Welcome back to the Final Fantasy Love/Hate series! Having now covered the first direct sequel in the series’ history, and our first spin-off film, we’re headed back to the mainline entries with Final Fantasy XII. This was one of the most-anticipated games in the entire franchise for me. I’ve always heard really good things about this game and thought that it sounded fascinating. However, having gotten more into the franchise lately, I have found out that its modern reputation is somewhat polarizing: some people consider it amongst the best Final Fantasy games ever made, while others hold it in much lower esteem. This just got me even more curious: how does the game differ from its predecessors, and does it hold up in 2026? Read on to find out…
There are a few different revisions of Final Fantasy XII, but by and large the two main versions are the original PS2 release, and the Zodiac Age re-release. For this playthrough, I played the Zodiac Age on my Steam Deck. Unlike some other games we’ve covered, The Zodiac Age makes some pretty major alterations to Final Fantasy XII, which definitely had an effect on my overall enjoyment. I’ll note these improvements where necessary, but in short: if you want to play FFXII, then The Zodiac Age is your best bet.
Love
- Real-time Combat System – Battles are something you come to simply “tolerate” in a Final Fantasy game: the necessary toll you need to pay in order to make your party stronger. Most combat in these games is just tedious busywork that you’re going through the motions to complete. While Final Fantasy XII does still have some of this tedium at times, it makes up for it by completely overhauling the battle system to make it incredibly fast and frictionless. As a result, it has some of the most enjoyable moment-to-moment gameplay of the entire franchise (that I’ve played thus far).
- Random encounters are now a thing of the past, THANK GOD. Battles no longer take place on a separate “battle screen”, you just walk up to enemies wandering around the world map and start attacking them instantly.
- Battles occur in real-time while you get full control of your party leader’s movements. While there are some practical benefits to being able to position your character as needed, it’s honestly just cool to see the combatants moving around in a battle instead of fixed in place; it makes the whole thing feel so much more dynamic.
- Despite being real-time and allowing you to control your character’s movements, FFXII still uses a menu-based action selection system identical to its predecessors. Just press a button and you’ll open a command menu, which allows you to give commands to your party. Despite all the other major changes to the battle system, this one little thing helps keep FFXII familiar. Hell, if you wanted to, you could play FFXII like an old-school Final Fantasy using this menu constantly.
- …that said, while FFXII does remain familiar despite its overhauled systems, that’s not to say that it doesn’t feel off at times. Despite liking FFXII‘s combat system quite a bit, I can’t help but notice how much of a difference the presentation makes. Even the most routine random encounter in prior Final Fantasy games ended with a victory fanfare, your characters performing a celebratory pose, and a trip to the XP screen so you can see all your rewards. FFXII has streamlined all of this away, which certainly makes battles go by much faster and be less-disruptive. However, that said… it sure makes every battle you get into feel a lot less satisfying upon completion due to the more muted rewards.
- The Gambit System – Going hand-in-hand with the new combat system, FFXII‘s other big feature is the “gambit system”, a system where you can create custom commands for your party to automate their abilities. It might sound a bit complicated, but it’s extremely intuitive and satisfying in execution.
- Each gambit you unlock gives you a trigger (eg, “Enemy: highest HP”, “Ally status: HP Critical”, “Self: HP < 50%”, “Enemy: weak to thunder”, etc) which you can link with a corresponding command (eg, “Attack”, “Steal”, “use Phoenix Down”, “cast Dark”, “cast Cure”, etc). Once combined, your character will perform the chosen action when the trigger command occurs. You can even layer your gambits so that certain gambits will take priority over others. Before long, you’ll have complicated and well-refined gambit setup for all of your characters to optimize their roles and make them a force to be reckoned with in combat. It’s so satisfying when you get to a point where you can sit back in a battle and watch as your gambits play out as you planned them to.
