[Ginkasa]

Final Fantasy XII tries really hard to have a more grounded story than prior FF games. It is Final Fantasy through a A Song of Ice and Fire lens. The main events of the story of this game occur without our party's involvement, really. Our characters spend the whole game just trying to buy-in to the game of thrones and don't really accomplish much; what little they do is almost immediately taken away in most circumstances. It is a bold move and could have paid off really well, but unfortunately the game is clearly uncomfortable exploring this narrative space and falls apart as you look closer.

The characters are bland. Balthier has charisma and maybe Vaan you could say has a personality, but everyone else are very unremarkable. Either they have no interesting features, like Penelo, or they have their one scene and then fade into the background causing the player to question what purpose they really serve in the story other than placeholder, like Basch. Even our villain is only remarkable for how bland and uninteresting he is. Vayne is set up as maybe being just a politician playing the game (seemingly successfully), but it falters in finding a place for him in our characters' stories. For a story like this to work - a story where our main party is only a bit player in the grand scheme of things - it has to be focused on characters and it has be focused on character based goals and this game just does not rise to that. Look to almost any other post NES Final Fantasy game and you'll find better character work than Final Fantasy XII.

The game almost seems to realize this as when it tries to find some sort of satisfying conclusion it falls back on the typical Final Fantasy end-of-the-world-our-characters-are-gods scenario. All of the sudden our seemingly cool-headed, politically minded (if ruthless) villain is a megalomaniacal supervillain with otherworldly powers and deific support. Suddenly our party is the sole hope for saving Ivalice in an epic battle that transcends reality.

The saving grace of Final Fantasy XII is that it does provide a more fully realized world to play in than prior games and is much more interesting to explore and complete side objectives than the prior single player effort: FFX. The Gambit system is more interesting to fiddle about with now that I'm older and have just a smidge of programming knowledge. The Zodiac job system introduced in the more recent re-release is fun. I especially like you can re-spec without issue freeing the player up from analysis paralysis and just letting you fiddle about without concern of wasting hours of playtime. It is really fun to play, but the narrative behind it falls short of just about every other FF game.

I've started FFXIII just yesterday and the contrast between these games is, of course, immediately apparent. It is the first time I played FFXIII since the first time I played FFXIII, so I'm interested in revisiting it, but I also recall not liking it very much at all. We'll see how it goes.