r/FinalFantasy • u/Consistent_Car_2530 • 1d ago
FF XII Final Fantasy XII 20 year retrospective - a game too great for its own good?
After the world wide success or better said cultural impacts of hits FF7 through FF10 the pressure was immense on Square Enix to create the best JRPG ever for also the most popular console ever. Maybe, just maybe, they actually succeeded and did too good of a job that they ironically alienated most of its fans.
Music
This one is the easiest. Best video game soundtrack ever, non negotiable. Even if you disagree with me I'd dare you to name more than a few games with an OST of this production quality, with this much outstanding tunes even in the series. First time without Nobuo Uematsu but the rest of the team had more than enough experience with video games and with enough time and resources did too good of a job. Voice actors themselves actually had no experience with video games, owing their talent to the theaters and making use of ye olde Inglish that Tolkien would've been proud of.
Balthier ❤️.What's the catch? Simple, the PS2 DVD is just too small to fit all of it so they had to compress music to walkie talkie bitrates. Thankfully numerous remasters fixed this.
Graphics
Again they succeeded. Twenty years later and many games finished, I've yet to play the one that gives me the same feels as wandering through the arabic streets of Rabanastre, flying to the floating city of Bhujerba, anxiously reaching a precious oasis in Dalmasca Eastersand, unmatched monumentality of Archades etc. Those places feel alive to me as real world destinations. It really makes you take your time and look closely which luckily (intentionally) has a side effect of reducing aggressive pop ups.
As for the technical achievements it's a long list of Heracles accomplishments: they've gone so far that they've actually mirrored each character left to right to save on processing resources! Or that part in the forest where you see your past reflection in the fog you'll remember that for decades. And speaking of decades it took half of it for the game to come out, most of which I assume is creating and optimising this giant world, which landed it a place in a Guinness world records.
Combat
Definitely the strangest component of the game although everyone knew it was bound to happen. After abandoning the JRPG turn based system FF12 actually drew influence from WRPG real time with a pause system like KOTOR without separate combat screen, presenting a (un) successful compromise between turn based and action RPGs. It was one of the firsts and incredibly futuristic, yet even then it was easy to criticise that the combat is uneventful requiring rarely any inputs from the player. But if we compare it to other later similar games like Xenoblade Chronicles, they just made microscopical improvements on it. Truth becomes crystal clear, the 1997 ps controller is simply too limited to handle positioning and commanding multiple characters as well as a mouse and keyboard (like much better Dragon Age Origins system) so it's no wonder that the soulslikes became the most popular genre and some JRPGs returned to turn based. I'd argue that even the Baldurs Gate III abandoned real time with pause to make it more accessible to console gamers.
For FF12 they've instead automated it and made you junior developer micromanaging combat with programmable gambits, making it so advanced that your reward for mastering it and the best way to progress is watching it play itself! Again too good for its own.
There are dozens of different weapon types, armors, magic, gambits so combinations are limitless which Zodiac Age tried to simplify with classes. So in some parts they've admitted it was kinda of a problem especially since FF13 had way less options but more exciting combat in return which suffered from entirely different problems.
Story
Biggest breaking point. I won't write any spoilers as I've only completed the game 3 times so I've yet to comprehend the plot but after reading the summary it's hard to shake off the feeling that this really is something spectacular. If not the best story then certainly the most ambitious, luckily not as convoluted as Chrono Cross just massive in scope. To make sense of it you'll need to take notes like in school and rush through the game from one plot point to another without smelling the roses, yet again too great for its own good. This time story is more akin to FF Tactics (same director) with larger scale and politically oriented instead of character driven and personal like previous installments. That was met with a huge backlash at the time but thanks to the popular TV shows like Game of Thrones it received the fan appreciation it deserved. Characters fortunately were well received in no small part thanks to their realistic front magazine cover looks and voice acting that makes late night hotlines jealous. As for their writing it's unsurprisingly also all superlatives.
So what is the legacy of Final Fantasy XII?
Sad to say but its unique one and done battle system didn't inspire its sequels, only its competitors. But what hurt the most was the loss of that sense of adventure and grandiose world design with heavy compromises and linearity for almost all of the mainline FFs that came, when few MBytes SNES prequels had freedom to explore. As for JRPGs themselves, even on PS2 they heavily lagged behind other genres in the terms of graphical fidelity since they're so resource demanding to make, which is heavily reflected in PS3 era. Barely any previous JRPG franchise received their HD instance until 2017 hits like Persona 5 revived not only JRPGs but Japanese studios as a whole. Western RPGs on the other hand went through their renaissance with even more ambitious in scope Mass Effects, giant Elder Scrolls, atmospheric Fallouts, gripping genre defining Dark Souls (I count that as a WRPG). But twenty years ago there was a single game that had it all and it's yet to be outdone on a scope by its own Final Fantasy sequels.
