I would have to say that the fact that it's take 6 years to make this game, and we had several games like Star Wars Knight of the Old Republic, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 11 that had simular design of combat but make the design of Final Fantasy 12'S combat feel shallow. It's not innovative like compared to final Fantasy 7 which did redefined the way we played RPGs, or even FF6 which had a wide variety of character classes with innovated gameplay elements like Sabian who had fighting games moves to memorieze in order to perform ingameplay. Recently with games like Tales of Syphonia which added a more variety to the combat, and path of the story, FF12 really does fail to be innovative since it seems to just ignore the past 6 years of video games.
The main MEAT of the game is the combat. And it seems pretty shallow that there isn't much to do within the game, unlike compared to lets say Legend of Zelda Orcarina of time. In Orcarina you were a fisherman, mask salesmen, horseback rider, archer ect and it felt like you really did a great deal of many different professions in a great deal of time. FF12 is more about the combat, so it can become rather dull grinding your way to the top, in fact, majority of the MMORPGs don't even have "JUST COMBAT" gameplay. One of the biggest flaw is how Mist Knacks and Summons lack power near the end of the game, when your near the end your player's regular attacks become more poweriful then a massive summon. So the combat boils down to just hacking away everything and then managing your ally's health status.
I can imagine that the initial design of this game was going to be something more along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics, of a larger detailed world in which you can do quests and battle all the time. But I think in the end, the combat is more along the lines of Final Fantasy 1, where "you hold down the A Button to win."
Little things would have gone to really help this game, better design of the enemy AI, more detail within the 3D surroundings, Night and day and weather effects with your surrounding happened naturally. Grand Theft Auto really did raise the bar of how 3D enviroments should react, and FF12 just feels like it's a SNES game with pretty graphics. A lot of enviroments randomly change, and there isn't any real intelligence to the crowd within the game. I mean there is threat of a massive imperial war and everyone walks around chatting with one another like it's every other day. You can freely walk around without any fear except for massive argo monsters. There was never a moment like in FF6 where I feared for running into an imperal officer. The main story is really just atmosphere and didn't effect the universe.
Although I felt that nothing within the game's graphics felt intuitive, and that's the biggest fault of the game. You don't have any feeling to your surrounding, you don't know when it will rain, when or where cetain bosses will appear, or how to solve puzzels. There is very little hints to how the world works, your going to run into massive argo monsters, stuck on puzzels with no hints, and forget why you have this item and whom to send it to. Resident Evil series gave better hints how to solve puzzels then in FF12, "This tiger statue is missing it's eyes, I wonder what would happen if I add a red jewel to them." instead you had to run out to a FAQ file and find the answer. Recently Okami was criticized for being too easy, but for how little people have forgotten at how initially game were in their crude design. In Okami, you look at a dungeon, see a massive source of the problem and then an obsticle. FF12 you do see the design of the dungeons to be broken down to BLOCKS like an old dragon quest, secrete of mana or the original final fantasy design. Eventually the dungeons and everything within the game gets boiled down to trail and error with punishing results. There is no crime in just showing a player a wall design, and then your player has to assemble that design in a puzzel. Intuitive design, don't have to HIT people over the head with the answer, and Okami was a perfect example with "Oh, there is a small sapling, I wish there was light to help it grow." Or even letting the players own curioustiy play around with the ideas "I wonder what would happen if I bombed this wall." Intuitive design is all about just making the player feel rewarded for trying something that the player either understood or is experimenting with ideas.
Regardless if people only as Amertusa as only a dog in Okami, you did eventually feel like you impacted this world by helping it. You helped people's lives, you saved them, and you fought in these massive battles for them. Final Fantasy 12 doesn't even have that. And in the End, Amaterasu was rewarded with people remembering her deeds. Same with Orcarina of Time, little things, little details helped make an Nintendo 64 game come to life. Or even Half-Life 2 benifited by blocking off certain sections and punishing the player to convince them this was a comunity opressed and at war with the Combine.
I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics, and enjoy viewing this world as a represenative of that small 2D world. I think that's where my heart lies. I do feel inspired by seeing Moogles, Vieras, and Monblac running a clan. I feel that even with the 6 years of development within this game there was something missing in the production. I do hope that later Final Fantasy games embrace ideas from FF12 and refine them, but as far as innovation is concerned FF12 doesn't have it.
The game isn't a waste of time, it's fun, it's GOOD! It's the first Final Fantasy game I've played since tactics, so that's got to count for a lot.