Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay > Final Fantasy XII

Put just under eight hours into this so far, but what I've played has been great. And brave - to make such fundamental changes to a series that's been around as long as FF has, without really having ever moved on in terms of gameplay, is a remarkably brave thing for Square Enix to have allowed to happen.

The combat is clearly based on the standard Massively Multiplayer Online RPG way of doing things, but I've always thought that the way MMORPGs handle combat owes a huge debt to Final Fantasy VII's Active Time Battle system, so really this has just come full circle. They're both fairly effective cons - combat's still turn-based, but providing a real-time timeline that the player can use to judge when any character's next attack will be acted out makes it look and feel as though it's actually a real-time system.

It's a weird marriage of traditional FF and MMORPG outside of the combat, too. Overworld sections have that free-roaming feel of the latter, but as soon as you decide to let the main storyline play ouyt for a while you're back into recognisable FF territory, battling through some fairly linear dungeons in order to come out the other side.

Gambits work excellently - really take some of the heat off the player during combat, because of the way that they allow you to set any or all of your party commands outside of combat rounds for them to use once they're in combat. It prevents you from having to ktry and keep track of them all, all of the time. Bioware could do with stealing this idea - it'd b a perfect fit in their RPGs and would work around the ludicrous 'pausable real-time' combat system that they've relied on over the years.

The Licenses are the other big new idea and one that Jake hasn't mentioned. A board of squares shows each character's access to skills, equipment and magic. Characters gain License Points for each enemy they kill, which you build up and spend on access to new squares on the board. Buy a square and those adjacent to it become available for purchase. You still need to buy the equipment or magic itself, but you need this access before characters can make use of it.

It's kind of a visualisation of the jobs/skills/weapons access system from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is a good thing because what that game desperately needed was something that made all of that more approachable. It works really well, too - early on it feels as though you're going to open the entire board up fairly quickly, but you soon find yourself taking each character's skillset down a different path on the board.

Not too sure about the storyline yet - feels a bit identikit to me. Political intrigue, evil empire, etc. I guess it needed that more recognisable hook in order not to alienate the series' regular audience, but I do hope it branches out into something more unique eventually. That said, I'm having more than enough fun with the gameplay to make worries about the storyline put me off to any great degree.

Want to get on with advancing my position with the clan (another lift from MMORPGs) and hunting all the bounties. And filling up the beastiary. The bestiary's a clever way of ensuring that combat doesn't become dull - it provides you with a detailed description of all the creatures that you've fought, but also gives extra hints or backstory to the world when you kill a set number of any enemy. And there appear to be rare beasts to hunt down, as well as the bounties that you find pinned up in the clan or on pub walls.

The only bad thing about the game is that it looks like arse on this tv, but I'm fast becoming used to that.

Final Fantasy XII - Now or later?