Final Fantasy XII is the future of video games. Yes, it's true. Video games are now so advanced that they can even play themselves! But seriously, Final Fantasy XII had the potential to be one of the best Final Fantasy games to date, but it fell short in practically every area due to everyday slacking off. 
     The first issue to hit will be the battle system. Your system is composed of setting your characters to do a series of commands, which you must first learn. And like any good RPG, the only way to learn is to spend! To explain the complete system would take all too long and just make you wish you were playing something like Super Mario, which needed no explanation. In this game, battles have become a three step process: learn, equip, and apply. 
     The level up system is a directionless grid of abilities. You earn license points to not only learn to use abilities, but also how to equip armors and weapons. It sounds like an awkward and difficult to understand system, but it actually fits into a game nicely. Why shouldn't you have to buy a license for whatever weapon/armor you use? 
     After learning abilities and equipping whatever armor and weapons you can, you have to set them on your gambits list. If you're a simplistic player, you might just set up basic abilities like Attack -> Any Foe. But you can gradually earn more actions and available targets (different types exist and involve numerous situations such as: Ally: Poison for when an ally is poisoned or Self: HP < 50% for when your life falls below 50%). You essentially have to program your characters, and like any good program, you'd better have them in the right order or else your party might put something minor in front of what should be a top priority.
     The final step for a battle is to apply it and walk your guys into battle. If you've done the first two steps well, then you're done. Enjoy the game. Just point your joystick in the direction you are supposed to go and let the game play itself. Done properly and you'll only need to ever command your party when somebody accidentally bites off more than he/she can chew. When you first turn on the game and start playing, you will notice that the fighting is extremely slow paced. During your times with one character, yes, yes it is slow. But don't fear: you'll obtain more fairly quickly and the battle speed with go up. However, once you obtain 3, the speed doesn't really change for obtaining all six characters. Get used to it.
     In this game, MP charges alone, though abilities and items still increase it too. If you're cheap and lazy like I am, however, then just run around in circles and your MP will come back. This is helpful for getting through certain long dungeons. Oh who am I kidding? They're ALL long! The dungeons are pretty long since enemy encounters don't cause a huge ruckus like in other Final Fantasy games. Hell, villains are all over the place. Some won't even attack you until you make them mad. There was in my opinion, a huge error with this idea. Whether swirly colors or shattering glass, the random encounters was taken out, but the hesitation before the fight was very much not. Your characters are apparently too inept to keep their weapons out for a long period, so once they encounter an enemy, they pause to take their weapons out and engage. This wouldn't be horrible, but then factor in the fact that they put their weapons away after a few steps away from enemies worth engaging and then pull them back out when they spot a new one. This happens every few steps, and not ONLY do they take a long time to engage, they also cannot charge for an attack with weapons sheathed, so they have to stand next to the enemy for a few seconds before building up the courage to hit the monster.
     The magic system is one worth admiring. They have added in a couple new categories for magics, so white becomes entirely restorative while green picks up things like protect and shell, then some black magic has moved into arcane- oh, and time is there as well. It's nice to see the magics so categorized and neat. I also feel the need to now mention that I will be spelling everything as I want to in this review. Final Fantasy XII has decided that they should do everything they can to make the game look more authentic, which even includes spelling everything with a ck, such as magick or technick. 
     Personally, I feel this game has a nice feel to it. Sometimes I think they shift+F7ed some words to make the plot a bit harder to understand with their archaic dialogue, but it fit decently enough. At times I cringed when the characters spoke of a character. He is the Marquis. Everybody in the game pronounced this Mark-wiss. Perhaps that is a more archaic way of pronouncing it, but to me it just makes me want to kill myself. Despite a few pronunciation errors, the speech is interesting and makes the plot and the characters more interesting, which in the case of the plot is highly necessary.
     The plot is as developed as the earliest of Final Fantasy games. If you're looking for plot twists, then I'm sorry, they're not here. Play four hours into the game (the first few hours don't have a lot of actual play time mind you) and you know exactly what you'll be doing the rest of the game, plot-wise. The plot is underdeveloped and incredibly short. There are enough characters within the plot to give slight development, but overall the game falls incredibly short on plot.
     The characters are the game's first huge plus. The characters are some of the best to come from a Final Fantasy, despite the fact that the game is so short that they get very little development as is. The majority of the characters can be analyzed to see their motives and the depths of their personalities. In addition, there is not a definite main character to this game. Vaan is the first character and he is the character you run around town with, but based on his relation to the plot and his participation in it, he is not much more than a background character. The main character award would have to go to either Balthier or Ashe.
     This is the hardest review to write because this game was on its way to becoming one of Square's greatest achievements, but unfortunately it fell far short. To summarize this game in one word I would use the word "sloppy." A large number of video games today are focusing a great deal on graphics and over-developed systems and not enough on the story aspect. I had hopes for Final Fantasy XII, but the execution was very poor. The actual story is linear and boring (not that linear is bad, but this line only really has two points on it), the graphics weren't too much better than FFX, which was released six years prior (a roommate of mine commented that Vaan's abs look like they were drawn upside-down), and in essence, this game is a one player MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game). Instead of a developed plot there were sidequests. Instead of difficult monsters, they had cheap monsters that took decades to kill (a monster that doesn't even look like it's losing life when you hit it should NEVER be given an ability to restore 4/5 of his life with a single, MP-free move). The license board had very little arrangement.
     Final Fantasy XII looks like a game that had big plans, but after working on it for the several years it took them to complete it, it gives me the impression that they had a good start on it, then forgot about it for three years, then came back to it and realized it wasn't done, so they pulled an all-nighter to put it together and sent it out. Seriously. The ending is abrupt, the plot is simple, there are several important scenes in text instead of voiced over (I know this isn't a huge deal, but FFX could do it, so why not the game that took them five years to finish?), and the mechanics were not as fluid as they should be (see comment about sheathing weapons). I put over a hundred hours onto the game and by the end I just wished for those hundred hours back. There comes a point when playing this game that you realize that all you do is equip gambits, buy skills and weapons, then walk around and let the game play itself. This game did two great things for me personally. First off, it gave me something to do while eating dinner since I could use both hands to eat and just play the game with my feet (truth). And second it made me a lot less sad that I don't ever plan to own a PS3 and therefore no future Final Fantasy games. I'm not saying it's a bad game, I'm just saying that if this is the direction that Square-Enix has decided to take, then I'm officially done with the Final Fantasy series. I'll continue playing what I already have, because they rock, but after FFX-2, FF11 (which I refuse to pay for), and this, I don't care for the new direction of the series and no tears will be shed for the lack of future Final Fantasy games.

Goatbob's Rating: 
5/10 Lamps