T w e n t y S i d e d

There is one last thing I would like to test your patience with, and it may indeed surprise you: there is so much to love about Final Fantasy XII.

Yes, I’m surprised by it, too! I try to bear it in mind, but I forget sometimes.

I will maintain once more that I could not have gone through all this effort and thought for a game I thoroughly disliked. I have been somewhat unkind to it, but I only care in the first place because there is something in this game that seized my imagination and hasn’t yet let go. There are people who can play a game they hate, that gives them nothing but pain, and remark upon it, and say meaningful things about it and entertain people with their lamentations. I admire these people, but I am not one of them.

The setting is brilliant, and alive. There is remarkable care and thought into making the world and its environments feel equally like a high fantasy we could never know and a living, comprehensible place that we are immediately at home in. This is not something that exists in a single part of the game, but must be distributed throughout it, and it is undoubtedly the work of people who treated this game and its creation with care, and love, and genius. Yes, the creation of the game was not untroubled, nor quick, and the creator of the very setting, Yasumi Matsuno, was tragically removed from the project by untimely illness. But somewhere in the midst of all that, people put their hearts into this game, and it is impossible not to feel it. You can hear it in Lowtown, while people sit and chat near sunshafts breaking in from the noisy streets above, hanging colorful cloths over the bare stone walls and lounging with a small circle of friends on crates that were bound for the city back in the good days. You can feel it at a small shrine, observing an unbroken vigil in silence overlooking a marsh of the miserable undead, lamenting wordlessly their anguished incomprehension, a great palace barely visible through the roiling mist, protruding at a grotesque angle from the shattered landscape. You can see it in the eyes of a madman, hanging in the air before a crystal that blazes like the sun, howling exultant laughter and praising a new era at the very edge of the world, gazing out over an endless abyss from a tower dedicated in ages unknowable to the deities he has usurped. There is life here. Put your hand on the screen and you can feel the pulse.

I love the real-time gameplay, and, with it, the brilliant open-world environment design that necessitated it. I like the gambit system, both as a concept and in practice, and I think with a little more development it could have served as a solid basis for a lot of games, but I know not everyone agrees. I needn’t defend it overmuch; it worked for me as a solution to a need created by the top-level design decision. The principal thing, to me, is that they took a huge risk on a radical paradigm shift for the series that I feel improved the game indispensably. The environments had to be crafted with the expectation that both players and monsters would inhabit them, and need to work within them, and I believe that the designers succeeded in crafting what feels like a grand, contiguous world teeming with life and possibility. There is not “dick around and hunt treasure world,” and “fight scary monsters world,” partitioned from one another by a big swirly wall. There is just Ivalice wild and free, where beautiful and savage creatures roam across sandy, rolling dunes and icy rivers flowing through frostbitten crags. There’s the palpable feeling that, walls of the world be damned, the setting extends in all directions, on and on. Environment design is not something to take for granted. When you play a game without it, it distresses you, mentally and physically. Whether you know why or not, you can feel it all the same. And when it works, you go to the top of a hill and stare out to the horizon, taking on faith that there is anything and everything lying beyond it, even if you know from experience that there isn’t. A well-crafted world like this gives your imagination license to supersede any realities you deem other than preferable. This game does this for me.

I love the monster hunting. I mentioned the Hunts only in passing at the outset, and never mentioned the rare game at all. But what I said then was true: they make up a huge proportion of the game’s content, far more than traditional sidequesting. My penchant for using my equipment, abilities, and gambits cleverly— or, uh, trying at least— to take on the game’s toughest foes as soon as it was marginally possible to defeat them made for frequent white-knuckle, drag-out brawls, fighting retreats, last-chance improvisations, and bitter close attempts and Pyrrhic victories. I’ve frequently joked about being overpowered for the main story content, but make no mistake: I more than earned that privilege barging in early wherever I could and getting my sorry ass kicked from Leá Monde to Louisville. Hunting the infamous Yiazmat only once1.98 times, actually; on my first serious attempt, I brought the pale wyrm within an inch of death, only to realize I had stopped dealing damage to wage a losing battle of attrition that would see my item reserves totally depleted before a sudden defeat. I fled. Ow. is enough for my lifetime, but several of the most fearsome Marks in the game— Fafnir, Deathgaze, Behemoth King, the Shadowseer, the top-tier Gilgamesh cameo, and that fucking Cluckatrice— stood for years as some of my favorite fights in gaming.

