Final Fantasy XII has to be one of the most mixed received Final Fantasy games next to maybe II or VIII where some people like the game while others not so much. I am one of those gamers who actually hated the game so much when the game first come out and even then I still do. Final Fantasy XII has plenty of big problems that really let the game down and for the series last PS2 outing it was very sad. We saw a big update with The Zodiac Age Remastered version which come out in 2017 for the PS4 which arguably didn't really improve anything from the already deeply flawed original and now we see the game on PC and also more recently on the Nintendo Switch and also the XBox One which those have more so called enhancements. Travelling through Ivalice never looked so much better but the poor gameplay choices combined with some serious cheapness in a lot of areas will try to ruin every aspect of it.
Let's begin with the only positive that I have for it and that it is a fantastically optimized PC port compared to the terrible Tales of Symphonia PC port. Usually console games have such terrible ports for the PC but surprisingly Final Fantasy XII runs fantastically well on the highest settings on the PC and it runs at full 60 FPS in which the console versions run at 30 FPS in gameplay and at 60 FPS only in the field menu. The overall quality of the game is improved just like with the PS4, having much better quality with the environments and the character models. Final Fantasy XII looked really superb on the PS2 when the game first came out and it was incredible to see the ageing PS2 console really pull off such incredible graphics. As for the soundtrack it has remixes of the Final Fantasy main tune and also the victory theme are good but however many of the town tracks are uninspired and repetitive but some of the boss tracks are okay. These are the main positives that I have for Final Fantasy XII now let's talk about the story and gameplay which have so many problems to talk about.
In the story the countries of Arcadia are overtaken by the Imperial Empire, the game's antagonist Vayne Solidor is attempting to collect stones called Nethercite so that he can win the war and rule the world. The so called protagonist Vaan lives a struggling life after losing his brother in the war and wanted to be a sky pirate but not before ending up with a group of resistance fighters who either want to take the fight against the Empire or try to find peace with them. Problem with the storyline is that many of the storyline elements are just entirely forced in without any actual character development and it also focuses too much on the political message which can be quite overwhelming at times. Another thing is that many of the hero characters aren't really all that interesting and don't really do anything all that worthwhile. Pennelo is one of the more worthless characters who just happens to want to stick around with Vann, Basch, Fran and Ashe try to give out a meaningful impact to the story and while their dialogue is somewhat believable for the first moments of the storyline but however they lose interest in what is happening around them. Vann the main character is the main offender of the cast as he doesn't seem to really care about the events that happen around the world and also around himself and instead acts as if he is just along for the ride. You just end up really losing interest in the storyline and the characters if they end up not actually caring for what is at stake what honestly is not how a story focused RPG should be played. You're meant to have a storyline which makes you care for the characters with all of the troubles they go through and if an RPG shows that a character doesn't care for what is happening the player is likely to end up not caring as well. Balthier looking back at him is the fan favourite character actually gives some of the plot actual meaning, cares at times for the party's well being and also his dialogue is actually pretty good to listen to. The real characters are the villains who show more care for the storyline and have quite a huge involvement then the majority of the main characters. The best of the entire cast goes to Gabranth who is one who truly serves the empire with thought and reason, his dialogue is well delivered and is actually one of the more involved characters in terms of the storyline. The game may have some really good voice acting even if the lip syncing is off in some areas but however Square Enix put more focus on the villains and the overall political message rather then have any sort of character development and also made the majority of the characters very uninteresting.
Now it is time to talk about the biggest problems with Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age and that is the gameplay which I have to say is among the series' worst next to maybe the XIII trilogy. For starters the Zodiac Age tries it hardest to address the issues some people have had with the PS2 original but there is nothing that feels all that improved and instead making some gameplay mechanics worse. The game plays kind of like an MMO without any online functionality. It has sequences which is divided between towns where you shop for items and new gear as well as talking to NPCs and also going to the waypoints where the game wants you to go for the next part of the story. It is also divided by fields and dungeons where you explore each area for treasure and also monsters to fight against, occasionally you get a puzzle that you have to work out and each dungeon has a boss battle to fight against and defeating it allows you to go to the next destination where you do the same thing again. All of which look and sound good on paper until you see for yourself how it is poorly executed.
