones are broken up into several smaller ones hurting the seemlessness of the world, (an area where, say, World of Warcraft or Dragon Quest VIII beat FF XII), that doesn't stop everything from feeling quite expansive.

• I like how the "hunts" are optional and nicely compliment the easier story missions. It simply makes the world feel more intricate since there is so much more to do in it. The hunts are pretty hard to do when you first get them (especially the elite hunts), but it adds a challenge to the game and you can just pass them by and come back later if it gets frustrating.

• I like the fact that the different classes of weapons do generally different things in different ways. Though it's sometimes hard to figure out what their actual damage-per-second is, as opposed to simply what their attack power is, it's nice that they give you different types of stuff for different characters with different stats needs. Not that you'd easily find out what the differences are between the weapon types in game.

• This is the first FF game that I can remember where the characters aren't all emo all the time. It was refreshing.

• The game is long. It took me twice as long to finish this one as to finish a regular FF game.

Overall FF XII feels like a game that has evolved with the breakthroughs in the genre in the last five years since FF X came out. You have to remember that in that time period two Elder Scrolls games, KOTOR, and Dragon Quest VIII have all come to consoles, notably altering what people expect from a console RPG. I'm glad that FF XII has followed the series tradition of always reinventing itself to remain relevant.

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