The music is some of the very best in the entire series, and I mean that. When the game starts up and “FINAL FANTASY” begins to roar out of the speakers, it shakes my fucking bones, and I am immediately eager to adventure far and wide. When you start the game for the first time, and are greeted by an Opening Theme like this, you have only your rotting, sexless heart to blame if you are not ready to at least give the game a chance. It contributes so indispensably the feeling of the setting, and the game simply could not be the same without it. Composed by Hitoshi SakimotoComposer for the Ivalice games, the quasi-related Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre, Bloody Roar, Odin Sphere, Dragon’s Crown, the Valkyria Chronicles series, and The Adventures of Hourai High: Transfer Student Dramabomb. That’s right, you could have been reading an LP of that instead of reading this shite! and Masaharu Iwata, who, together, have created the unique and beautiful music that has so wonderfully characterized the games of the Ivalice setting since Final Fantasy Tactics in 1997. The score of the game is built from high strings, soaring horns, flute, timpani, and harp, and if any complaint can be leveled at the music, it is, perhaps, that they rarely depart from this instrumentation. But when it works, it works amazingly, and it works nearly all of the goddamn time. In particular, the credits identify the horn player as Osamu Matsumoto, and I can only infer that this man descended onto the Japanese shoreline in a pillar of silvery light, tromboning all onlookers to tears. I have been listening to the soundtrack on loop since I started writing this, and every time The Battle for Freedom comes on, I have to suppress the urge to make war on my neighbors. Note that track in particular: Sakimoto and Iwata, already the only two natural choices for Ivalice’s biggest title yet, also do the main series proud by carrying on grandmaster Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu’s well-developed tradition of making excellent use of leitmotifs to convey stories musically. If you’ve been following me so far, your time is clearly worthless, and you owe it to yourself to at least give these tunes a chance.

The game is unrelentingly and remarkably beautiful— yes, future people, even in 2022! This was a game created in the closing of a long, long console era and the creators knew exactly what to do with the hardware, technologically speaking. But that’s only the foundation, not the edifice. The art in this game was put together masterfully. Everywhere you go, there is vibrant color, and beautiful, intricate environments of every landform and climate, architecture tragically unknown in our own world, and creatures bizarre and beautiful alike. There is more color and variety in the game’s sewer level than some games display in sum. The game is so frequently and expertly pleasing that when you go to a place like Old Archades, which is so drab and barren, you can believe it’s because the town is simply an awful place to live, and not that the artists couldn’t be bothered to put in the hours— which they did, because even these areas are intricately detailed and filled with thoughtful design.

As I mentioned long, long ago, I have a total preferential weakness for the style and delivery of the game’s writing. The game strikes an amazing balance, relying on faux-Elizabethan vocabulary and sentence structure while remaining immediately comprehensible, and the intense variety in diction and construction keep the dialogue vibrant and immensely readable. And going hand in hand with that…

The voice acting is some of my favorite in any game I have ever played. Reportedly, for the English translation, they simply hired a bunch of Shakespearean stage actors, and let them go nuts on the script, improvising as much or as little on the prose as they felt appropriate, and in a game that already has the kind of writing that I adore, I cannot help but feel speared by the effect. There is such genuine feeling and nuance, and emotion, that playing this game after many others of the era left me feeling richly spoiled. Hilariously, the main cast are the only characters that seem not to have gotten the benefits of these casting and direction decisions, having been made much more “conventional,” and the result is that literally everyone in the world is many factors more interesting to listen to than every member of the main cast besides Fran and Balthier. Characters like Ondore, Al-Cid Margrace, Vayne, Doctor Cid, Anastasis, Bergan… Anyone. Nearly everyone! I can’t get enough of the voice acting in this game. Comparing it to its predecessor, and its successor, is an act of madness. There is not even any point.

