There'll be war, mah boayh.
Furthering this theory, few games have taken the Final Fantasy series as far away from the rest of a pack as the Playstation 2 pair of XI and XII; their MMO-like controls and notably Western RPG mechanics are a far cry from the homage-happy IX or the overly emotional cinematic tribulations of X. While XI deals with the management of thousands of players in a consistent online world, XII attempts to bring this experience to the PlayStation 2 in a single player format, and the result is nothing shorter than the series' best, with only a small list of reservations.
The game opens with flashy cinematic sequences and fantastically written and performed exposition, casting the player's perspective into a world of complex intrigue, fantasy and technology that suggests only minor glimpses into the inspiration they sprung from. The story, politically and emotionally dense, curves constantly into new realms and the game's almost endless (and visually obvious) budget makes it difficult to know exactly where the game will take us next. This is not a plot that is held back by technical or budgetary concerns, unlike the rest of the series whose plot personalities were often crafted by the technology that hosted them. Cutscenes are paced excellently and rival Metal Gear Solid 3 for sheer beauty, while granting the player a chain of events that embroils a great cast of believable, interesting characters voiced by some of the best actors in any video game.
What makes the plot so interesting is the world that it inhabits and brings to life so flawlessly. The opening city is a sprawling urban landscape with more load times than Oblivion on horseback (the only noticeable relic of the game's PlayStation 2 host), offering hundreds of citizens to chat with and a multitude of realms to explore. As the game opens up in the initial few hours, side quests appear much like in the world's initial host, the Game Boy Advance masterpiece Final Fantasy Tactics Advance; these give the player an incentive to travel beyond those boundaries and explore this MMO-like world populated with so much polished creativity and flair that it's nearly staggering. These side quests give breathing room to the plot's various dungeons and focused escapades, which are more structured and difficult.
The game's difficulty is just one symptom of Final Fantasy XII's massive, bleeding flaw that overtakes much of the combat through the sprawling adventure, and that is that the combat is simply too slow. Even with the speed of the battles cranked up to maximum, the back-and-forth still feels sluggish compared to the game's nearest relative, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Perhaps Square Enix wanted to make the game feel more strategic (as seen through the excellent Gambit system, allowing you to program your friends' AI) but what it really does is drag out much of what makes the game uninteresting, such as the minor bits of grinding and longer dungeons filled with monsters. The grinding bit is especially damning, because levelling up your characters and practising on smaller monsters still feels like it moves too slow, and as such it's hard to put forth the effort to be at the level where the game thinks you should be. It's not the pacing of the difficulty that's off - it just takes too long to grind.
This is a shame, too, because everything else about the combat is fantastic; the game's deft combination of KOTOR's action/strategy hybrid mixed with the best ideas from the turn based days of Final Fantasy only make the failures of the sluggish battle system more grating and frustrating. Playing with the Gambit system is rewarding and allows the player to customize their experience to a great degree (though a faster battle system would make the Gambit system worth more; in a slow battle it feels like you could manually manage all of your characters without issues). The enemies never fail to delight, both through art design and battle prowess, and the variety in the stunning environments can legitimately change the outcome of a battle. The plentiful weapons and the skill board, while mildly fiddly and mundane, are at least competent enough to not interfere with the rest of the game's excellence.
In the end, the game's massive lack of a realistically paced combat system can't really drag down how great the rest of the package is. It's the best looking games on the PlayStation 2 (and with a high definition upgrade a la the Playstation 3's discarded PS2 emulation it betrays none of its age), it sounds absolutely gorgeous and the quality of even the most minute details simply seals the world that Square Enix has been crafting for an entire console generation. The engaging plot and excellent story telling solidify Square Enix as a master in their craft, and the battle system, while annoying at times, manages to come off as fun the majority of the time. This game is without a doubt one of the best in the series, and one of the best on the console, no contest.