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I have such a love/hate relationship with this game. And not like in the "I love it, it hates me". I just love and hate it at the same time. Final Fantasy 12 strays away from the typical style of the series, going from a fantasy world to a political climate with a lot of technology, as well as eliminating a love story from the game. This isn't inherently bad, but only if it's done well. The story is rather reminiscent of the original Star Wars. Underground resistance trying to overthrow the evil empire that's taken over. Probably other stuff but I'm not very familiar with Star Wars. As with most of the games, things take a turn when it becomes more about whatever evil being chased and comes down to saving the entire world. In this case, the Occuria, a race of beings that basically control the world of Ivalice, gave magical gems known as nethicite to the world in order to control the world, sort of. A rogue Occuria named Venat went against them, believing the races of Ivalice should have control over their own fate. Not any religious analogies here, nope, not one. The flow of story is where I have issue. First off, you get captured, like three times, in the first half of the game. I get the point of it, but it just gets annoying. The game even tells you at certain points when you try to save, that you may not be able to escape, so you might not want to overwrite your original save. Of course, this is stupid, since you gotta keep going, but it serves up my point well. The game uses the city of Rabanastre as a central hub. You go out, do a quest, and end up back there. It feels trapping, like the game doesn't want you to explore its vast landscapes. On that note, I had issue with the major plot points. It becomes a game of "oh, we have to search for an item that can compete with the empire. Oh, well, this item, no. Ok, now, we heard about another item that can do the same". Rinse and repeat. That's not exactly how it goes, but that's how it feels. A lot of the major story points take place away from your party, in "meanwhile" scenes. And the reason for this is because:

Characters: I'm probably gonna get flak for this, but outside the main party, I had a hard time keeping up with who is who. A lot of the humans, particularly the Archadians, look and sound alike. Even worse, the judges wear all that armor, and they so sound alike, so it's really hard to tell who is who. With that said, the side characters all seem to work well. The problem is, like everything else, they didn't do a good job exploring each one. Al-Cid, for example, is the only Rozzarian (the main kingdom fighting the Archadians) you see at all. You don't even see his land. And you don't see him for more than a couple scenes. For a game all about politics and struggling in a war, it doesn't make sense to not include, you know, one of those struggling. Vayne obviously gets his time, but the only other one to get any good development was his brother Larsa. And that brings me to the main cast. From what I've read, Vaan and Penelo were not originally characters in the game. It was supposed to star Balthier and Fran, but for some reason test audiences didn't dig it. So they added a couple orphans with barely any personality. Seriously. At one point, Vaan says "I'm just along for the ride". They're not even being subtle with the fact the writers couldn't add a decent story to them. Balthier and Fran really are the only ones to get any interesting development. Basch is basically just a mindless soldier, who happens to be fighting for the good guys. Ashe's dilemma of using power for revenge is good, but the fact that she was being manipulated into it the whole time kind of kills any development she would have. Vaan wants to be a sky pirate. Great. Penelo's only use is for shippers to put her and Larsa together. Because face it, they should end up together, even if she's a sky pirate's sidekick. It doesn't help that:

License Board: What a cool concept. One thing that I really have to like in a game like this is character progression. Both in personality and actual gameplay, but mostly the gameplay. You have your usual "kill enemies, get experience, level up", and you have license points. The License Board is a big giant board with everything. Weapons, armor, accessories, magick, skills, and stat buffs, everything. You earn license points each kill, and you spend them on things here. Even if you have a specific piece of gear, you have to buy the license for it for that character before they can use it. It sounds like a major pain in the ass, but it works ok. The problem is, everyone can learn everything. In a game where the main cast are just faceless avatars, homogenizing all their skills just makes it that much worse. I love games with alternate reasons for leveling. Grandia 2 is the example I always go to. You have two types of coins you earned per fight that you spent on skills, buffs, and spells. The difference there is, each character has their own specific skills that individualize the characters. Final Fantasy 12 does not do that, and because there isn't really a thing called base stats (for each character. For example, Penelo starting with more magic), the only reason to use a particular character is because you like the way they swing a sword. And that vague segue brings me to:

Gameplay. The actual, kicking creature ass gameplay. This game took a lot of things from MMO's to use. You still have an ATB gauge, but it moves really fast, and your characters' commands are automatic, sort of. You have gambits that you set up to tell your character what to do. The top gambit takes priority over the ones below it. So you have a character with the top gambit "ally:any>raise", and below it "ally: party leader's target>attack". That character will attack the party leader's target, unless an ally dies. Then that character will switch its command to use raise on the fallen character. That's the basics. So, the good that this does is it speeds up combat considerably. The bad thing is the game gets very boring, and almost plays for you.