- It’s worth noting that The Zodiac Age re-release makes this system a hell of a lot more enjoyable. The original PS2 release made gambits into rewards/loot, which really limited their utility and forced you to use menu commands more often. However, in The Zodiac Age you can just buy any gambit you want in shops. Given their importance to the overall gameplay, I made sure to purchase them all within the opening hours of the game.
- Also, this is kind of a nitpick, but I have to say it: you often find yourself wishing that gambits were even more customizable. I can’t count the number of times I found myself wishing for gambit triggers that didn’t exist (ie, “Ally status: Any” would be great for when you just want to use Esuna). It would be nice if you could put in some more conditional “if ___, then ____” sorts of commands to modify existing gambits. For example, I spent the entire game with Vaan using the gambit “Foe HP = 100%: Steal” to get lots of free loot from enemies. However, Vaan can only steal one item per enemy. I ran into so many situations where he would just stand there trying to steal from an enemy he’d already robbed, forcing me to manually select an attack command for him to break the loop. Would it be so difficult to put a limit on the number of times a character will attempt a particular gambit per enemy and/or encounter? That’s not even getting into enemies that get healed by certain types of attacks. If you’re not paying close attention, you can have a character out there healing an enemy and nullifying your entire party’s damage in the process. Why can’t we have a trigger command where, if the character notices that their attack isn’t working, they no longer perform that gambit on that enemy? I get that this is just me whining that the gambit system isn’t complicated enough, but it was a frequent enough disappointment that I had to note it.
- Balthier – At this point in our journey through the Final Fantasy franchise, I’ve met some characters that I really love: Tifa Lockhart, Terra Branford, Shadow, Celes Chere, Yuna… I’ll tell you though, Balthier came dangerously close to unseating all them to be my uncontested favourite Final Fantasy character.
- First of all: he’s just so fucking cool. He has a very charming, swashbuckling personality, is supremely confident in himself, and is always looking out for his companions. Hell, he straight-up sees himself as the leading man in a grand narrative and makes sure we know it. Goddammit, he’s the best.
- Secondly, but no less crucial, is Gideon Emery’s incredible vocal performance. He makes every line Balthier utters suave as fuck.
- Thirdly, he’s a goddamn sky pirate with a bunny girl for a partner! That’s an insane amount of drip for an RPG party member!
- Really, the only reason I can’t put Balthier at the top of my Final Fantasy character tier list is because he doesn’t get a whole lot to do until the last quarter of the game. As a result, he doesn’t really do enough to endear himself to you over the course of your playthrough.
- Graphics – Final Fantasy XII has to be one of the most graphically-impressive games to release on the PS2. Final Fantasy X wasn’t exactly a slouch either, but it had some aspects that look straight-up embarrassing in hindsight (particularly NPC character models). Final Fantasy XII has very few weaknesses in comparison, with impressively-detailed environments, enemies, and character models for its era. The stylized art direction also helps, aiming to make FFXII look more like a painting than photoreal. FFXII doesn’t look on-par with modern games, but I genuinely believe you could release it today and people would still find the graphics charming. Hell, it still looks better than any modern Pokémon game, so they clearly were doing something right.
- Zodiac Age Additions – Like I said in the intro, The Zodiac Age version of FFXII is definitely the one you want to play. While the overall game is largely the same, some of the additions make a world of difference to your enjoyment:
- Probably most importantly to me, the game adds an on-command fast forward button. As you’d expect, this makes the game go a lot faster when you’re grinding, traversing through an area you’ve already explored, or when you just want to get to your destination already. It’s a simple feature which shaves away some of the friction and frustration that could have set in without it.
- The other major, game-changing addition that The Zodiac Age brings in is the ability for your characters to take a second job. This allows you to double your characters’ potential abilities and customize their builds in fun ways. For example, my Ashe in my playthrough was a paladin and white mage. I’m always conflicted about using white mages, because you always feel kind of bad about having to use one, since they’re fragile and lack offensive output. However, with this dual job system, I was able to craft an Ashe who could put out incredible melee damage, tank hits, and provide healing support to my party as needed. This made her one of the most pivotal healers in my entire time with this franchise.
