Last week I finally beat FFXII: The Zodiac Age (PS4 version). I'm pretty bad at writing long pieces unlike many of you, but I still want to share a little bit about my experience playing through it (
WARNING: Spoilers all over the place):
My previous experience with FFXII: I bought the game for ps2 a looooooong time ago but never gave it a chance. During the previous generation remasters of so many games of the ps2 era came out so I thought that eventually we would get a remaster of FFXII, I wasn't wrong but it came out a generation later. Now, I'm not a big fan of Final Fantasy, I've said it several times on the Discord server, the one Final Fantasy I really dig is FF Tactics and its spin offs and FFXII sharing the same world with Tactics was what made me give it a chance. My first contact with XII was the demo that came with Dragon Quest VIII though, and at the time I really hated the battle system: it wasn't a turn based game nor an action RPG and I didn't have any patience for games that have this "Real Time With Pause" battle systems. That was what? more than 10 years ago? Since then many things have changed: I played Contact and Xenoblade and became more tolerant with that kind of battle systems.
The setting: Ivalice is a place that kind of captivates my mind, walking around Rabanastre and Archades and so many places never got old, the cities in this game are amazingly well crafted with so many NPCs doing simple tasks that make the places looks so busy and vivid. More than once I got lost in thought fantasizing about how would it be like to live in Rabanastre. As for the political setting and the struggles from the people of Dalmasca, that's probably my favourite part of the game: when you get to explore Rabanastre and listen to its citizens complain about the occupation and how all of them were stripped from their rights to live in their own houses, when you see that so many kids survive stealing money from tourists and soldiers, when you get to witness the racism from some humes towards other races, etc. all of that adds to the authenticity of Ivalice, even if some of the examples I'm giving are actually terrible things. As for the different areas of Ivalice: most of them were mysterious and contributed to make the whole game a joy to explore... except when I deviated a bit and found monsters 20 levels higher than my party.
The party: this is an aspect of the game that puzzles me, half of the characters are great while half of them are not. Some of them were well developed, most of them not; most of the races that inhabit Ivalice don't have representation in the party while the one that does just seem to be there to remind us of how exotic Ivalice is. Ashe and Balthier are the best developed characters of the whole party and surprise surprise, they are the best in general because of it. The whole game is Ashe's story, she is "the chosen one" by the Occurians too and yet she's not the main character... Balthier is that character that comes from the evil side and helps the good guys to correct the wrongs of his people, he's interesting, suave, charming and he's always there to save the day... for a moment I thought that besides his introduction they wouldn't develop his story further either (since the rest of the characters were pretty much like that) but I'm glad I was wrong. Fran and Vaan were okay, as I said Fran was a constant reminder that Ivalice is more than humes doing the things that humans do, but other than her very brief story arc she's mostly just there; in the other hand Vaan, the protagonist of this story, was supposed to be the one that introduced us to the world, except that the game doesn't do anything interesting with him either: he has a believable backstory and a somehow well defined personality but like Fran he's just there doing nothing interesting (he even says he doesn't even know what to do with himself despite the fact that he's helping the ones that can change both literally and figuratively his limited world) An example of how bad the game handles Vaan: You get to play as his brother during the tutorial of the game, about 30 minutes later he's dead and you get to control Vaan, a few hours later you get thrown into a pit and there you meet the man that killed your brother and betrayed the whole Kingdom, when he gets his chance to get revenge Balthier tells him to shut up (lmao), then a few hours later he fucking defends that character from Ashe's accusations without having a believable reason to do so... it's pretty underwhelming to say the least. Then we have Penelo and Basch: Penelo is nothing and Basch is terrible. I'm actually surprised about Basch since he seems to be pretty popular in some corners of the internet but the "evil twin" story is so ridiculous. The only thing I liked about Basch was the ending scene, it fits perfectly despite the fact that I disliked the character.
Other characters: I liked Vayne and how likeable he is at the very beginning, he's a good politician as well (in the sense that he knows how to play everyone) and a better conspirator; I feel that he as a final boss as
Opa-Pa said is a role that the dev team came up with because they didn't know what to do for the final boss. I still believe that Larsa could've been a party member if you made him the amalgamation of three characters: Vaan + Penelo + Larsa himself in just one character, Larsa is much more important to the story than most characters in our party. Gabranth is underdeveloped too to the surprise of no one. Where are my Nu mou, Banga and Moogle party members though? I know this isn't Tactics but I would've loved to have more variety in my party, if they had given me the chance I would've played the entire game as Montblanc!!!
The Gambits and the Zodiac Job System: For some reason, I didn't feel like exploring all the areas that the game offered, I simply don't feel like doing so but I can tell you that it's not the fault of the battle system or the Zodiac Job System.
Fou-Lu mentioned once that if I set my gambits up right the game basically played itself and well... he was right. It was a pretty relaxing experience but at some point in the middle of the game my party was being trashed by regular enemies and I was starting to panic until I said to myself "why are you worrying so much? all you have to do now is fucking press X and you can make adjustments", not only that you can literally press triangle in the middle of the fight and you can adjust your Gambits. It's a brilliant system. Persona 3 would benefit a lot from a system like that for example. And the Zodiac Job system was very flexible and gives you a lot of options, and in my opinion options is what makes good games, great.
Other things that I found interesting, fun or annoying:
-The music is kind of underwhelming most of the time, sorry.
-The Star Wars parallels are all over the place: You have a "sky pirate" with a non human friend that help a princess to oppose an evil empire. Rabanastre fucking looks like a location from Episode 1; and those amazing cutscenes of ships battling each other look like something out of Star Wars. The only logical conclusion is that someone was into Star Wars when they made this game.
-The Occurians are a bunch of assholes (and the game becomes less interesting when you finally meet them)
-Balthier is awesome.
-Elementals are annoying bastards.
-Moogles are awesome in this game.
I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a lot of things but this was just a bunch of random thoughts about Final Fantasy XII.