Come to think of it, the cutscenes in this game are consistently quality. I’ve looked at a lot of cutscenes checking and rechecking details for this write-up. A lot. I watched many, many cutscenes. Believe this. Frequently, I’d just get engrossed in what I was watching for a while! The framing, blocking, pacing, it’s journeyman work. And everything I said about the art, music, and voice-acting goes just as strongly here. Games have long sold themselves on the “cinematic” buzzword, but it’s a pleasure see a game with a decent grasp of visual storytelling, just working it like it as a matter of course.

But lastly, I think these games have some amazing characters. It would have been great for some of them to end up in our party! But they’re in there, and they aren’t uncommon. A lot of the better characters seem to be enemies, actually, but that’s likely because our dear party tends to piss off so very many people. This, too, is a function of the writing style; any dumb, no-name NPC you run into has some sort of personality crammed into them, and when you throw that much stuff at the wall, you end up with a lot that managed to stick. And, knowing the alternative, I’d say it would have been just great if that’s what the main cast had ended up with. Forget about narrative arcs, or thematic relevance. All the characters needed was some memorable personality. Balthier is far and away most people’s favorite party member, and it’s because the guy actually has some life in him! For what desperately little there is to her character, I ended up always liking Penelo for the slab-simple reason that her voice acting is decent, she has a little personality, and I found humor in the idea of this confused peasant girl being thrust into this crap after being randomly kidnapped by lizard people one day. But even beyond just having memorable people, there are a number of characters who really do have some depth to them. Vayne, Cid, and Venat, of course. The Ministry of Law tend to make able use of their limited screentime. But I’ll do you one better: you know who the best character in the game is? In fact, you know who the main character of this game is? Halim Fucking Ondore.

Marquis Halim Ondore IV is most everything that a major character of an Ivalician game should be. He’s moral and warm-hearted, but never soft or naïve. He’s cunning, but not conniving. He can play the Great Game as well as his opponents in Archadia and Rozarria despite having a fraction of their power. He’s a natural leader of men, uniting the Rebellion into a force that could legitimately oppose the Empire and leading them in battle at the front of the fleet. He’s handsome, well-dressed, his voice is outstanding. He is practical without being ruthless, reasonable without vacillating. He never seems selfishly tempted by the power he wields, which the setting promotes as a near-impossibility. He games the course of nations and history for his nation’s benefit, and for the benefit of his friends and allies— not because he, personally, profits from it, but because he desires peace and freedom for these nations. While the Big Six dick around in a swamp collecting rainbow slime and zombie fritters, he’s moving the pieces around the board facilitating the entire plot thanklessly behind the scenes. He makes a better opponent and counterpart to Vayne than Ashelia does, when she was designed to fill that role. Put simply, he’s a good ruler, and a good warrior, and a good man, in a world where being the last of these is a constant trial and being all three makes you a creature of myth. Ondore MVP 2006.

…I, uh… I think I’m out. Yeah, I know, you’re so disappointed.

But I’ve said all there is for me to say. Anything beyond is for you to find out for yourself, and I think I’ve put enough out there for you to know pretty definitely if you want to, or not. I wouldn’t blame you either way.

If I had to describe Final Fantasy XII in two words, I would pick “fascinatingly flawed.” I’d be very hesitant to call it a great game, and at times I’d balk at calling it a good game. But nonetheless, I found myself entranced by it. So often, I find myself shaking my head at the missed opportunities, left only to wonder what might have been if things had been different, if other decisions had been made or if more or less emphasis had been put on this part or that. Yeah, there are times when I can’t stand Final Fantasy XII. But sometimes, in the right light, or from the right angle…

I think I might love this fucking game.

Thank you for reading.

The Rocketeer —PLEASE—STAND—BY—