- The Map – This might sound like a weird thing to highlight, but I LOVE the in-game map in FFXII. Just make a quick press of the L3 button, and a large version of the area map will appear overlaid on your screen while you maintain full control of your character. This allows you to easily navigate in real-time, maintain your bearings, and ensure you explore every nook and cranny for treasure. In an era where level maps were often hidden behind disruptive menu-diving, mitigating their usefulness in the process, having FFXII‘s map be this handy, unobtrusive, and undisruptive is a godsend.
- Hunting Side-quests – FFXII features easily one of the most enjoyable side-activities in the entire franchise: hunts! These play out somewhat similarly to Monster Hunter: you go to a notice board to find what marks are available, then you travel to the petitioner to accept the hunt and spawn the monster into the world. You then make your way to the target and face off against them. Hunts present some of the most challenging encounters in your playthrough, effectively acting like frequent, optional boss encounters. In addition, marks will often have some sort of twist that makes them harder to fight or encounter, making them a real test for your party. They also don’t tend to take all that long to accomplish, often taking less than half an hour from start to finish. There were plenty of moments in my playthrough where I set aside a couple hours just to complete outstanding hunts, and these ended up being some of the most fun moments in the entire game.
- Also worth noting: the hunts tie directly into the endgame content. In prior Final Fantasy games, if you wanted to face off against superbosses, you often had to do a bunch of tedious, unrelated bullshit first before you could even stand a chance. With FFXII, the high-level hunts are the end-game content and will naturally on-ramp you to get to the point where you can take them on. This makes FFXII have arguably the most accessible and compelling high-level, optional endgame in the franchise.
- The Sky Pirate’s Den – Hidden within the menus is an unassuming little thing called “The Sky Pirate’s Den”… and it is ADORABLE!!! It basically acts like a trophy/achievement tracker, showing you some of the milestones you’ve accomplished in your playthrough. It’s pretty unimportant and boring if we’re being honest, but what elevates this to a “Love” is entirely down to the presentation. All of your achievements are visually represented with cute little animated pixel art renditions of the FFXII cast. It’s so adorable, to the point where I could totally understand trying to 100% the game just to fill out your Sky Pirate Den!
- Localization – This is another one of those “Love” points that seems kind of weird to point out, but if you’ve ever played FFXII, you’d totally get it. FFXII has a very particular tone and distinct personality thanks to its Shakespearean, “olde English”-style writing and dialog. The fact that the game turned out this way is almost entirely down to the work and creative choices of the localization team. The olde-English flavour helps grounds the world of Ivalice and makes it feel more serious and fantastical than if they had gone with a more modern English translation. The localization team can also be thanked for Fran’s vocal performance. As I understand it, they decided to give her a more distinctive accent than in the original Japanese version. They ended up going with a thick, Icelandic accent, which makes everything Fran says sound mesmerizing. I can say with full sincerity that FFXII would not be as good as it is if Square-Enix had contracted a less-bold localization team to bring this game to life.
Behold, my Paladin/White Mage Ashe gambit setup (screenshot taken around two thirds of the way through the game). Note: when I took this screenshot, I didn’t realize that you didn’t need to use the “Self: HP” gambit slot to heal yourself if you already have an “Ally: HP” setup. Whoops.
And here is my Red Mage/Machinist Balthier! He mostly just provided spell support throughout the game, occasionally bashing fools in the face with a mace. Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of the Machinist though, I would definitely pick a different second class in retrospect.
And here’s my Shikari/Uhlan Vaan. He was my party leader through the game, so he’s got a very simple setup – steal from enemies, then whack them with a sword until they were dead. My class setup didn’t really leave a whole lot of need for gambits, so I was able to keep his automation quite simple.
