If you havent already read part 1, here is a link to that article: FF XII (Final Fantasy 12) Revives the Series
And then there was XII
My first look at Final Fantasy XII was as a playable demo; reminiscent of the demo I played of Final Fantasy VII at Incredible Universe at least 3 years before its release. I saw the Final Fantasy XII playable demo available at a local Game Stop and played it briefly. The demo left me quite unimpressed. This was after having played Final Fantasy XI which was a very similar game. The obvious initial difference is that, since there is no multiplayer aspect to the game, that a single person is expected to play as all members of the party. I didn’t see how that could even be reasonable with the active gameplay battle system. The demo had me walking around a dungeon, I recall fighting bombs which is a typical enemy found in the Final Fantasy series. The spell animations and sounds were quite unimpressive as well. Even the art on the box gave me the impression of a game with no real depth (don’t ask me why I thought I knew this just from looking at a box).
Better than the First Impression … By a Long Shot
Initially I didn’t purchase this Final Fantasy. It’s not the first Final Fantasy since my initial Final Fantasy experience that I didn’t buy. I also didn’t buy Final Fantasy X-2 which most people I talk to agree is not really a Final Fantasy. It’s Final Fantasy X with some new content (art, audio, dialogue) added. I started playing Final Fantasy XII after borrowing it from my brother who is obviously more dedicated a fan than I. The game started out slow to be honest, the story is a bit boring at the beginning. After about 15 minutes of that though you are into the gameplay. And I have to say that from minute one of gameplay I was drawn in and loving it. It didn’t take much more than 2 or 3 hours of play before I didn’t want to put it down. This is a game I could (and have) played for 8 hours straight (I only put it down after 8 hours because my wife made me).
Gameplay
One thing I didn’t experience from playing the demo that you encounter out after about an hour of playing is gambits. Gambits is a mechanism by which you can add a bit of AI to members on your team. Each playable character has a small list of configurable gambits. A gambit consists of a trigger and an action. A trigger is something like “Self HP < 40%” and an action is something like “Curaga”. This particular trigger / action combo will tell your character to cast curaga upon him or herself when their HP is less than 40%. Triggers available range from enemy and character statuses to enemy weaknesses. For instance you can have a gambit that says Character status = blind -> blinda, or Enemy weak fire -> firaga. Gambits are arranged by priority and will resolve if the trigger is met and there are no higher priority gambits. With this system you can reasonably control your characters from a set of instructions rather than having to make them perform an action manually each time. This solved one of the biggest problems I saw in the demo and to be honest gambits are pretty well done. It doesn’t take any enjoyment from the game and leaves you with a feeling of satisfaction when you come up with a particularly useful or clever gambit. There are a huge number of triggers and while there are some things you can’t do with a gambit, it’s probably for the best because having fully automated battles wouldn’t be fun anyway.
As for the other bad half of my first impression, spell animations and sounds, they were overall pretty disappointing after my second impression as well. I would rather they had taken the sounds and animations directly from FFXI, those were some nice effects!
Now to my favorite part… hunts! Hunts are brand new in the Final Fantasy series (as far as I know) and they really add most of the enjoyment to this game. To segway why I love hunts so much, let me first tell you about one of my biggest problems with Final Fantasy games… the difficulty level. They are by and large too easy! And remember, Too is a Negative Word. The Final Fantasy series has long needed a difficulty level boost. My favorite in the series was 2. Much of the reason for this affinity is because it is more difficult than every game since. Other games had their moments but to underscore my love for a challenge let me tell you about my favorite part on FFVII. Near the end of the game enemies called “weapons” are roaming around. These were not enemies you encountered randomly and there was a finite number of them. Of these creatures, emerald weapon was my absolute favorite. You had to pull out all stops to defeat him. I remember trying at level 89, 90, 92, 93 only to eventually defeat him at level 94. Part of this was because I was leveling up my knights of the round, final attack and phoenix materias. What was this battle like you ask? Well, you have a 20 minute time limit and you’re fighting an enemy with 1,000,000 hit points. This meant you had to deal maximum damage each tturn and that meant that you had to use knights of the round with the mimic materia. Since it was pretty much guaranteed he would execute is kill-everyone-in-one-hit attack at least once and obliterate your entire party giving you no chance to recover you also had to come up with a way of surviving the battle. The best (maybe only?) survival strategy is to equip the final attack + phoenix materia in combination. This way whenever he killed your entire party in one fell swoop, the phoenix would come revive you. Now mind you, this would only work up to 4 times and that’s only if your materia is fully leveled up, which would only be the case if you did this intentionally(both materia in the combination had to be at least level 4). This was absolutely the coolest part of the game. I wanted 10 more battles just like it.
Hunts in FFXII are like the weapons in FFVII only there are dozens of them! Now, honestly, some hunts are not very difficult to defeat at all but if you breeze through a battle against a particular hunt you can bet dollars to doughnuts it’s because you didn’t seek out the hunt when it was freshly posted, and you have gained too many levels before fighting it. Ok, so what are hunts? Hunts are bills posted on a public message board displayed in a prominent place in most major cities. You find the board, read the bill then find the person who posted the bill. When you do you will learn about some new notorious monster that did some such thing or the other, where and how to find him. Once you have talked to the poster and accepted the hunt you are free to go find, and kill the great beast. If you do it right (meaning you find and defeat these hunts as soon as you are able) most of them are very difficult and very fun. I remember fighting a giant turtle no less than 5 times because whenever I got his hit points down around the 10% mark he would cast some magic spell that doubled his level. Now all of a sudden he is hitting for 2000 damage instead of 200 damage. I fought an antlion that would kill me in 2 hits and had a speed of roughly twice any of my characters. This amounted to a pattern of me reviving a fallen ally only to fall myself. I then change the party leader to the ally just revived and revive the ally that was just ko’d only to immediately become fatally wounded myself again and the whole pattern would start over. I kid you not I continued this pattern in this battle for no less than 15 revolutions before I finally decided to give up. I revived one last party member for good measure, brought in my only remaining living party member and prepared for death. By this time the antlion really only had a few thousand hit points left, but I was completely and utterly unable to land even a single blow as all of my efforts were focused on reviving. Well, with the last 3 members of the party that were still living I stopped the reviving pattern and went on a full attack fully expecting a prompt death. I was literally jumping up and down on my feet cheering about 2o seconds later when a near-fatal Vaan got pissed or something (I don’t know) and started landing blow after blow not letting the antlion even respond. He landed no less than 6 blows consecutively and fell the antlion. It was probably the happiest moment of my life (don’t tell my family).
Not only the hunts are difficult though. You can make a wrong turn in a dungeon somewhere and find yourself facing a foe that is twice your level. I don’t know why but something about being able to encounter enemies orders of magnitude more powerful than yourself is exciting. Whenever I happen upon enemies like this I break out all of my tricks to try and defeat even just one of them just to see how much experience I can gain. Sometimes if they are only 10 levels or so higher than me I will try and onesy twosey the enemies to make it to the other side of the dungeon to see if there is some treasure that is only supposed to be collected once I am at their level. I think “wouldn’t it be cool if I find a sword or some armor that I am not supposed to have until I am 10 levels higher?”. Yes, it’s geeky, but we are who play these games 
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