A dramatic change to a popular RPG has paid off and set a new bar in role playing games.
There have been many changes and new innovate elements to Final Fantasy XII
The story of the game is set in a fictional place called Ivalice. The game starts in the Dalmasca's capital city of Rabanastre, where the King is force to sign a treaty before his surrender in an Archadian Empire's invasion of Dalmasca. You jump into the story and learn the first parts. I would spoil the plot of the story so I would aviod talking about it.
Forwarding 2 years later, you play as Vaan, the lead character of the story, who is an orphan dreaming to become a Sky pirate, he sets about stealing from the Archadian forces who are station in Archadian oppuied Dalmasca. He meets a lot of other characters along the way who join the party and later learn that a war will occur in Ivalice. The war effects the party and the party set out trying to prevent the war.
SquareEnix rearrange the elements in the past Final Fantasy games, the first and noticeable feature is by removing the random encounters screen and is replaced by real time battling. The player can run up to any creature or enemy on the battlefield and the player or enemy can target them the player to combat. This also allows more flexibility to have battles and explore a lot more of the surrounding area.
This is good news and removing those annoying random encounters work. The encounters still occur, only during boss fights or special battles.
The other new element is the Gambit system. The Gambit system is programmed by the player to tell the other characters what to do, basically resulting in the characters performing actions by themselves, this is useful as you avoid pressing those buttons, thousand times and save times telling all the characters what to do. You'll be pressing buttons a lot less as you progress into the game and just moving around slaying monsters.
Every time an enemy has been killed, the players who are involved in the party are rewarded with experience points and license points. Experience points cause the player to level up as in most RPG games, however the license points are spent on a license board. The License board allows players to learn new abilities, allow them to equip different weapons and armour and learn magic. Each player has a their own license board and you can raise the characters in the game, any way you want by spending the points to activate the abilities in different areas of the board.
Summons return in the game, this time, called Espers. Once obtained, the player can allow one character in the party to use the Esper by activating it on the license board. Characters can also activate up to three Quickenings on the board. Quickenings give the player a powerful magical ability, which causes heavy damage onto an enemy, which is useful for boss fights or other powerful enemies.
This works well with the story, the gameplay lasts for ages, just countless battling and levelling up, when you're good enough to bit the bosses. The story continues. The graphics and visuals work really well with the game and to present the story.
The graphics have been finely tuned to the PS2 and SquareEnix have present excellent graphics. The sound is crisp and high quality, the voice acting is amazing and fits the them well. The soundtrack is great, however many of the other FF games had better soundtracks. Some tracks are better then others.
The world in the game is vast and really is worth exploring, every part of the environment has a lot of beautiful scenery, which is made up by great visuals and sound. It's worth exploring.
The gameplay lasts around 60 hours in the first run, so set aside a lot of time and you do end up grind most of the game, so if you're used to grinding, you'll get used to this game. Many enemies do offer a challenge in a battle. However considering the new elements in the combat system, battles has been easier.
After completing the game, you may go back and complete side quests, their a lot of questing in the game and they last for more hours on end, it's worth trying them out as the story alone is half of the game. It offers great value to the game.
Huge fans of RPG and any new PS2 owners or RPG player, give this game a shot, it's well deserved and really represents the PS2.