Mixed
- Streamlining… and Its Knock-On Effects – While I do really like the new battle system and all of its efforts to speed up the gameplay, there’s this palpable feeling I get that FFXII‘s combat is not quite as satisfying as an old-school random encounter. There was just something about formulating a strategy to deal with each enemy type as efficiently as possible. There’s something about having the freedom to experiment, which you can’t really do without turning off your gambits (which is a pain in the butt). You also have a much looser sense of just how your party plays, since they’re acting on their own during battle and are often off-screen too. Hell, FFXII doesn’t even have a victory fanfare pose (outside of the occasional boss fight) or XP screen to make sure you know the progress you made from that last battle. As a result, FFXII‘s encounters can feel like an unceremonious chore at times. Look, I said that I like the gameplay of FFXII and think it’s fun overall, but there’s just something about it that makes you really appreciate the subtle design pillars of prior Final Fantasy games.
- License Boards – One of FFXII‘s new mechanical systems is the license board, which effectively acts as your characters’ skill tree. Basically, for each enemy defeated, your characters will earn license points, which can be spent to unlock nodes on your class’s license board. These nodes allow you to access to new weapons and equipment, new spells, special abilities, etc. The system works, but it isn’t particularly fun to me.
- For one thing, the license board doesn’t feel as rewarding as the Sphere Grid did. Every node you unlocked in the Sphere Grid felt like a palpable improvement, you could plan out your route a lot more, and you unlocked new things all the time. So much of the license board feels worthless to your character. Accessory nodes in particular suck: most of them are completely worthless to your characters’ builds, you can’t even see what the accessories you’re unlocking do, and there are SO MANY OF THEM to waste your license points on, which makes no sense when you can only equip one accessory per character.
- It also SUCKS when you get an awesome new piece of equipment, but you can’t use it because you haven’t gotten the license for it yet. This goes doubly-so in the latter half of the game, when it can take a little while to accumulate license points to be able to afford the license for it (and God help you if the node you need requires you to activate a couple other adjacent nodes first).
- Then again, at least your reserve party earns license points even if they don’t participate in the battle. They’ll still be under-leveled if you don’t use them often, but their abilities are even more powerful than their raw stats, so they’ll stand a bit of a chance.
- The Characters – I really want to like the characters of Final Fantasy XII. Ashe has classic “Final Fantasy heroine” energy: a resolute princess who is trying to restore her kingdom’s freedom, but who is tempted by dark power to achieve her goals. Vaan is a naive kid who hates the Empire because they killed his older brother, so he wants to take them down in a juvenile attempt at revenge. However, as he explores the world, he starts to mature and use his dead instead of acting impulsively. And then there’s Basch, the stout-hearted, honourable knight-paladin who always does the right thing. Unfortunately, the game does a poor job of making you care about any* of its characters.
- On the one hand, we have Balthier and Ashe, who have the most development through the game by far. Both get some big, memorable character moments, but we rarely get to see them express themselves, and they develop very little over the course of the game.
- Then there’s Vaan and Basch, who feel like they have chunks missing their narratives. Vaan is ostensibly the main character, but around a third of the way through, he becomes a passenger and doesn’t do anything important for the rest of the game. Meanwhile, Basch seems like he should be the game’s protagonist, but he barely does anything of consequence. Hell, even his “big moment” at the end of the game isn’t about anything he does, but rather that his brother just so happens to be opposing us. It’s a shame, Basch has a ton of potential, but ends up being a dud.
- Then there’s Penelo and Fran, who the narrative basically forgets about. Fran at least gets a pretty big moment in the middle of the game, and her lovely voice keeps catches your attention every time she speaks, but she kind of feels like an accessory of Balthier’s rather than a distinct character. Penelo though, hoo boy, she’s got to be the most pointless party member in any Final Fantasy game I’ve played thus far. She’s Vaan’s childhood friend, her parents got killed in the war… and that’s about all we have about her. She doesn’t seem to hold it against the Empire like Vaan does. Okay, well does she get any cool moments in the narrative? You bet, early in the games she spends several hours… as a captive of the Empire, who we need to rescue. Oh. And then she does literally nothing of consequence for the rest of the narrative…? I’m sorry, but why are you even here, Penelo?
