Final Fantasy XII
(PS2)
4 out of 5

What’s good?
• The level grinding is actually fun
• Ends very strongly
• Decent cast and one stellar character, the next Square-Enix shooter should be titled “Balither May Cry”

What’s bad?
• Slow pacing and/or lack of the normal huge narrative we’re used to from the series
• License board is an interesting way to level up a character but needlessly tedious in spots
• Featured pop song feels tacked on, not like the pop theme in Final Fantasy 8.

So after a long long wait we finally got to play Final Fantasy 12 and by and large it was everything we could have hoped for. The new battle system was perfectly fine and fun, unlike the detractors told us it would be. The cast was decently interesting and competently voiced for the most part. The visuals and production values were top notch as usual. So what’s the problem? As with most things worth writing about the devil’s in the details, as a sum of all its parts Final Fantasy 12 is, sadly, not a masterpiece. It’s more on par with numbers 9 and 10. This is to say that it is still a very good game. But it just doesn’t have that sparkling extra something to it.

FF 12 has a massive pedigree to live up to. Not only is it the twelfth installment in a long-running, best-selling, game-of-the-year-winning series, but also it is the follow up work from the man who brought us Final Fantasy Tactics (which many people think is the best thing ever made with the Final Fantasy name attached, myself included, maybe, depending on my mood that day) and Vagrant Story (which has a cult following and received a rare, perfect score from the Japanese magazine authority Famitsu.) Unfortunately as stated above, despite this pedigree, FF 12 is not a masterpiece.

Since the game itself isn’t a masterpiece what history will probably remember of FF 12 is the behind-the-scenes intrigue. Development of FF 12 took a much longer time than usual. And halfway through Yasumi Matsuno, the aforementioned auteur behind Tactics and Vagrant Story, had to bow out of the Producer/Director role due to “health reasons”. Then the reports started coming out that the whole development had to be over-hauled. And so after many months of extended development we’re left to wonder what the game would have been had Matsuno had his druthers, much as we’re left to wonder what The Magnificent Ambersons would look like had Wells had final cut authority. Given Matsuno’s track record I would have to think that perhaps his initial vision would have been better than what was finally released. All we can do is wait and see what Matsuno comes out with next (reportedly with other Square-Enix expatriates at Mistwalker.)