"All dazzle, no soul. FF12 sounds the death knell for aesthetic and character."

A series as long as Final Fantasy can hardly be blamed for bearing little resemblance to its former self after twelve installments and multiple spin-off titles. The question is, has the series changed for the better or the worse? When we discard all of the trappings of graphical and technical comparisons, which are merely signs of the times rather than true measures of a game's quality, we must ask, does a player have more fun playing a contemporary Final Fantasy game than earlier ones? The answer to that question lies primarily in the kind of gamer you are, and the elements of the series that made you a fan to begin with. While I unreservedly acknowledge the technical and visual achievements of the Final Fantasy series, along with new levels of depth and complexity brought to the gameplay, Final Fantasy XII has forced me to admit a harsh reality—that, for me, the true soul of what this series once was is gone.

As someone who has followed Final Fantasy since playing the very first game as a ten-year-old boy, I have seen more beloved characters, captivating locales, and shocking story twists in the flagship Square series than in any other line of video games. From that first day, when four nameless warriors appeared to restore the Crystals and save the world, I was enraptured by a world of limitless imagination, where I felt truly in control and the lure of exploration called every time I turned on my NES. I continued my journey through Final Fantasy IV, VI, and VII – IX, went back in time to visit the “lost” Final Fantasies via anthologies, and even bought a Playstation 2 solely for the purpose of playing Final Fantasy X when it was released. After avoiding XI as I have no interest in online RPGs, I looked forward to XII, although with much reservation.

You see, something had taken place around the time of Final Fantasy VIII that, at the time, I could not quite place my finger on, but has now become more apparent through recent reflection on the series as a whole. With the explosion of popularity FFVII enjoyed, Final Fantasy suddenly became a “blockbuster” product. No longer content simply to be a quality RPG with enchanting worlds to be explored by a niche of loyal enthusiasts, the series slowly evolved into an “event” game reaching across demographics, trying to appeal to series veterans and please all types of gamers simultaneously. Ambitious and often avarice-fueled endeavors such as these are rarely successful, as in order to maintain such wide popularity it is often necessary to relinquish the richness, the purity and the passion of the visions that used to fuel such artistic creations.

Final Fantasy XII falls victim to this same syndrome, perhaps more strongly than any other game in the series. It is beautifully designed, spit-polished to a near-blinding shine. The sprite-based graphics of old have been replaced with fully realized three-dimensional environments, synthesizers with orchestrated scores, poorly translated written dialogue with well-acted voice-overs in state-of-the-art animation sequences. And yet, underneath all of the glamour, the game has very little of the soul that was once borne so proudly on the chest of each Final Fantasy game. This missing piece is a difficult one to quantify, as it is entirely aesthetic and arguably tangible only to those for whom story and atmosphere are paramount in a game of Final Fantasy's epic scope.

The main cast of Final Fantasy XII may serve as the most noticeable example. With the exception of IX, each Final Fantasy game since VI has featured fewer leading cast members than the game before it. Final Fantasy XII features only six permanently playable characters. Yet, in an almost embarrassing irony, we come to know less about these six in 60 hours of gameplay than we learn about the record fourteen playable characters in Final Fantasy VI. How is it that the game features fewer than half as many characters, yet is unable to adequately make the player care about the fates of any of them by providing more than the slightest hints of background for each one? The only characters who are even remotely attached to the main storyline are Ashe, Basch and Balthier. Vaan's motivation for fighting is mentioned briefly before being dropped altogether, and Fran and Penelo are so much window dressing.

In fact, some of the supporting characters in the game are far more interesting than the main characters themselves. Larsa, the would-be ruler with a conscience, Reddas, the high-minded pirate with a sense of honor, and Marquis Ondore, torn between loyalty and practicality, would have all made fine party members. More importantly, they would have added a great deal of depth of character to the largely lifeless cast. All story is about conflict, and XII certainly has that, but in order to care about the conflict, one must care about the characters involved. Where previous Final Fantasies nailed this precept spot on, this one seems to approach character almost begrudgingly, like an unfortunate necessity blocking the way between the designers and the next architectural monstrosity, overly complicated battle system, or lavish CG sequence, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

(SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS FINAL FANTASY GAMES FOLLOW)

I remember that chill that went up my spine when Sephiroth first said, “I'm going to see my mother.” I remember the magnificent sense of achievement and pride when Cecil shed his Dark Knight roots to become a Paladin. I remember the overwhelming revelations as Squall and his friends began to recover their repressed memories. But you'll find none of that in Final Fantasy XII. Instead of plot twists that reveal information about the protagonists or show their growth as individuals, the storyline primarily deals in the shifting political tides between opposing governments. In this regard, the story is very much like that of Final Fantasy Tactics, which touted much of the same creative team. While Tactics' story was nearly incomprehensible by its end, XII does keep its political intrigue to a reasonable level of murkiness; however, this is simply no substitute for good old-fashioned character development.

