Games: Square Enix - Final Fantasy XII

Square Enix
Final Fantasy XII
[Role-Playing Game]

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series is, arguably, the reason Sony has managed to maintain its lead in the console market all these years. While Nintendo’s steady demise was instigated by a mixture of self-inflicted design flaws (cartridges instead of CDs, that controller) and catalysed by a weak selection of killer titles (Zelda, Mario, Goldeneye and…um…a Resident Evil remake), Microsoft’s Xbox has earned itself a considerable fan base. And with the Playstation’s increasingly reliable Grand Theft Auto series defecting, it looked at one point as though Gates and friends were going to take the lead.

Alas it was not to be, however, and it appears the reason many have resisted the urge to invest in a 360, disk scratching issues notwithstanding, is the wait for the much-anticipated twelfth installment. Just to put the series’ popularity in perspective, Final Fantasy X sold five million copies (making it one of the twenty best selling video games of all time), and was recently voted the Japanese public’s favourite game of all time in Famitsu. Even the game’s short, rushed, confused and nonsensical semi-sequel, Final Fantasy X-2, managed to shift three million units worldwide. Now that’s what I call market influence.

And thus we come to the inevitable question – has the five year wait been worth it? In short, yes. All the main Final Fantasy titles come with hours of game time and tons of side quests, making them, if nothing else, excellent value for money.

However, one of the main issues I had with FFX was a worryingly Kojima-esque trend to make the game as much like a movie as possible. Cutscenes positively littered the first ten hours, suffocating any sense of momentum and introducing us to some of the most unlikable characters yet seen in the series. Thankfully, the whole experience lasted in excess of 150 hours, making the initial slog forgivable in the context of an (eventually) well-realised, pleasantly convoluted story, the series’ best combat system and an obscene amount of extras.

Despite the aforementioned strengths, though, it was all a bit too serious for my liking. Sure, there were mini-games aplenty, but accompanying them was a distinct lack of the quirky Asian humour fans have come to love. Like FF8, it was all a bit too whiny and self-important, crucially forgetting that, in a nutshell, it was still a traditional RPG where players loot villages, kill dragons, cast spells and adventure in tightly-structured manner.

Thankfully, the team at Square Enix appears to have acknowledged the series’ limitations and opted for a much more light-hearted approach in FFXII, the last of the series to be produced for the current ‘generation’. It could be the race of bunny girls, the tigers with Indian accents or the alligators hailing straight from the streets of Kingston (or even an interesting combination of all three), but the game’s wackiness is sure to please even the most hard-nosed of gamers.

Instead of the (admittedly compelling) life and death musing from the last game, the plot has been toned down somewhat and is, to put it mildly, extremely basic. And this is surely a good thing, given the more free-roaming nature of the game. Fortunately, that doesn’t mean another urban crime-’em-up, though, just that the game takes place in a world which is fully traversable. A happy medium has been struck between the fully open-ended world maps of the earlier games and FFX’s disjointed, menu-accessed locations and, while this does mean the player can potentially wander into level sixty monsters in the first hour of play, it’s a risk worth taking when recalling the horribly claustrophobic kingdom of Spira.

One obvious downside of the new approach is that, at times, the story’s grip on the player can tend to loosen. For instance, the player can partake in a number of optional monster hunts that, if attempted immediately, provide a satisfying challenge. These hunts can take up to an hour of game time to complete and, considering that up to five may become available at once, some involve puzzle solving and a handful are punishingly difficult, it’s easy to see how Vaan’s tale can become lost in the wilderness. That said, the plot is essentially this: an evil man is doing something evil that will enable him to rule world with an evil hand and must be stopped because he’s evil, so it’s pretty easy to get back on board after some voluntary questing.

The new combat system, taking place in real-time without a transition between exploring and battle modes, has attracted much attention, but it really isn't that much of an improvement. Instead of the more tactical and lengthy battles veterans have become accustomed to, battles mostly take the form of a three-pronged charge and lots of sword swinging (handled automatically by the 'gambit' system). You might get the odd bit of magick cast here and there, but why bother when you can defeat most enemies in half the time with simple physical attacks and the occasional cure spell?

Boss battles are notably poor, especially with the bigger foes; for the length of some fights, the restricting over-the-shoulder camera perspective shows two of our heroes chipping away at a pair of feet while someone off-screen is getting slowly beaten to death. Also, the inclusion of 'quickenings' – super special combo attacks that can annihilate some bosses in a single hit – is also extremely questionable.

And forgive me if this sounds a little picky, but is there actually a difference between wandering around an area fighting random battles and exploring a dungeon fighting battles against randomly placed enemies? Newcomers to the series (or console RPG gaming in general) often bemoan the random battle culture, and the developers have clearly listened to this voice, opting for a system which is aesthetically modern and highly simplified, but whose bare bones are essentially unchanged. While this could have led to them pleasing both sets of fans, I fear it has the potential to backfire and satisfy no-one.

Putting all the criticism in perspective, however, it would be wrong to suggest that FFXII is one to avoid. It is suitably epic, charmingly quirky, stuffed with content, polished to perfection and, for the first time in a long time, has some highly memorable characters and great dialogue. Even the noticeable flaws and abrupt ending to the story fail to prevent it from being a quality title, though it's far from the masterpiece that some will inevitably claim it is. In a similar vein to FFIX's role before FFX, FFXII is clearly acting as a stopgap before the star-spangled next-gen onslaught of FFXIII, but it's no doubt one that's sure to rake in the cash.

In a nutshell, FFXII is well worth a purchase. Well, unless you're on a tight budget, in which case buy Dragon Quest instead. 80