Rather then having a proper turn based combat system that is separated from the field screen in previous games Final Fantasy XII instead has a massive field where you explore the area and fight enemies in a MMO like battle system. Fights however are started by pressing X to bring up the combat menu, selecting Attack and then picking the enemy you wish to attack as long as the enemy is within view. After picking the action the character you are using will attack the enemy till it is down and you have to repeat this process for other enemies and the same for using Items, Magic Spells and other Technicks as well. This process becomes rather boring and tedious even during the earliest portions of the game because you don't have much options for combat and you honestly don't have much control of your character. The game has options to either make the battles stop while you navigate the combat menus to give your character commands or active where the game doesn't pause when you use the combat menu but even then it's tedious having to go through the menu to get everyone to do whatever it is you want them to do. Putting it on wait is advisable because on active enemies don't wait for you to do anything.
One feature that you get later on is the Gambit System, the way this works is that it allows the computer to control the party members based on their action setup and their priorities. You can set a number of different actions which will allow characters to attack, heal or use items automatically. You can set individual actions like attack the closest enemy or set an action to use a potion or a cure spell if a character's HP was below 50%. These actions can be assigned at any place on the screen in which any action assigned to the top would be the highest priority while any action assigned to the lowest will be the lowest priority. On paper it sounds kind of decent but however it's a poorly executed design choice, why do I say that I see you guys asking? Well let me break it down. For starters you have to correctly manage your character's action on the gambit screen like you could place in the actions where a character can use a different attack if an enemy has high defence, use an attack that reduces an enemy defence or to have a different character cast a magic spell, it's ideal but however it can be confusing to get used to when you notice that some actions function the same. Like if I were to insert Ally = Any use Phoenix Down it would have the same effect as just Ally = KO'd Ally use Phoenix Down or Ally = Any use Antidote and Ally = Poisoned use Antidote for example. Another thing about the gambit system is that once you set up the gambits to how you need it to be the battles become automatic as every single action that you set up including your controlling character is handled by the computer without any actual player input. Look in all fairness it's an attempt to have a unique system where you can set up the character's actions in combat, but it just feels confusing when deciding the best actions for some battle situations like bosses which I'll come back to and having to manage priorities like healing and stats buffing as well as having to decide which attacks will be the most effective instead of just relaying on a single attack command. I get it that if you didn't use the gambits and relayed on just giving the party members commands in combat one by one then it would be tedious but then again even if you do set up the attack commands the priority order no matter the condition messes up how your other attacks are supposed to come out and it's mostly easier to input characters other attacks in some fights anyway which makes the gambit system almost redundant. Compared to the strategy system found in the Tales of games for instance all you need is a simple command telling your party members how aggressive they should act, the placement a character should be or how frequent they should use their Artes to what Artes you want or don't want them to use, it's a simple system which has worked fantastically well and it doesn't need to be anything complex then that. Having a Gambit system is supposed to handle the entire party members without you having to spend more time in battles going through menus and also allow for different strategy options I get that, but the Gambits regrettably takes the control away from the character you are using and you just don't feel all that involved at all. It's then you realize that the battles play themselves and if you have the right Gambits set up then you can just sit back and watch the battles play out.
Another one of those that the developers tried to implement was the License Board, now the way it worked is that a character can equip a piece of equipment like a sword, axe, spear, bow or a type of armour as long as they have license to equip it, the same even goes to magic spells or other abilities. It meant that if you slowly filled the License Board every single character could equip the same type of equipment and have all the magic spells at their disposal making them all the same. In Zodiac Age attempts to address this by making what's called the Zodiac Job System where you pick from a class job which has its own licenses. Select wisely though because if you pick the wrong class then you are stuck with that class the whole game and you can't still change classes in the PC port. This License System would have been more efficient if a class had any unique or proper abilities or weapons to support it. Why would you make anyone in the party a Thief when some other classes have the Steal skill? Why give a character a Dagger when they are clearly the weakest weapons in the game? At least you can pick out a secondary class when you reach a certain point in the game but still it's the most unintuitive way to make a system better. This was a system that doesn't really improve from the flawed Licensed System in the original game and still if your characters have most of the Licenses unlocked they can pretty much use all of the same actions and equipment as one another making none of the classes unique or enjoyable to use.
About the only two things Square Enix did right was adding in the speed function allows you to speed up the game by either 2x or 4x speed. This allows you play with more faster battles and trust me for some battles especially bosses it's a good system to have if you don't want to sit down for minutes doing hardly anything. Another thing is that they made the Quickenings it's own meter rather then sharing with MP like in the original version. This means that you can get your Quickenings out end a lot of the bosses rather quickly and without sacrificing your MP to do so. Square Enix must have known the battles were slow in the original version and that the Quickenings needed it's own meter to try and balance things out so they did it like that. Also they must have found out that the License Board System was ridiculous that they added an easy to access chat where you can instantly Maximize the License Points and Gil with a press of a button the same thing that was done in the PS4 port of Final Fantasy VII. Yep Square Enix decided to take the easy way out of making their system overly tedious and boring and then decided to add a cheating system to it to make the grinding non-existent.
