Light spoiler warning for names of characters and locations.
I've just finished The Zodiac Age for the third time, marking the fifth or sixth time I've finished Final Fantasy XII overall. An average playthrough is 100 hours and I still find myself wanting to replay it. I've played almost every mainline Final Fantasy game and I consider this one the most replayable of them all.
The Zodiac Age is one of Square Enix's better PC ports of a Final Fantasy game, but the bar is low. I don't want to be too critical - this [I]was[/I] a PS2 game, and a massive one at that - but the upscaled character and environmental textures aren't great. Thankfully, they can be improved by mods. And speaking of mods, there are so many good ones now. For returning players, I recommend all the Insurgent's mods on Nexus; first-time players should at minimum find a mod that removes black bars from cutscenes. You may also need the tkMalloc crash fix mod.
I love the world of Final Fantasy XII. My latest playthrough convinced me that Rabanastre and Bhujerba are two of the best cities in any Final Fantasy game. Nalbina, Balfonheim, Jahara and Bur-Omisace are smaller but also full of character. I will happily talk to every one of the hundreds of NPCs in these places multiple times throughout the game as they react to the latest developments in the story. The fields between them are huge but full of interesting places, creatures and secrets. I can't help but go THIS IS SO COOL when an NPC adventurer finishes their fight with a wild creature, comes over to me and casts Protect on my characters completely independently. If you've ever heard this game described as an "offline MMO", it's partly because of details like this.
The game gives the player enormous freedom. It's not an open world game, but the plot-gating of various locations is much less restrictive than it is in most other Final Fantasy games. For example, around half an hour into the game, you can already explore Rabanastre, Nalbina, all of Giza, all of the Westersand, most of the Estersand, and a little of the Zertinan Caverns if you feel like sending Vaan to an early grave. You can try and fail to kill a T-Rex at level 1, or just stand by and watch as that T-Rex eats other, smaller creatures to grow stronger. This is a living, breathing world where things feel like they are happening without you. Ivalice is an amazing setting that has been honed over multiple games, and it shows.
Every coin has two sides, of course. The fact that the plot happens without much involvement from Vaan, ostensibly the main character, is something that many people bring up as a criticism of this game. I don't mind the main character being a regular kid - there are more than enough stories where the main character is a Special Boy of Destiny (to borrow a phrase from the Retrograde Amnesia podcast) if that's what you prefer - but I can't entirely dismiss the criticism. It's not true to say he has no reason to be there, but the plot only really needs Ashe, Basch and Balthier to move it forward. I want all six playable characters to have meaningful connections to each other, but they don't. That's true of other Final Fantasy games as well, but it's usually mitigated by every character having a strong connection to the main character, and that's not the case here either.
Every once in a while, the writers will try to make Vaan seem more significant, or show that the characters get along with one another, but they never quite manage to pull it off. I find that's true of much of the story. There are parts I like and parts I don't. I think this playthrough has made me more critical of it than I was before. I have to kind of squint at some scenes and read between the lines in others to assemble them into the story I want, a story I'm happy with. A lot of the story could have benefited from another rewrite pass. You may find yourself struggling to understand parts of it on your first playthrough, or straight-up forgetting what is going on as you spend multiple hours exploring and doing sidequests between important cutscenes.
The voice acting is good, but not great. Maybe it's due to overfamiliarity, but I've started to notice rushed or incorrectly emphasized line reads in more places. Don't get me wrong, there are still many lines I hold dear, like the exchange between Basch and Vossler at the Resistance hideout early in the game; it's just a case of time gilding my memories slightly. The lip sync is less accurate than I remember it being, too, and in some scenes where characters are standing further from the camera, their lips don't move at all - this was probably much harder to notice on the PS2.
Another common criticism is that Final Fantasy XII "plays itself." While I understand where that line of thinking comes from, I disagree. I find there to be more gameplay in XII than there is in a lot of other Final Fantasy games. Admittedly, a lot of the gameplay takes place before battles rather than during them, but that's right up my alley as someone who loves solving optimization problems. "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war." That optimization wouldn't bring me any joy if the game didn't have such a wide range of difficulty. It's basically "choose your own adventure" in that regard. As a new player, I remember struggling with many of the story fights; as an experienced player, they no longer give me any trouble, but I can challenge myself at every turn by going off the beaten path or by taking on the hardest hunts and optional bosses as soon as they become available. Most Final Fantasy games before XII (and XIII that came after it) backloaded all the difficult optional content to the very end, but XII manages to spread it throughout the game, which I think is brilliant. I'm also someone who generally hates having to grind, but I enjoy grinding in this one, in part because the Gambit system alleviates the most tedious parts. The 2x and 4x speed options come in handy, too.
The Loot system is nigh-impenetrable to first-time player (the most help you'll get is in the Aletap Rumors, but that's not much help at all), but it's a goldmine for returning players willing to look things up online and make their own plans. This is a game where the more you put into it, the more it gives back. I suppose that's true of many games, but few have the depth of this one.
I don't think XII's soundtrack is on the level of, say, VI through X, but I enjoy it a lot more now than I did when I first played the game. I'm becoming fonder of tracks that I wouldn't necessarily listen to outside of the game, but which I think work perfectly within it, like The Clan Hall and Flash of Steel. Then there are the tracks I'll happily listen to when I'm not playing, like Eruyt Village, A Moment's Rest and The Cerobi Steppe, which have got to be up there with the most beautiful compositions in the entire series. The Zodiac Age reorchestration is, for the most part, excellent. The brand new tracks are a nice enough for the most part, but there are a couple of tracks I find unpleasant, like the Tchita Uplands. Still, for about 95% of its runtime, it's exactly what I want from a remastered game's soundtrack - better sound quality and real instruments while staying faithful to the style of the original. I have to compare it to the soundtrack for the HD remaster of X, which has its moments, but has me reaching for the original OST toggle in the menu every time I hear the new battle theme.
Final thoughts. For its time, XII was an incredibly ambitious game in terms of both breadth and depth. 20 years later, there still aren't many games like it. It didn't nail all the elements that would have made it one of the all-time great games, but if you're someone who enjoys freedom, exploration, talking to NPCs, finding secrets, learning mechanics, and an incredible challenge, then I wholeheartedly recommend it. If you prefer linearity or action combat, you'll have to look elsewhere.
