"Plenty of style, but no real substance"

After years of waiting on the edge of my seat in anticipation of what looked like the "perfect game", now that I've finally played said game, I feel cheated out of a hundred hours of my life. The game has such high potential to be great, but falls flat on its face in poor execution. It's as if a chef cooked a dish using the highest-quality ingredients one could buy, but threw the ingredients in at random and ended up with a giant mess instead of a delicious dish.

So where did this game go wrong?

Story: 1/10

Here's the game's real killer. An RPG's main hook is its story -- if you don't care about what's going on, there isn't much reason to play. The story starts off with an impressive bang (the first 10 hours of the game are highly entertaining because of this), but soon after all of the main characters are in your party, the fun stops. Most characters have poor reasons for being on their adventure. At least half of the party has no real reason to be there at all. Ashe, the center of the story that keeps it moving, isn't a likable character at all, leaving the player spending 90% of the story trying to help her get her poorly-planned revenge to "save" the country that was taken from her.

This sort of story would probably come out a lot more interesting if the country she was trying to "save" seemed to be in danger. The ruler Ashe is attempting to overthrow seems to be a better ruler than she could ever be, and the people in Ashe's homeland seem happy even under "enemy" rule, which leads the player to wonder if there really is a point to her little revenge adventure.

Terrible dialogue further hinders the plot. Every line of story in the game has more frill than content. While such writing does fit the "fantasy" theme, it's often very difficult to understand what the characters are talking about. Though the characters' long-winded speeches sound quite pretty, their overall lack of content and coherency makes them very boring.

There's just nothing in the story to make the player want to smile. NPCs have nothing interesting to say, the plot is terrible, and the main characters (excluding Balthier, whose witty lines are quite entertaining) are dull and unresponsive. You'd think if a giant boss monster ambushed you in the middle of a sewer you'd have something to say, right? Unfortunately, though, in Final Fantasy XII, the characters spend almost the entire game wandering around like silent unresponsive zombies, making no effort to interact with their environments. Yawn.

Sound: 4/10

The game's best audio-related point is its voice acting. The lines are well-delivered and easy on the ears. Fran's unique way of speaking (slow-paced, hissing a bit on s-sounds) was a nice touch.

The music, however, leaves a lot to be desired. The background music is easily forgettable and heavily recycled. Sometimes there will be a dramatic cutscene about war, yet the background music is the same generic "peaceful field map" music that you've been forced to hear for twenty hours. The game's only interesting background music piece is played in a strange and relatively small area: the music playing in Lowtown, the slum area of the capital city Rabanastre (where the game begins).

The game's theme song -- a tradition held in the Final Fantasy series since VIII's "Eyes On Me" -- is a great song on its own, but doesn't fit into the game at all. In previous Final Fantasy games, the player is slowly introduced to the theme song by hearing remixed versions of it blended into the background music throughout the game. FFXII's theme "Kiss Me Goodbye", however, seems like it was tossed into the end of the game at random. It's the first newer Final Fantasy game that has no love story whatsoever, so why did they choose a love ballad for the theme song? It's a mystery to me.

Graphics: 8/10

Easily the game's finest point. The cutscenes are beautiful and crisp. Scenes with airships battling in the sky look like scenes straight out of a high-budget Hollywood movie. In-game graphics are also generally nice to look at.

Many towns and dungeons, however, aren't very visually appealing. Monsters look really neat, but are over-recycled. Be prepared to be fighting a lot of similar-looking creatures. "But this monster is stronger because it's purple instead of green! And that one's a mini-boss because we took one monster and made it twice as large!" All RPGs recycle monsters, but it seemed a lot more frequent in this game.

Gameplay: 4/10

A lot of classic RPG fans' main gripe about the game is its Gambit system, which replaces traditional battles with real-time fighting. I thought the Gambit system was great, though (and players who dislike it can just turn it off, though having it on makes battles a lot faster and easier) -- it just wasn't put to good use.

