It has been a long time since I’ve played Final Fantasy Advance on the Gameboy Advance, so I didn’t immediately recognize the setting. FFXII, in short, is kind of / sort of like mashing Final Fantasy Online with FFA and making a single player game out of it.

In fact, it’s a lot like that.

Battles are handled by pressing “X” on the controller and choosing your target from a list of critters that are near you. Selecting a target will cause a blue line to quickly draw in an arch from your character to the target. You know which critter it is that you’re targetting by the ring that appears around it as you place the finger pointer next to it in the list.

The list appears as so:

Wolf A
Wolf B
Wolf C
… etc.

So the line and ring are very helpful in knowing what it is that you’re actually attacking.

There are also “gambits” that one can setup. These “gambits” allow you to tell a character, “If an ally’s health is equal to or less than 50%, then cast Cure on them”. Unfortunately, gambits are things that you must purchase and the selection that you start with is very basic. However, they become very complicated and will allow you to tell your party members to react to a target that is under any specific status effect, or at a certain HP range, or MP range, or so on.

Gambits execute in the order that you have them arranged (you begin with only two gambit slots, but can gain more via the “license board”). So you will need to be careful to put your healing first, for example, so that the character does not always attack while ignoring the gambit instructing them to heal.

The gambit system, then, effectively allows you to control your party members without the need to physically control them. You can, however, take control of any active party member at any time by using the “+” shaped direction pad on the controller.

Parties are limited to three characters at a time, but you can press the triangle button to bring up the main menu screen and quickly swap in other characters as you see fit. This is not as streamlined as the FF-X system was, but it works nonetheless. Also - and quite thankfully - you do not automatically go to “Game Over” if the three in your party are defeated. Instead, if you have any characters in reserve, you’ll automatically be prompted to swap out the three defeated characters with at least one character that is still alive and kicking. Of course, said character is plopped immediately into the action that killed off the others, but this system actually did save my game earlier today.

Guests will also occasionally join your party. They exist in addition to the usual three character limit, thus raising your party to four characters at one time. However, you have absolutely no control over the “guests”. Not via gambits or any other means. You also can not access their equipped items.

The weapons in Final Fantasy XII are taken right out of the FF-A. There are cross bows, guns, swords, and so on. This allows you to have at least one ranged character, but of course there is no guarantee that they won’t gain aggro.

Note: You can use a gambit to instruct a character to cast any specific black magicka at your target (or any target within range) rather than using a ranged weapon. Once they are out of MP they will then begin using gambit #2, which could instruct them to attack using their typical ranged weapon (or use an ether, or whatever).

Moving from the battle system and on to random rambling points…

At its worse so far, the voice acting in the game is “not bad”, and there are some moments when they play their characters exceptionally well. I’ve been particularly impressed with “Lamont”’s acting, who’s only recently been introduced in my game. It’s no KOTOR mind you, but it’s planetary leaps & bounds beyond FF-X.

Boss battles all seem to follow the same formula. The boss will do its regular attacks, then a very flashy animation will play where it uses its strongest attack on your group, and it will then go back to its regular attack. Pretty basic.

Sadly, in all cases - both boss battles and regular battles - the Final Fantasy victory music seems to be a thing of the past. Only after the first boss battle (which effectively serves to introduce you to boss battles) did even a hint of the FF victory music play, and even then it was only a hint.

Speaking of music, the music in general is “alright”. I do have a couple of notable complaints however:

One level in particular, the name of which I forget, had “music” that regularly used an extremely high pitched sound. It was so bad that after a couple of minutes (at most) I turned the volume down to just a couple of bars, but even at such a low volume level it was still giving me a headache. This is no exaggeration. The sound was so high pitched that it was physically giving me a headache, and it wasn’t long before I was playing through the entire level with the TV effectively muted. Yikes.

Another area has music that seems to end in a victory sound of some sort, though it’s not anything like the traditional Final Fantasy victory music. This is more of a generic “hurray / congrats!” roll. Unfortunately the music loops, and this results in the victory-esque segment playing over and over. It actually becomes somewhat embarrassing as nothing at all important is happening.

I’m not saying that it’s all bad. Not at all. The rest of the music certainly passes itself off well enough, though I haven’t yet heard anything that I would want to put on my playlist for regular listening.

There have been no especially touching cut scenes at this point in my game and I have not yet heard a hint of a theme song for Final Fantasy XII. Typically in a Final Fantasy game, such as in FF-VIII with “Eyes On Me”, they’ll play a musical version of the theme song at various points or during important moments of the story. This has yet to happen for me in FF-XII.

The game itself isn’t bad at all so far. It’s fun, the voice acting can be quite good at times (and never reaches a level of “bad” in my opinion), and it’s definitely an interesting break from the usual Final Fantasy formula.

This post is being written right before I head to sleep and I’m sure that it’ll have typos and grammatical errors. I’ll try to edit this tomorrow after I get back from work.

It’s time for me to hit the hay. Good night!
~Steph

edit: All Final Fantasy XII posts can now be accessed from their own sub-category located at http://steph.shadowsinmotion.com/category/games/ff-xii/.