"Square Enix, you've outdone yourself again!"

Once a year, there appears a game that stands out in a genre, a game that takes what defines that genre and not only uses it well, but adds many new elements to it and improves for future games to come. The game that does that this year, and is called Final Fantasy XII.

Every time that a Final Fantasy game comes out, I instantly start proclaiming that Square Enix is the "master of the universe" and that the gameplay,graphics, story or anything else simply cannot be improved up in any other game made. Surprisingly enough, I've gotten into the same trend with Final Fantasy XII, but you will not be surprised to hear that my claims are not unfounded.

The Graphics 10/10

The graphical quality of Final Fantasy XII is superb, and by superb I mean better than anything else on the system, as the old Playstation 2 is being used to nearly it's fullest potential. To bring the graphical system in view, allow me to simply say that the regular cutscenes of Final Fantasy XII are as good ( if not better) that the FMVs in Final Fantasy 7. The environment designs are also nicely done, showing many minor details that would not have been possible earlier on in the series life.

The characters models are extremely well-detailed, showing full finger motion and facial expressions as well as making the game characters look like they are actually realistic instead of lego block action figures (I'll stop comparing to FFVII now).

The places as I said before are all great to look at and are very expansive as well. And that just turns out to be the biggest problem that I had with the game, the expansiveness. The first town that you start out in, Rabanastre, is HUGE. And this is coming from the guy who thought that Balamb Garden was big in Final Fantasy 8. Now while the fun of this does go on for a while, you can walk around, visit shops around the whole place and talk to many townspeople the problem remains- I can run through my neighboorhood in the time it takes me to walk through Rabanastre and use the map to identify my location.

The problem with the towns is slightly assuaged by having a small mini-map in the right hand upper corner of the screen that allows you to see which doors are shops, where the crystals are and provide you with an small view of the area that you are currently in. If you have ever played any Metal Gear Solid game (and you should) the mini- map is similar to that game's radar map .

The enemy and bosses are very nice to look at but the enemies suffer from the problem that it just seems that SE reused the same pallates for some of the enemies and simply changed their color to suit the situation. For example? You are in a desert, the color of the wolf is tan, snow wolfs are white and forest wolfs are darker , it is not a huge thing but it shows a slight bit of laziness on Square Enix's part in my opinion.

So while on the whole there are a few minor problems with the graphics of the game, the pluses overshadow the minuses so much that the cons barely even count anymore, hence the ten out of ten.

Gameplay 10/10

The Final Fantasy series is known for having random battles in the games for the most part , so what do you get when you change that aspect of the game? Something even better. In Final Fantasy XII Square Enix decided to go with an MMO-RPG style gameplay setting, only with a single player. While MMO and single player might sound like two very contradictory things, Square Enix manages to combine them, how you ask? Well here's how:

Firstly, random battles are a thing of the past. Like some other RPGs such as Tales of Symphonia, you can see the enemy monsters before you engage them in combat . But Final Fantasy XII does even more, unlike other games where you go to a fixed battle arena, the place where you encounter the monster IS the arena. Every part of the environment you were in contributes to the battle, with up to 4 party members fighting the enemy monster(s) at the same time.

So now you ask, well , do I have to control the movements of the characters AND what they do? "I'm a gamer, not a supercomputer". We know you aren't, and Square Enix knows that as well, so Square has introduced a "Gambits" system into their game to make it very easy for you to fight battles. In fact, if you configure the gambits corrects, you can make it so that you don't even have to fight the battles yourself (though that ruins the point of the game).

The gambits, put plainly, are the specified character's artificial intelligence, or AI for short. You tell the characters what actions to do and what order to do them in. For example, let's say you want a character to be a specified healer, so you go to their gambits menu and you turn on the first option, and there you select the target (Allies with HP less than 50% let' say) and then you select the move (Cure or Curaga in this case). And then you place it to first priority. And if all goes as planned and you actually turn the character gambits on( I forgot about this the first few times) your character will the cast Cure on any ally whose HP goes below 50% of their max, pretty nifty eh?

But now comes another point, how do you get those spells cure or fire or water or thunder, how do you get skills? Are they for jobs only like in FFIII,V or X-2? Do you buy it? Obtained naturally as you level up? Sphere grid? Running out of ideas? Well then I'll tell you. You use a license board to obtain these skills. After a battle, you gain exp and LP, after a while you accumulate these LPs and have enough to purchase special abilities or the ability to use special weapons . That's it? Wow easy huh? Nope, you also have to purchase the ability or weapon from a shop AND the License board before you can use it, which takes a while but it worth it.

And now we get to the discussion of how you actually get money in Final Fantasy XII , the answer is simple. Loot. Monsters rarely have any gil anymore to just give to you when you kill them, so instead they give you loot which are pieces of junk that nobody needs that merchants will buy from you at huge prices if you have enough of the loot. You also unlock bazaar items by selling the loot, which is just sets of items or weapons at discount prices, which is nice of course.

You can also obtain money by performing hunts, which are like the FFXII version of Final Fantasy Tactics missions, not much there except go out and kill monsters, come back and get gil and teleport stone.

Teleport stones can warp you in between orange crystals , which are quite rare and can be used to save , same as blue crystals. Like FFX, save points also fully replenish your HP,MP,heal allies, cure status conditions, and do so many things you'd wonder why the denizens of the realm don't go around holding one in their backpacks the whole day.

So the gameplay has so many faces, that it just has to get a ten out of ten from me.

Story 9/10

I'm not going to go into ANY detail for the story. Why? Because I'd ruin it. I'll just tell you what you can learn from the back of the box. The Archadian empire decides to flex it's biceps and go around conquering places, one of these being Dalmasca, the king of dalmasca die, the princess dies, the main character's brother dies, and after all that you go to Rabanastre as Vaan and the story starts from there. I can also tell that it's very political, but no more!

Sound 9/10

Movie quality, to say the least. Each place has it's own music, and it's all good and fitting for the game. While the music doesn't have the feel of say FFX or earlier games in the series, it gets the job done, which is better than most of the games out there anyways. The voice acting is cood, good lip-synching as well, compression takes away so quality, but it's not noticable unless you look at it.

Controls 10/10

I'm no judge of controls, but you don't get any cramps while playing this game, and that's always a good thing right? You can play in the dark and you'll know where all the buttons are after and hour of playing in the light first.

Replayability 8/10

Dude, it's an RPG, 'nuff said.

Well now my hands are cramping up so I'll just list the pros and cons again

Pros
+Good Story
+Great graphics
+Cool characters
+Many things to do

-Some Difficulty
- Voice quality

9/10 Not an average for Final Fantasy XII.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/07