Took a major step renovating Final Fantasy as a game, though wasn't quite as personal or memorable as the best of them.
I liked this game.
I thought the combat (acknowleding complaints that 'it plays itself') was actually well done. All turn based combat systems play themselves, but the one in FF12, I feel, was refreshing, inspired, well thought out, and marvelously executed.
The story, too, was good. Definitely more mature than the most recent installments. Obviously more political, but interesting and worth completing.
Also, the world itself feels larger than any Final Fantasy I've played since the SNES. There's alot of ground, and while not every inch of it is interesting, it does deliver a sense of a 'world' you're moving through, not just tiny little corridors with random battles thrown in.
In alot of significant areas, this was the most ambitious FF game since they revamped the graphics on the original Playstation. And, I feel, it succeeded in all the ways it attempted to make the game feel bigger, more epic, while integrating encounters into the environments you explore.
The one area this game drops the ball, and probably the biggest way it could have dropped the ball, is that the story is no where near as personal as most Final Fantasy games are.
That's a big thing for fans of this series. We've watched other games reinvent combat, and even after playing the best of them, we keep coming back to our favorite installment of this franchise for the story. We become invested in the characters, in their story, in their role in the bigger story. They feel like a family after a while.
And, while the characterization in FF12 was very solid, the team, or their stories, never seem to make me care the way I wanted to care. I understand their motives, I understand their stakes, which makes manuevering my attention through the politically heavy story easier...I just don't care the way I did playing other FF games.
That, in my opinion, it's this games greatest fault. And, honestly, the most significant fault it could have had.
If played as a game alone, ignoring the title, I feel it's very fun. I've played it through twice, and through both playthroughs, it was always very enjoyable, challenging, and worth my time to explore. There's a bit of a learning curve to the combat system and the use of basic code style 'gambit' commands, but once it took my attention off combat, allowed me to plan a fight better, and explore the world more freely.
I just wish at the end of this ambitions game, and it's interwoven story, I cared more about the characters that I took through it. But, this detraction doesn't make this game a dissapointment by any means, because it is actually a quite fulfilling and interesting gameplay.