A lackluster and disappointing wash out. What happened?!
Let's get this out of the way, the Story of a Final Fantasy game is most often it's greatest selling point. FFXII does not have a particularly compelling story, I went in hoping for a masterpiece of political and social drama, unfortunately it's really just a re-hash of the classic 'band of rebels fights the evil empire' story. The characters are not very compelling at all, especially Vaan who is by far the weakest link, he's dull and never really makes his presence known, he also just seems like a tag along and it really feels like he and Penelo could just be removed and the story would go on exactly the same as it does. I did like Basch, Fran and Balthier quite a lot, they were interesting characters, but this game really didn't take much or any time at all to really develop the characters to any particular degree. The main villain also just didn't strike me as very interesting and by the end of the story I barely knew anything about him and I really didn't care if he died or not, but then this game really doesn't make an effort to make you care about the characters. Missing from this Final Fantasy is any semblence of a nice fluffy love story which is a shame because it's nice to have it in the story even if it's just a minor plot line, for this it would've been a nice way to give Vaan some personality.
The graphics in Final Fantasy XII just don't have the series usual charm, everything looks washed out, environments are drab and dull and the character designs are mostly dumb looking or just kind of boring. Character models and environments have plenty of detail, but the colours make them almost painful to look at. Character's faces are also very strange looking and some characters look too masculine, while others have this very chubby cheeked look to them which makes them look like very tall 3 year olds. Alot of the outside environments are just boring and it's just not fun to have to fight your way through them. Also a lot of the monsters are recycled and are just recolours of lower level monsters in other areas.
The sound in FFXII is just not up to par with the rest of the series, it doesn't even come close. The voice actors aren't really poor but they do generally sounds bored most of the time and the script is kind of awkward and strange. Vaan's voice actor just does nothing to make the character stand out during his few speaking parts which only serves to help the guy who is supposed to be the main character shrink even more into the background. The most painful thing is the fact that Nobuo Uematsu is not the composer for this game and it really shows. The music is generally not nearly as epic as the rest of the series, though some tracks (such as the boss music) do stand out and save the soundtrack from utter disaster, the music is at least passable but for something that's usually such a strong point of the series it's hard to listen to it in this game. I also really missed battle music, I just don't feel as excited in battles when the dull, generic over world music is playing.
The gameplay in this isn't actually half bad. The new battle system is actually quite compelling and works very well, I actually got very excited with it during the first part of the game. Unfortunately it does get a little dull after a while because none of the battles really feel as epic as they used to and I miss directly controlling the entire party. The new limit system is strange but kind of cool, at the same time though I miss the guarenteed power that the old limit breaks brought you, the new system is quite unreliable. Summoning is pretty cool in this, albeit not all that useful, I really didn't do much summoning at all to get through the game. I found the license board to be a really dull and boring mechanic, even the sphere board was more interesting and easy to use.
Really overall this game makes me sad. I pretty much just forced myself to complete it to see if it maybe got better towards the end or if the actual ending made eveything worthwhile, my gamble didn't pay off unfortunately. This game really leaves me questioning the future of Final Fantasy, I just hope that this game can blow over and Square can get back on track.