The newest trip back to Ivalice is an exciting, immersive adventure that is hard to put down.
Vaan, a fully-fledged sky pirate now, finds himself possessing a jewel called Auracite, which calls an airship to him which takes Vaan, Penelo, and their friends to the hidden floating continent of Lemures, home of the winged Aegyl. Vaan soon discovers that the Auracite has the ability to summon Espers to his aid, which adds to both the storyline and most of the battling.
Overall, the story is good. Truthfully, the game revolves more around the battles and missions than it does the plot, and it works, with just enough plotline and dialogue to make it solid. It's still holds the basic Final Fantasy twists that everyone has come to love, with an initial bad guy that everyone blames disasters on, but a bigger bad guy appearing as the master manipulator. If anyone thinks this is a spoiler, they should honestly go play a few other games of the genre and then come back here.
The battling is extremely unique to any other Final Fantasy game to date. Instead of turn-based battles, active-time, or even real time, Revenant Wings takes a new turn. After the beginning of the game, Vaan and his friends can use the Auracite to call upon Espers (which vary from regular old goblins and chocobos to everyone's favorites, Bahamut and Zodiark) to stand with the characters. When it's time to attack, the player sends the characters and Espers either together or separately to march toward the enemy parties, which usually stay dormant until the distance is closed. After first contact is made, well, basically, Hell breaks loose as the player makes all the units attack and move on to the next enemy party. The player's own party can get quite large, especially when using Summoning gates to summon even more Espers in the middle of battle. Have fun with that!
How do battles appear? Well in the storyline, the player simply travels from place to place and the initial battle will ensue. On the sidelines, side-missions can also be accepted, much like in most other games in Ivalice. The battles of both the main and side storylines don't all have the same winning requirements. Some simply require the player to defeat all enemies, sometimes only one leader must be felled, and sometimes summoning gates or ground must be gained. After all that, free battles can be accepted at each location on the world map.
Speaking of the world map, there is no map-trekking or dungeon-crawling in Revenant Wings. The player simply pilots Vaan's new airship, the Galbana, to wherever he needs to land and walks for about three seconds to his location, with no random encounters with enemies.
The graphics are amazing as well. The regular game play graphics are great, with great scenery - no, absolutely AMAZING scenery - and very creative characters and creatures all over. Continuing, the cutscenes with full CGI effects are fantastic, and although it would have been great if there had been more of them, they satisfy perfectly.
There are a few quirks with the battling, such as view obstruction that prevents selecting characters or enemies with the stylus, and a slight lag when the battles begin to be too wide-scale, but other than that, this game is great. Overall, this game is WELL worth it for any Final Fantasy player to try.