Final Fantasy XII, Five Years Later

Near the end of October 2006, I did something both unprecedented and unrepeated: I took a paid day off of work for the launch of a video game. The game in question was none other than the last PS2 blockbuster game, Final Fantasy XII.

And in all fairness, I must say that was one of the most worthwhile days off I took. Final Fantasy XII ranks as one of my favorite games of all time. Among Final Fantasy games, it ranks second only to FFVII on the PS1 as my favorite, and the only PS2 game that compares with it as a prize of that system's venerable library is Dragon Quest VIII - whose included demo of FFXII was of course the first time I had hands-on time with this great game.

The first time I knew of FFXII's existence was in EGM's preview of FFX in the summer of 2001. FFXII was mentioned only briefly, being in pre-production only at that time, but its mention drew my eye instantly: it was said to be a much darker FF game than FFX, and it was being directed by none other than Yasumi Matsuno and Hiroyuki Ito, whose Final Fantasy Tactics was one of the best PS1 games ever made and the only FF spin-off regularly included in series canon. Ito was also the creator of the Final Fantasy Active Time Battle System and co-directed FFVI with Yoshinori Kitase. Hitoshi Sakimoto, composer of the Tactics soundtrack, did FFXII's music.

FFXII's troubled production cycle was legendary. FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi was forced out of Square after it merged with Enix due to the horrific losses Square sustained from the ill-advised theatrical release FF: The Spirits Within, a pet project of Sakaguchi's that had cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. In the last year of FFXII's production, Matsuno abruptly disappeared, and it was much later before it was disclosed he had left Square Enix for health reasons, with rumor having it that the stresses of FFXII's protracted development had caused him to have a nervous breakdown. Akitoshi Kawazu, director of Final Fantasy II and the SaGa games, was put in charge of finishing FFXII. The FFXII demo released with the US release of Dragon Quest VIII did not make the best impression, either.

In the end, all the concerns over FFXII's production came to naught.

The first thing I noticed when I booted up my copy of FFXII (bought in the collectors' edition with a collectors' edition strategy guide offered to people picking up pre-orders) was that this was a darker, more serious game than FFX, as promised. Already it was living up to the hoped-for legacy of Tactics. The game started out right in the thick of things with King Raminas' (supposed) betrayal and assassination at the hands of Basch, as witnessed through the eyes of Reks, Vaan's older brother, which served as a tutorial.

Secondly, this was one beautiful game. FFX, my first PS2 game, had presented a detailed world of bright colors and expressive character models, albeit one presented only at pre-set camera angles, and games like Okami and Dragon Quest VIII were better still. FFXII, featuring the detail of FFX in a fully free-roaming world drawn to spectacular scale, blew them all away. It even looked better than all but a handful of the 360's first-generation offerings (the PS3 hadn't been released yet, but its first few games didn't look this good, either). The world was darker than the light, frothy FFX, but it was still very colorful, and the city of Rabanastre soared majestically into the heavens. The characters had better expressiveness and fewer awkward movements than FFX, which was to be expected given the years between the two games' releases.

Finally, FFXII was tough as nails. For the first time since FF5, regular enemies were dangerous and could overwhelm your party. However, to balance this off, FFXII not onli allowed you to customize your playable characters to a large degree with the License Board system, but Square Enix also introduced the Gambit System. Around the time FFXII came out, the shift to RPG battle systems with heavier emphasis on action increasingly meant that you could only have direct control of your "main" character, with other characters controlled by abysmal AI, resulting in healers throwing themselves into the thick of heavy boss fights (Tales games suffer badly from this) or NPC in games like Fallout 3/New Vegas which featured NPC permadeath having piss-poor life spans and being useless unless they were thoroughly OPd. FFXII's gambit system allowed you to give very specific directives to AI-controlled characters for various situations, and gambits could even be arranged so that you could produce some complex macros for your characters. This resulted in FFXII being one of the few games with "auto-battling" that I really enjoyed, although others complained that gambits made it so you could run the game on auto-pilot.

I liked FFXII's main cast of characters, but apparently I'm a rarity. FFXII's main characters were criticized simultaneously by long-time FF fans for being too bland or generic, and by the KOTOR/Oblivion crowd for being yet another cast of "emo" RPG characters. At least people found some common ground, right? Now it's true that Vaan was designed to appeal more to the traditional teen/young adult FF fan as opposed to the original main character, Basch, who was seen as an "old man." But Vaan was also not prone to the same kind of histrionics as Tidus was, either, and he wasn't intrusive at all. Balthier was always entertaining, ready with a sarcastic quip or with some insiders' information of the enemy, since his dad was one of them. Basch, the game's originally planned main character, was for that matter a well-drawn, likeable hero. In Princess Ashe, you could see the temptation (egged on by the Occuria) for her to just use the magical relics of her ancestor, the Dynast-King Raithwall, to do to Archades what they did to Nabradia (i.e. nuke the place). The main characters were designed to be unobtrusive to the main narrative, all told. The villains, particularly Vayne, and Dr. Cid, were well-drawn. Vayne was probably a nice enough guy at one time, but once his own dad told him to kill his own brothers, he decided he liked the power-trip and just continued on accordingly. Dr. Cid, the first Cid to be a bad guy, and the father of Balthier, was probably my favorite Cid in the series. They're a little like what Emperor Gestahl and Kefka would have been like if Kefka had gotten himself killed before having a chance to off the Emperor.

Plus, if you needed a break from the main narrative, there was a nearly equal amount of side-quests to do, and given how long the main narrative was, that was an impressive feat in itself. The quests started off as simple monster hunts, a nod to the growing popularity, of, well, monster hunting RPGs, but some of them would flesh out the world, and a lot of them required a bit of puzzle-solving to complete. There were eight Espers to find beyond the ones given to you at their set points in the main quest. And for the true masochists, completing all these hunts would give you a crack at the most ridiculously powerful enemy in a series known for over-powered optional bosses, a super boss with over 50 MILLION HP!

All told, I logged in 8 hours the day I got FFXII, and my save file eventually topped out at 100+ hours, with a good chunk of the side-quests still left to do. FFXII kept me busy for the next three months, until I got the Gamecube version of Twilight Princess as a birthday gift. In a year of great releases (which also included Okami as well as TP), it was among the best. No game released since then has held my attention quite as thoroughly as FFXII. I'd also like to say it was the last great PS2 game, although Persona 4 and Sakura Wars, both released several years later, would probably beg to differ. But I will say that FFXII was one of the most memorable gaming experiences of my life. Maybe I'll celebrate its fifth anniversary by starting a new game.

It's a pity Yasumi Matsuno isn't still with Square Enix full-time.