Like the surface-level characters that populate it, the world of Final Fantasy XII is similarly lacking in the depth and ingenuity that used to permeate the series. Though beautifully rendered, to be sure, there is nothing terribly original about any of the locales in the story, save one or two. Whereas in previous games, a forest might lead you to a Phantom Train that carries the dead to the next life, or a marsh might be populated by androgynous creatures whose sole mission is to sample the world's food and eat frogs, in XII, a forest is just a forest, and a marsh is just a marsh. There's really nothing exceptional or innovative about any of the locations. This is particularly noticeable in the nauseatingly repetitive ruins that one must routinely explore to get yet another all-important artifact throughout the game. Only a few environments, such as the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea with its sprawling abandoned processing facilities, stir the imagination.

The whole game reads like a painter who was so proud of his skillful brushstrokes that he forgot to render a subject worth painting. I sat amazed in FFXII's capital of Archadia, marveling at the endless skyscrapers and bustling streets populated by enough people to make the place feel like a real city. And yet, the amazement was purely in appreciation of a technical achievement, rather than a true sense of being spellbound by a world that I could not only witness on the other side of a screen, but in which I desperately wanted to involve myself and explore every inch. A master artist incites emotion of this caliber, and while earlier Final Fantasies have done it with ease, the emperor has no clothes here.

Equally to blame for FFXII's inability to truly captivate is the blandness of the music—surely a mighty fall from grace for a series that has produced some of the greatest soundtracks not only in video games, but in all of modern entertainment. Any attempt to make the music of FFXII memorable seems to have been abandoned for a flaccid score that could easily be interchanged with the blandest selections from your average episode of Xena or even your local NPR station. I failed to identify any overriding themes or character-specific themes. The town music for Rabanastre is the only song that came even close to stirring me, and then only for the ten seconds of rousing refrain amidst two minutes of background noise. Some might even consider this to be the game's single biggest disappointment, based simply on the height of the bar that had been set by previous Final Fantasies.

Clearly, the focus of the creators here was not on character, visual or auditory aesthetic, but on gameplay. In that regard, the series has taken many overdue steps with this installment. At long last, random encounters, which outlived their relevance almost two consoles ago, have been put to rest in favor of much more active, real-time fighting. Here, the emphasis is on strategy before the fight, and the player becomes the commander. The Gambit system allows the player to completely instruct the battle party on how to behave in combat, which actions to prioritize and which to avoid. The system does not, however, strip the player of their ability to change the plan mid-course or apply alternate commands to any of the fighters. The control is still there, but the tediousness of entering basic commands like “Attack” on low-level beasts has been eliminated.

I will shed no tears over the loss of random encounters; however, with the game's other new system, Licenses, characters have taken yet another step from being individuals with unique properties to blank slates with no real distinguishable characteristics, save a few flashy animations. FFVI achieved the best balance between these two extremes by granting each character a unique set of abilities, but allowing any character to learn any magic spell by game's end. However, since that time, the “blank slate” mentality has dominated, with the exception, once again, of FFIX. While there is a certain appeal to having the freedom to make the demure Penelo the team's strongest fighter while turning the hard-boiled Balthier into a healer, the lack of any real individuality provides even less motivation to distinguish between the characters than the dearth of story depth. FFXII was actually the first game in which I honestly didn't care who was in my party at any given time; not only did I lack attachment to the characters for story reasons, but their play mechanics were nearly identical.

Between Licenses and Gambits, the new battle system is a mixed bag. For every appealing new innovation, such as the ability to earn “loot” rather than gil by defeating enemies, there is a flaw, such as the near-complete uselessness of summon monsters. After being over-powered for so many recent games, I am relieved that the summons took a back seat, but now they are so underpowered that there is no real motivation to use them at all. The same is true for many of the magic spells as you acquire powerful weapons late in the game. The exhausting linearity of Fain Fantasy X has been solved with a more diversified world environment, but the result is a lot of retreads of the same areas, fighting the same monsters. While the repetitiveness of random encounters is gone, its replacement by fights that are almost entirely automated is not much better. Another Square game, Chrono Trigger, accomplished the task of integrating highly interactive, command-based battles into the same screens where exploration took place, eliminating random encounters but always placing the reins of combat squarely in the player's hand. It's a shame that system could not have been improved upon here.

I salute Square for making a technically masterful game that attempts to address many of the long-criticized holdover elements from previous Final Fantasy games. I appreciate their attention to detail and their painstaking efforts to create a battle system that redefines the role-playing genre, although imperfectly so. But despite these achievements, I mourn the loss of what used to make the series great—the spirit of great storytelling through great characters. Combined with a lack of aesthetic ingenuity, I fear that the soul of Final Fantasy has finally left the series. I felt this the most when I was more interested in watching a roommate play Final Fantasy VII than I was in completing my own file in this latest installment. It was a telling moment, and it doesn't bode well for the future.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/06