Game Review: FFXII

Nearly 2 years and more than 132 hours later, I've beaten Final Fantasy XII. I did *not* complete all the side quests; I got quite far in them, but I was getting bored of doing them so decided to advance the plot and next thing I knew, I was done. Well, not really - what I thought was going to be the last quest turned out to not be, it was the second-to-last, strangely. I think I'd lost track a little of the plot, or I might've known. It was refreshing that the male and female leads did not fall in love and marry and live happily ever after.

I'd say the story is a little less intriguing than my favorite, FF8, and I miss the Junctioning and GF system, but I like the Gambits a lot, takes away a lot of the micromanaging that I am not a fan of. The License system is intriguing, but it becomes moot after you've done a bunch of leveling towards the end of the game. I'm glad I didn't have to dick around with any stupid card games; the Hunts are a nice set of sidequests that net you good items and experience. There were a few Magics I never found in the whole game, and should I play it through again I will attempt to find them. Or I might just pick up from the last save I had and get the remaining Hunts and look for those Magics - the structure of the Hunts makes it so that (as far as I can tell) none of them ever become unavailable, so I don't think I "missed" any Hunts. I kept expecting some sort of mini-game of flying the Strahl, but there wasn't one. I found in the end that the best combination of character roles was a tank who also did stealing, a defensive spellcaster, and an offensive spellcaster who also did some other technics in boss battles. Losing the encounter system and being able to change weapons mid-fight was great.

If you have a short attention span, do NOT play this game. If you like RPGs where you get soooooooo many hours of gameplay for your buck, then do.