A movable bore. Final Fantasy XII won't reaffirm your faith in a progressively disappointing franchise.
Five or so sequels later [comprising of a sequel-to-a-sequel X-2 and a stab at MMORPG] the Final Fantasy series is back with a brand new bag of moogles and chocobos. This time around, the tale travels to the magical kingdom of Rabnastre, when airships, magic, and a Gambit-system combat reigns supreme.
With each successive Final Fantasy iteration, a considerable amount of hype surrounds the upcoming game. And it is this reviewers humble estimation that the Final Fantasy games after FFVII have largely been appreciated and acclaimed for its past pedigree rather than its actual quality and content. Final Fantasy XII is an excellent case-study of this theory. Although the game is undeniably chock-full of rich production values, the gameplay and actual combat system itself, which is where you'll be primarily spending most of your time in, is disengaging, repetitive, and uninspired. Simply put, the game, while competent and artfully assembled, is just not that much fun to play.
Let's begin with the Gambit-system, which defines most of the combat and gameplay mechanics. In your menu system, you program your character's actions and responses based on the situation they will encounter in real-time combat. The most common program is to assign your party-leader to target the nearest enemy, and then program your party members to attack your party-leader's target. You can also program other ancillary commands, such as heal an ally if his HP dips below a certain percentage, or as the game expands and new abilities can be acquired, buff party members with beneficial spells routinely.
It sounds like an excellent combat system in theory. Gone are the old days where a player-character will wander around a blank screen and a randomize combat will ensue, awkwardly transitioning from world map to battle screen. Now, combat occurs in real time, and your party automatically engages enemy mobs that they encounter and react according to the preset Gambit-system you programmed into them. The Gambit system is also logical and elegant in that no longer do you have to input the same command to attack over and over again-- now, the system streamlines the act for you, and you simply program the action once and watch it unfold in each battle sequence.
Ironically, the streamlining of the combat system so that a player no longer has to manually input commands to his troops severely exposes the flaw of RPGs-- namely, that you do the same thing over and over again. This repetitious act is hidden when input commands is necessary, since the player is making calculated battle situations and thinking critically, even if he does not realize his actions occur at a predictable pattern. However, by removing continual user input from the game and replacing it with the Gambit system, the player simply guides his characters around and watches the battle unfold with little to no involvement. It sounds wonderfully efficient, sure, if you're making coffee. But removing player input from the game makes the player an observer, not a participant.
The cinematics that FFVII introduced, while beautiful, where criticized for being too long and overdrawn. Gamers complained that they watched the game as much as they played the game. Now, imagine that you no longer have to input any command in combat. Not only do you watch the game during cinematics, you also watch the game in combat! The first dozen or so times this feat occurs, you marvel at the ingenuity and elegance of a system that requires you to set it once and forget it. As the game progresses, you realize you're not doing a whole lot aside from moving your characters from point A to point B and watching the scenery.
To add insult to injury, the game also introduces a "Bazaar Goods" conceit. Basically, enemy mobs drop loot that can be sold to shopkeeps for gil. Sell the correct number and type of drop loot, and a rare item becomes purchasable for you. Sounds like an intriguing concept with one caveat: most of the drop loot that you need to sell to the bazaar to gain access to powerful items have incredibly low drop rate-- MMORPG low, around 5-10%. The only reason online players endure such ridiculously low drop rates is for the bragging rights of obtaining such rare items to their online chums. However, in a single player game, no glory but only tears and sadness can be garnered from the fact that you spent hours of your life for one item to drop in a virtual reality world. What's worst, the game adds an incentive for you to grind-kill enemy mobs by increasing the percentage of rare mob drop loots if you kill the same enemy type in successive chain. It sounds like an excellent idea of rewarding players for farming mobs, but what it actually does is unmask the fact to the gamer that you will be performing the same actions and killing the same mob over and over again.
In conclusion, although Final Fantasy XII is an artfully presented game from Squaresoft, its combat system, which is the meat of the game, is woefully boring. The game, in an attempt to streamline combat and make continuous mob farming rewarding, actually does the opposite of what it intended and delivers a game that robs the player of decision-making and makes it painfully obvious to him that he will be repeating the same series of actions for the next sixty hours of his life. The only solace he can find is that he can program those actions in advance in a new-fangled Gambit system, so all he has to do is watch his life wither away.