- On a related note, the zodiac job system sucks a lot of the identity out of the characters. Since every character can take any class and do well, you don’t really get the same sort of feel for a character that you do in a more traditional JRPG. A bespoke class means that you can infuse that character’s animations, stats, strengths, weaknesses, etc with their personality, giving you a strong feel for who they are, even during regular gameplay. Meanwhile, we only get a sense for the characters of FFXII during the rare cutscenes we get, which makes them stick with you a whole lot less.
- It’s a Long-Ass Game – Your mileage will definitely vary on this one, but FFXII is a long game. Thus far into my Final Fantasy journey, I logged about thirty hours into FFVI (while completing most of the side content), forty hours into FFVII (again, while completing most of the side content), forty hours into FFX (while skipping most of the side content), and thirty hours into FFX-2. FFXII took me sixty hours, and it would have taken me a lot more if I had decided to complete all of the high-level hunts, which is what I was originally planning on doing. However, by the time I got to the end of the game, I had just had enough of it. After sixty hours, it was time for the game to end, so I just went ahead and steamrolled the final boss to get it over with. There’s something to be said for longer games, but I much prefer a shorter experience.
*Even Balthier; I like him as much as I do in spite of the game’s weak handling of the character.
Hate
- Pacing – FFXII reminds me exactly why I really appreciated FFVI’s pacing. That game had a new plot development or mission every thirty minutes or so, which meant that nothing ever overstayed its welcome. By contrast, just getting to your next quest can be a multi-hour commitment in FFXII, and then the subsequent dungeon crawl can easily take a couple more hours on top of that. If you are exploring, just getting to your destination feels like it takes forever. While the real-time battles go by quickly, they’re also far more frequent, making them feel more disruptive. While this could be fine if you had plot and character development to keep things interesting, FFXII generally saves its cutscenes for the start and/or end of a mission, so you’re literally going hours at a time without any sort of story progression. This is exactly why the characters fail to really resonate, and can make FFXII feel like an utter slog at times. Thank God for the fast forward button, or I would probably have been way more disappointed by this game.
- The Story – Going hand-in-hand with my last point, FFXII‘s story is decent on paper. It’s got a lot more focus on world-building and in-universe politics than prior Final Fantasy games. It’s also basically just a high-tech fantasy version of Star Wars, which is neat. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough story here for a sixty hour video game, and what is here is sorely lacking.
- FFXII‘s story is pretty simple overall, but it has been stretched incredibly thin in order to accommodate the long-ass playtime. When you’ve got minor narrative developments stretched out over several hours, it’s easy to forget what the hell is even going on or what you’re supposed to be doing. It also makes several plot points extremely frustrating. There are multiple occasions where it seems like the story’s finally about to progress, but then you’ll reach your destination and realize, oops, we should have been somewhere else instead! It’s an endless blue ball parade…
- The worst part of the entire narrative has to be Vayne, this game’s purported “main villain”. He shows up at the start of the game, seems like he’s actually a pretty reasonable and nice guy… and then he completely disappears for the next couple dozen hours. Like, I’m serious, the game will tell you that he’s evil, but it doesn’t earn it. By the time he shows up for the final battle, we’ve barely even seen the guy, let alone have much reason to hate him. He sucks, easily the worst Final Fantasy villain I’ve encountered thus far… which makes it kind of disappointing that the mad scientist, Doctor Cid, wasn’t the real villain. He is a much more entertaining antagonist and actually feels more important to the overall narrative than Vayne ever does.
- Then there’s Ashe’s storyline about her temptation to use the power of nethercite to destroy the Empire. The game bashes us over the head with characters telling Ashe that she’s tempted by its power, but the game never actually SHOWS us this inner conflict. The entire storyline feels so hamfisted, like you can see the game telegraphing itself. It legitimately hurt my overall feelings about Ashe: if I could see that inner conflict and intuit it myself, it would make her far more compelling and memorable.
