Brilliant in many ways, but a let-down in just as many others.
~
Pros:
+ Technical Achievement: Normally I don't go over this kind of thing too much, as a game's visuals and suchlike are inevitably outdated within a year or so. However, basically the whole way through FFXII, I was simply amazed at just how much they wrung out of the PS2 - Square have always known how to push a system to its limits, and they created a monument to their abilities with this one!
+ No Random Battles: The long-awaited moment finally came: random battles are no more. Besides making the game a lot more immersive and free-flowing, it also provides great moments where you have to run for your life from something you know will crush you like a twig (although sadly this isn't capitalized on as frequently as it could have been)...
+ Open Landscape: Thankfully, the endless straight roads of FFX have been replaced with large, open environments, with multiple routes available to explore or ignore at your leisure. The size of them is also impressive, and just about compensates the loss of the World Map by truly making you feel like you're journeying through vast lands.
+ Mark Hunts: The continual sidequest of hunting for powerful, exotic monsters is a compelling one, and a nice way to keep the more obsessive players satisfied the whole way through.
+ Voice Acting: While I think the script is overly-steeped in 'Ye Olde' language, the voice acting is a great leap up from FFX, both in terms of its natural flow and the quality of the actual performances.
+ Camera Control: The ability to control the camera at will is a great feature, letting you soak in the world around you and scout ahead for monsters.
Cons:
- Story & Characters: According to Wikipedia, the original producer left the project fairly near its beginning, leaving others to try and finish his work off - this shows bitterly throughout the whole story. Everything starts off very interesting and shows great potential, but over the course of the game, everyone single one of the plot and character developments is botched, dealt with too swiftly, or forgotten until the last minute and desperately shoe-horned in. The pacing is wildly uneven, with a massive stretch of tens of hours of gameplay where almost nothing happens in the plot, and with the exception of Balthier, virtually no characterisation or significant back-story development ever takes place, even during these long stretches of mindless wandering.
- Gambit System: It sounds good in theory, and combat would probably be fairly frustrating without it, but as long as you know what you're doing, the Gambit system basically means the game can play itself, while you just watch and occasionally move your character about. Severely cutting the amount of different Gambits, as well as the amount you can have on at one time, might have been a way to deal with this.
- Repetitive Environments: Clearly this comes at the cost of having such expansive, open environments with many routes to follow, but now they are even more repetitive and unvaried within themselves than those of FFX, with a pretty limited amount of scenery types and objects in any given area - this is especially problematic in the indoor sections, where the long mazes of identical-looking corridors are both dull and highly confusing to navigate.
- License Board: The immediate problem with the License Board is that it is highly derivative of the Sphere Grid of FFX, which is a shame given how the series has varied the battle and levelling systems so much in the past. The other problem that eventually reveals itself is that it makes it all-too easy to duplicate the exact same stats and abilities over all six team members, right down to their weapons and Limit Breaks, without it having any real detriment to your fighting ability as long as you know what you are doing: this only exacerbates their lack of characterisation...
- Minimal Sidequests: The Marks may be a great idea that last all throughout the game, but otherwise there aren't actually that many sidequests to pursue, which is disappointing.
- Reduced Re-Exploration: While there are fair motives to hunt down any monsters you may have missed the first time through, there is otherwise very little reason to return to the places you've already been: the towns, in particular, offer basically no developments whatsoever after you've initially visited them, both in shopping terms and in the absence of sidequests.
- Limited Monster Variety: While there are quite a few more monsters types than in FFX, and their exact design varies quite a bit more too, there's still not as many as there could have been, and especially as you get further into the game, you'll hardly run into anything genuinely new at all.
- Humourless: Previous games in the series have always had a wacky undercurrent to keep things interesting; FFXII is just a bit too straight-laced in comparison.
~
While there are a good few faults with FFXII, most of them are reasonably small and easy to forgive in the face of the game's achievements, and it has undoubtedly done a lot to establish how the series will move into the future. However, the one thing I simply cannot forgive is how the plot and characters were so badly botched and neglected - if they had just taken the time to structure and develop them properly, FFXII could have been among the very best of the series. As it is, it's a good game, but I expected so much more!