And I could get passed that, except for two things. First, this game requires a TON of grinding. I don't mind grinding a little bit, and usually automatically do it when I play RPG's. But this game makes sure that if you don't do a ton of it, you're gonna die. So that boring combat becomes even more boring when you do it for hours on end in the same zone, just to build up the gold you need to equip your gear. The second problem I have is more with the creatures themselves. The bosses, specifically, are all about the status effects. The positive and the negative. Your first priority in any fight, once you get it, is to dispel all their buffs. But one thing every boss likes is somehow taking away control of your characters, by applying every status effect it can. And this game isn't lenient with what you can get rid of. Most status effects will NOT have any kind of solution when you see it first. Slow is a really bad case of this. You start getting slowed WAY before you learn haste. Oh, and remedies only cure the effects that you can already cure with other items or spells. You have to unlock the ability for them to cure other effects on the license board. But bosses like Rafflesia aren't just satisfied with that, because they apply every debuff possible. Remember the gambits? You only have ten max on each character (and you have to unlock them from the license board like everything else), so there are a lot more status effects than you have room for. It becomes you having to manually control everyone anyway. And then there's another problem. See, every spell has some kind of delay before it's cast, once your ATB gauge fills up. That's fine, but when spells start going off like crazy, especially later in the game, it lags. REALLY bad. And don't even tell me "oh, they're just attacking faster than you", because that's shit. I've watched my character wait to cast a spell after everyone else has gone, even though their ATB gauge filled up first. And it's not even a slow spell. It's usually a heal spell, that gets delayed so the monsters can just off everyone before the game allows you to cast it. VERY annoying.

Every time I talk about this game, I talk about how incredibly beautiful and vast the world is. And that's partly true. The game is gorgeous. I don't play many current-gen games, so you might find it weird when I say it's the most beautiful game I've played. It's insane. But, as far as the vastness goes, meh. In some places, it became apparent that the "corridor simulation" description for Final Fantasy 13 definitely had its start here. Also, the game reuses a lot of landscapes. Not just the desert, though let's start there. Two of the largest areas in the game, nothing but desert. All of the cave/mine areas feel very similar. And you're in an airship wandering around, at least twice. But the exploration factor just isn't as great as it should be. The zones have a layout that basically keeps you going in one direction no matter what your plans are. The one thing it does do well, on the flip side of that, is let you explore more than where your next quest is. Outside of those "you may not be able to escape, save anyway?" moments that is. You can head south into the Giza Plains instead of going through the desert like you're supposed to. Though, there usually isn't much to do. Yay, another vague segue.

So, one thing each game in the series does is present you with a load of side quests, and usually includes one big one. In the case of this game, that's the hunts. You have two hunt clubs, one of which you don't access until late in the game. The first one has you read bills posted by people who are looking to have a particularly strong creature hunted down. The second just has you roam around and find em on your own. The first club generally doesn't give you insanely hard objectives to get the creature to spawn, but the nature of the second club has you needing to do certain things, and there's no way to know how outside of looking it up. These clubs provide a great deal of fun, but the problem is, the rewards don't seem to be worth the time invested. It's more about the fun of actually going out and hunting them, which, if you've played any MMORPG, you might already be familiar with the concept. Other than that, most of the optional events in the game can only be accessed at certain points in the story, and don't offer any reward or any fun like hunting down rare creatures.

There was an international version that was released not internationally that fixed some issues. Guest characters were controllable, though I don't know if that goes so far as to give them gambits. There were different license grids, and you picked one for each character to be locked into. The problem here is, the game is balanced so that each character kind of needs all the skills. So I don't know how balanced this makes the game, even though it does give them some form of individuality. New Game +, again don't know how it works. Controllable espers, just like guests. A fast forward button, similar to the one you get in New Game + in Chrono Cross. Makes you want to try in Lhusu Mines with the afk farming, to get it done twice as fast. New items and enemies, again, no idea. Some magick must be found, which is super lame. Given how treasure chests work, that's kind of bullshit. Oh yeah, treasure chests respawn in this game, but the items in them are completely random. Meaning, you can open a treasure chest at the end of the game and get 5 gil. Which I did. Oh, Quickenings. Your "limit break" ability in this game is a mist power you unlock on the license board called Quickenings. You spend all your MP in order to activate it. So when it's done, your mana is drained. The international version added it's own mist meter, so you don't lose all your MP.

Oh, one thing I forgot. Weapons. Weapons in this game have a shit ton of hidden stats that aren't mentioned anywhere in the game ever. Seriously, read all of this: finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Li… None of that is mentioned in game, at all. What makes this worse is that out of all of those weapon types, only three or so are worth a shit. Horribly unbalanced, and mostly useless weapons, fun times.

So, all in all, it looks like I hate this game. But for some reason I find myself going back to it occasionally. I played through it recently, but mainly so I could write this review. I need a better story, and I need better characters. One thing I don't need, is more moogles, because they're a whole race in this game and are awesome, if a little differently designed. KUPO!. I rate games, right? I guess it'd have to hover somewhere around 5/10. If you're a Final Fantasy traditionalist, you'll hate this game. But if you've never played the series before, you might find yourself enjoying it.