The Gambit system allows the player to apply basic programming to party members' actions (such as "if an ally's HP is lower than 20%, cast heal"). It's fun to tinker with for the first five or ten hours of the game. The problem here is that the game is at LEAST sixty hours long. To add another problem to the mix, the dungeons are either completely uninteractive or have only the simplest of puzzles ("go here, hit a switch"), leaving players to spend almost the entire game sitting there mindlessly drooling at the screen while watching their automated party hack at monsters on their own.

The license system is a pretty good idea, too. Killing monsters gets you license points that you can spend on a board, allowing you to equip new items or use new skills. The license board allows you to customize your characters as you please, letting you choose who gets to learn the magic, who gets to wield what kind of weapon, and so on. Unfortunately, it's the only sort of customization you're ever going to see in the game, and quite frankly "equip a sword instead of a dagger" isn't very interesting as far as customization goes. And license board squares tend to either be amazingly useful or completely useless, without much space in-between, so choosing skills isn't a tough decision (and you can learn the entire board in the long run, if for some reason you want all of the licenses). I'd like to know how many people found use in the skill that increased damage with bare-handed attacks.

So if the Gambit system and License system are good, why is this game so painful to play? Because it's unrewarding. Sure, you CAN go around mindlessly leveling for hours and hours, but what's your reward? A lot of nothing. Even the hardest-to-reach treasure chests in the backs of optional dungeons will probably contain only a Potion or a small amount of Gil (the game's currency). You can hunt down optional Espers to summon in combat, but why would you want to do so when they're far weaker than any normal combat party? Even a bit of interesting dialogue or character-developing piece of background information would be an acceptable reward, but expect none of that. No matter how long you play or how much you do, your efforts will go unrewarded.

The game is so in love with its Gambit system that all there is to do in the game is fight, fight, fight. There are plenty of optional special battles (Marks, which can be hunted for rewards) that are good for a challenge, but with such poor rewards, there isn't much of a reason to go after them. While some of the challenges come in the form of a good, tough fight, many of them are just plain irritating. An example of this is having to wait for the weather to turn into a specific condition for the monster to appear. but the weather only changes after a certain number of real-life hours have passed. They were aiming for realism, but caused frustration.

Another nudge towards realism comes in the fact that monsters do not drop Gil. They drop items that can be exchanged for Gil. If you sell certain items, you can purchase special items in Bazaar shops. This would be a great idea for item creation if they'd put a little more thought into it. You can never view a list of items you've previously sold to the Bazaar, leaving you wondering if you've sold enough of item X to create a weapon Y. You never get recipes or hints as to what you need to make something good, either. And even if you had the patience to strengthen your party enough to take down all of the optional bosses to get their special loot to make special Bazaar items, the rewards don't feel very... rewarding. After you do all of that work to finally make a special weapon (with an invisible recipe), go do some research online (I say "look it up online" because the game gives absolutely no hints toward it) to find out where the REAL strongest weapon in the game is. It's hard to not feel like you're being mocked by Square-Enix once you find out that bit of information.

Replay Value: 0/10

Frankly, I'd rather leap into oncoming traffic than play this game a second time. One 100-hour round of boring dungeon crawling is plenty for me, thanks. There's no New Game+ option, either. Beat it once, and that's it. If you missed something in your first game, just go back and do it in your first game -- the entire world is at your fingertips, if you choose to explore it. Nothing in the game is worth a second look.

Overall Impressions

I'm impressed that a company was able to create a game that stretches for over 60 hours but has nothing memorable, exciting, or thoughtful to accomplish in those 60+ hours. The game's only memorable scene is one of mockery toward Vaan's voice.

So in the end, the player is left with a horrible story, innovative-yet-still-boring gameplay, and dull music, cleverly buried under a pile of shiny graphics and hype so high that it efficiently hides the trash underneath. The game's potential was so high and all of the right ingredients for a great game are here, but the game fails at keeping the player interested and motivated to continue its seemingly-endless rounds of dungeon crawling.

2006 was a year full of great games and amazing RPGs, but this game falls into neither category. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/07