The Gambits and the License Systems aren't the only things that really make the gameplay really awful. Like I said before Final Fantasy XII is an open world game where you can freely explore the world how you see fit, that idea is solid but it poorly executed for a huge reason. There are areas in the game where if you decide to take a detour from the critical path you'll encounter plenty of tough enemies that are seriously high levelled then you are. They would throw powerful attacks instantly and can wipe out the whole party with little to no effort before you could even do a single thing. In another words going off the main road and into an optional dungeon will instantly spell Game Over if you pretty much decide to fight against a random enemy in a dungeon that is way past your party's overall Level. The designers even had the nerve to put overpowered enemies within the first hour of the game and a fight against that without warning can be triggered resulting in instant death which will send you back to the title screen. It's a severe handicap in the sense that unless you realize that's an area that you are not meant to be in yet you are pretty much dead just before even taking one step inside. What doesn't help is that the game never tells you that you should perhaps avoid many of the early super tough enemies or areas which really makes dungeon exploring especially early on rather frustrating.
The dungeon designs aren't that better, some start out decently and are designed very well but then later dungeons start throwing traps where if you stand on them it either causes status effects or do massive damage if not instantly kill maybe one, two or maybe the whole party. You can never tell where they could be unless you equip either an accessory that has the Libra ability or use the Libra spell yourself. Traps can end up being placed all over one area or sometimes placed in the middle of small tight corridors which makes them difficult to avoid. You could try and avoid them by going to the side but most of the time one of your other idiot party members could instead walk right into the trap and get you killed. You can even step into a trap pretty much the instant you go into the next screen in some dungeons and you wouldn't know till it's too late, how is that supposed to even be fair!? The main way to avoid the traps without using Libra is the Float spell which will make your party members float in the air for a time so that you can avoid the traps but you do get this spell till later in the game.
With the regular enemies and dungeon designs being ridiculous what about the bosses in the game. Most of the storyline bosses aren't that much of a problem as long as you grind enough levels which will happen anyway and build up your licenses or if you have the Quickenings ready then you will win the boss fights without that much of a fuss. They mostly just stand in one place and attack one party member or use one of their super attacks which deals massive damage to either one or maybe the whole party. However it's the later ones where they have other minions with them or fights where the game decides to throw a curveball like can't use magic or use physical attacks is where the frustration begins right? Not quite yet.
Some of the optional bosses are just completely unfair in terms of their design, attack pattern and stats which makes a lot of them unbalanced. They have plenty of overpowered attacks which do serious damage to one or maybe the whole party, have attacks that kill a party member instantly, throw dozens of status effects, get more attacks off faster then the party and lastly put on immunity barriers which makes them immune to all your attacks. Yes I swear it's true, Let me tell you if a boss puts on a immunity barrier then you are screwed because the immunity barrier lasts for perhaps minutes and there is literally nothing you can do. I tried using different attacks, dispelling it, used non elemental attacks, used items but none of them worked. This single handily is the most unfair thing about the bosses in the game and it's one which you will fall victim to and no doubt rage out in anger. I understand that every boss has their own weakness that you have to exploit but however in FFXII you just have to be very lucky with some of the bosses especially ones with that stupid immunity barrier, you just can't do anything about it. All you can do is hope that the barrier goes away after a few minutes while you struggle to keep all your wounded party members alive only for the boss to finish what is left of your party members with a super attack. You can have 3 party members at a time fighting with a guest character that you get occasionally and if your 3 party members are down you have to bring out the other 3 members who are not dead yet. It's only when all 6 of your party members are dead it's Game Over and you have to load from your last save or use a temporally auto save which auto saves each time you go into a new area which is generous. Even then it's still just a pain to make it to the boss in order to try again. They even made an optional boss that has over 50 Million HP, yes again I swear it's true and anyone who has played the game before on the PS2 would know that it is just atrocious. It's called Yiazmat and it takes about nearly 2 hours to defeat him even with the best equipment in the game at normal speed. I swear who ever came up with some of the bosses for this game must have been a complete sick manic who fought none of the previous Final Fantasy optional challenges where not hard and challenging enough, and I fought the Dark Aeons in Final Fantasy X where the worst. This game is challenging but that challenge comes from the frustration from the bosses having overpowered attacks, annoying barriers and the terrible combat system being tedious and unenjoyable due to how automatic it is.
