After 320 hours, 38 minutes and 7 seconds of in game play, I completed the game almost perfectly with every single boss, mark, etc. beaten except for rare games, which are weak and annoying. Every character is at level 99 using the Negalmuur Auto-Leveling trick, which would just mean that I actually only play a quarter of the playing time. After 80 hours of actually game play, all I can say is that Final Fantasy XII is over-rated and disappointing.

Despite having a good score at most game magazines and sites, I think the game has a rather poor story compared to the previous FF games. Maybe, I am more in to the romantic or tragic influenced of the previous games than the politic one. In my view, the whole story is about a group of characters, who is like traveling around, trying to beat a bad guy and that’s it. There is little development of both character and background, which make me feel that the game is very much boring and predictable.

At first, I thought FFXII was going to be like FFIX with a thief, princess and guardian. But then, what can I say, it turned out to be very different and suck. Ashe is nothing compared to Garnet from FFIX, story and background wise, even for the personality and look, I would refer Garnet over Ashe. Ashe never seem to give me a feeling that, she is the main character. Next, Vaan is just a damn kid from somewhere and he is over-powered, who has little to none development. I don’t even think that he has any key role in the story at all, very unlike any other main guys from the previous games. All other characters are alright but I couldn’t help but wondering, what the hell are they doing through out the game. It’s almost as if the only thing that I need to do is to defeat the last boss, who is Vayne to complete the game. Vayne, another character who has little development and even at the end, I think his intention evil plan was plainly lame or maybe, I just couldn’t figure out what the heck he was trying to achieve. Very poor indeed, the other main villain,  Cid, who seem to be the most interesting character of the entire game, again, did not receive any development that would explained his intention.

 >      

   Garnet                  Ashe                                       Bahamut Sky Fortress

At the end, it took less than half an hour from traveling to Bahamut Sky Fortress to the end credit. Vayne is incredible weak for a last boss. He sure has cool moves to show off and such but the damage that he did didn’t even blink my characters. I thought the last boss of FFX-2 was weak, who I didn’t even need to touch the controller to defeat but man, Vayne is just terrible despite his look. I have to say that the end credit has some good art works that would mean more to me than the entire game. But after the end credit, it’s just says “The end”, waiting for you to press X or O to exit to main screen, no secret ending or post game scenes, not even a report card like Kingdom Heart, how disappointing could it get.

   [If only they could stick to the artwork, I would have a different opinion]

On a brighter note, I have to say that the game has the least grinding battle system of all FF games. You can always travel through an entire dungeon without fighting any enemy if you’re strong enough to withstand their attacks. The gambit system lessen your effort even more. With it, you just need to set a set of appropriate commands and after that, all you do is moving the stick. Nevertheless, this system makes boss battle seem unchallenging. There is barely any boss battle where you have to spend more than 30 seconds to defeat. With the right gambit, all you do is sit back and watch your characters hack and slash the boss till death. In fact, the only real challenge of the entire game is to defeat Yiazmat, the infamous boss who has over 50 millions HP, the most HP of probably all RPG games. I wasn’t fancy enough to go around hunting good equipments to defeat him. So, it took me around 4 hours of concentration to beat him with two Masamune and store bought equipments, tough fight I must say. You need a lot of luck in this battle towards the end as this guy will keep on spamming death strike every 5 seconds or so, and when he get to the last bar, ignore death strike, it’s best that you use every single character to attack instead of healing or reviving. A risky strategy yes but if you leave him alone, he will regen massive amount of HP and despite putting him to near death twice, this is the very reason why it took me so long to kill him, I was being too cautious.

Still on battle system, I think the Espers in this game are really useless. Really, I would love to trade Gambit and Espers for the old good Summons from previous games, I miss Bahamut, Odin, Shiva and the likes. Except for one  time where I need to use an Esper to process on with the story, I did not find any other use with them. They might be useful at the beginning of the game for some but none for me.

                           Ultima, the best Esper

Music of FFXII is average. Hitoshi Sakimoto is just not as good as Nobuo Uematsu at composing a memorable theme. Even the ending theme song, while sound a bit like “Melody” from FFIX, it’s no where near as good. Through out game music is just fine, not as unique as the previous games. And while the music is not repeatedly, it gets boring quickly. I think the best piece is the one that play at the opening. The ending orchestra is quite good as well.

Voice acting again, despite the fact that I did not finish the Japanese version, I don’t think that Square-Enix ever going to do a good English voice for FF series as they did for Kingdom Heart series. They didn’t even bother to synch the voice to mouth movement, which is what they did great for KH. Anyway, I think it’s a bit better than FFX voice acting, where if you played the JAP version, you will be put down immediately by the the English voice.

Graphic of FFXII is a big step from FFX-2. Everything look fine for something that is on PS2 and is much better than all the previous FF. I thought the environment could have been better, I mean the environment from Grandia III for example, it has a sort of good lighting and right color feel to it, looks more moving too. The characters as well, I just think they are lacking something that make them feel interesting. I was tired at looking at their backs for the entire game, I refer the characters from Xenosaga III a lot more, they’re more interesting. Unlike previous FF games, I dislike the way characters appear in game. The designs are good with Tactic feeling but in game, they are not appealing to me, maybe it’s just me who think so.

This game is not meant to be replayed, there is no new game plus and there is just one route line, one ending to go with anyway. In fact, the game can be completed within 1 or 2 days if you’re concentrating on the main route line and ignore the extras.

Overall, I would give the game 7/10. But then, I maybe am too different from others, like how Grandia III got a relatively mediocre score but I think it was great. I enjoyed it a lot more, not because of the story but because of the game play and graphic. Out of all the FF games I played, this game did not give me the feeling of achieving something, I felt rather empty as if it was a waste of time at the end. Lets just hope the FFXIII will be a big step from this, seem so so far to me.

                                         Best moment of the entire game

I ripped out the opening CG for your pleasure. <DL link>

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