- Quickenings – Man, FFVII perfected the limit break, why do we keep trying to reinvent the wheel, ruining the entire concept in the process? FFXII‘s aborted attempt to innovate on the limit break is its “quickenings” system. Basically, you can purchase up to three quickenings for your characters on their license board(s). Once you have accumulated enough mist charges (which are gained passively as you recover MP), you can perform a quickening in battle to deal a lot of damage to one enemy. While performing the quickening, you can also perform a QTE to chain an additional attack onto the quickening, which can then be further chained until you fail the QTE. Once you get good at this, you’ll easily chain thirteen or more quickenings into one massive, devastating strike, which can deal tens of thousands of damage to an enemy at once. The problem? Quickenings take fucking forever to play out. An effective quickening chain is going to take two or three minutes to play out every time, which is just an insane ask. Quickenings completely disrupt the pacing of a battle, throwing you into a separate battle screen where you just watch your characters perform the same animations over and over again. As a result, I only ever used them when I was in dire straits, because it just wasn’t worth the time commitment: I could kill the enemy with my gambits automatically in a quarter of the time.
- Level Design – On the one hand, FFXII brings back some freedom and branching pathways that FFX was sorely lacking. That’s not my issue with these levels. My issue with them is that they’re so boring.
- Most levels are full of repetitive, copy + pasted assets, which make entire zones feel monotonous to traverse. They’re also often just flat planes, with little in the way of elevation to break up the terrain.
- Level design is particularly poor in this game’s dungeons. Dungeons feel like they go on forever, both in terms of how long they take to explore, and their actual design. They’re full of pointlessly-long hallways which just make it take longer for no reason to get where you want to go.
- Furthermore, while there are branching paths in the levels, they are rarely meaningful and almost always return to the main path moments later… so, if you’re like me, you’ll feel obligated to explore each branching path, even if they’re almost always disappointing.
- That said, the environments do start to get a bit more interesting around the second half of the game, but by then you’re already bored sick of the game’s levels.
- Only Three Party Members – Look, I get that a three-character limit has been how Final Fantasy games worked since FFVII, but it stings more in FFXII because you often do have four party members. The game will often pair you with a story-relevant NPC who acts as a temporary, AI-controlled party member. I’d rather have a fourth party member of my choosing, thank you very much, especially since XP is not shared with your reserve party. This means you either need to cycle your characters regularly (which is annoying), or you just ignore half the cast for your entire playthrough (which is what I eventually did).
- That’s Not a Fucking Yeti – This is literally what I said when I first encountered this game’s purported “yeti” enemy. While I thought that this visceral reaction was funny and was going to put it into the “hate” column as a joke, it does point to a legitimate problem with FFXII: enemy variety. That doesn’t look like a yeti, because it isn’t: the game has a “werewolf” enemy type, which it has reskinned and reused to make this so-called “yeti” enemy. While there is a decent amount of enemy variety in FFXII, you’ll have seen nearly every enemy type in the game within its early hours, meaning that you spend the rest of the game just fighting a dozen different-coloured variations of the same enemies. This might be fine if it required different approaches, but it generally does not: you’re just steamrolling them automatically every time thanks to your gambit setups. Plus the game doesn’t tend to mix enemies, so you’re rarely having to make any strategic decisions to account for differing strengths and weaknesses.
- al-Cid – This guy is a fucking dork. When this sunglasses-wearing, Latin dude showed up out of nowhere, I was completely thrown off. He looks like a Platinum Games character, not a Final Fantasy nobleman!
As much as I enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XII, the game is plagued with a constant barrage of annoyances which make it feel fundamentally compromised at its core. I’m enjoying myself when I play it, but then I’ll come across a bit of friction that could have been easily tweaked. Or I’ll come across the next story cutscene and be reminded that I really don’t care about what’s happening in this game. Or I’ll start a new quest and feel the creeping dread that the next several hours of my life are going to be spent just getting from point A to point B, with nothing to break that monotony up or make it more interesting. It’s kind of a tragic fate, a good game that always leaves you feeling kind of soured on it.
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