Look I understand that a boss has to be tough in which you have to be fully prepared in order to take them on. Every single boss is supposed to behave different that would make them all unique and challenging but even then it's just a challenge trying to keep your party members alive cause a boss is cheating by using that annoying barrier while you struggle to keep everyone alive. Take a look at the old Final Fantasy games most notably VI, VII and IX for instance you don't see bosses or overpowered enemies that use those annoying immunity barriers and attacks that wipe out everyone in one hit, the challenge in those old games are so fair that the only reason you died it was because you didn't use a healing spell in time and wasted your turns attacking instead. In other words if you died in the old games your defeat was entirely your fault. Yeah, sure they had some of the franchises hardest bosses but again it's done in a way that it is fair and you know it is because everything falls on you. In Final Fantasy XII a lot of the deaths are just out of your control and are dozens of times where you die constantly and it wasn't your fault and that the game just being a total cheating swine and it is just annoying to put up with. It's like playing with a five year old child who is very spoiled and you just have to let him win and it is just not fun you know.
What also isn't fun are the sidequests which are poorly designed as well, You got hunts that you can take part in and you would think you can do these hunt by going a board, selecting the hunt you want and then do it right? Wrong! Instead every hunt has a partitioner that you need to speak to in order to start the hunt, they could either be close by in the same town you are in or one partitioner could be in a different town maybe zones away from your target monster. It's only after talking with them that the quest starts, some of the hunts are simple go to this area to kill it which is more or less easily done just by looking on the map but then some of the later hunts have to throw some of stupid gimmick that either isn't explained at all or designed in such a way that you would never figure out on your own. There are some quests in the game that have some of requirement in order for the enemy to spawn, the same goes to the rare game type enemies. These can either be clearing out the zone for it to appear or you have to change the weather of the area which the way this works occurs at complete random. You're supposed to come out of the area completely, walk to different zones and then back to the area you were in for the weather to change but sometimes it never changes. I tried going to different areas, warped to different dungeons and the weather never changed at all which makes this whole RNG system with the weather system just tedious and annoying. There are also ridiculous requirements like having to be low on heath or to come out of an area and then come back in till the thing decides to spawn. The majority of the hunts tell you where they will spawn but the last hunts never tell the locations which will force you to look it up guides or just guess the location which again becomes a pain. If it wasn't for the whole RNG aspect and you didn't have to waste your time going to the annoying partitioner's then Final Fantasy XII's sidequests would have been better for it.
I know that I am being extremely critical against the design of the battle system but there are just plenty of bad design choices with the gameplay. The battle system is slow, punishing and automatic, the bosses are unfairly balanced, the gambits just take away the control away from you, not even the new Zodiac Job System even tries to resolve the License Board from the original. Not even the 100 Stage Trial Mode is any fun at all, oh yeah cause they had to include a new mode for the game for the re-release I guess. In this mode you basically go through 100 stages fighting the enemies and some bosses you fought in the main game only that some bosses have less HP. It starts out easy till it goes into that unfair territory just like with the optional bosses in the main game. You'll struggle with them and no doubt rage cause of the cheapness of certain bosses. There is also a New Game Plus which makes you start you off with bonuses I guess and also a New Game Minus which doesn't give you any Experience Points which I would not dare ever challenge this setting unless you are just a complete masochist who wants to punish yourself some more.
Final Fantasy XII makes for a great port for the PC thanks to the excellent optimization and performance but however the gameplay elements from the terrible open world design, cheap and unfair boss battles, a Gambit System which takes away control from the player when it is set up properly, weak storyline with uninteresting characters, terrible side quests and a tedious and boring which really lets Final Fantasy XII down in so many ways. The PC port on Steam costs a lot more then buying a second hand copy of the original version on the PS2 as well as the PS4 version which is what the PC is based on. I still wouldn't recommend this game to anyone not even for the most die hard of Final Fantasy fans. It hasn't aged all that well and compared to a lot of these ports and remasters of older games that we have been getting this game alongside other previous Final Fantasy games doesn't hold a candle to anything. There are far better out there that we should be playing instead of this.
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Game Score: 3.5/10
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Game Title: Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age
Platform: PC
Developer: Square Enix
Genre: Role Playing
Age Rating: PEGI: 16+
Release Date: 1st February 2018 (Steam)
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The Good Points:
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Runs really well, looks amazing and has fantastic optimization on the PC running at full 60 FPS
The Bad Points:
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Battle system is very boring, punishing and at times no fun at all
Setting up the Gambit system for all of the characters becomes really confusing to use and it takes away the control of the leading party members
New Zodiac Job System is poorly implemented like original License System
Some boss battles are cheap and unfair
Optional Sidequests are either misleading, tedious to figure out or frustrating
Weak Storyline with mostly uninteresting characters
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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