FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE

Ultimately, this is the best version of a very mediocre and confused game. The design of FFXII was very muddled, with a combination of a lot of the bad trends of the day such as "force players to buy a strategy guide" oriented quest design, an experimental combat system that doesn't *quite* work, etc. The biggest flaw of the game, however, is just how miserably slow and plodding it is. This release has 2x and 4x turbo speeds available, which do a fantastic job at helping you run around from location to location in the early game when you don't have access to fast travel or very many teleport stones, as well as farming resources so you can deal with the weirdly unbalanced pricing of equipment that causes problems at a particular point in the early midgame. The one thing about turbo is it produces a mixed feeling about the battles. You end up wanting to not ever do the battles and have your gambits do everything, because non-turbo mode is SO slow compared to 4x turbo. Unfortunately, the flaws are still very evident and you still pretty much are required to look up certain sidequests in order to find out what is needed to start or progress them at times (what do you MEAN i have to talk to a random NPC that appeared for the first time in a part of the city that hasn't been relevant for 30 hours because now that i've spoken to another NPC there's now a new NPC? And absolutely nothing hinted at this in any way?). There's some really bad design with how the monster hunts and sidequests are structured which results in it being a struggle to complete them as you go (if not outright impossible, with some sidequests being triggered early on and impossible to complete until far later in the game). The game just doesn't "flow" cleanly between doing the main quest line and doing the sidequests - it feels almost like you're having to force the game to let you do some sidequests for a bit, and of course at the very end of the game you get into a state of "The Enemy is about to do a Very Bad Thing, let's go do sidequests for 20 hours" that was unfortunately really common in game design at this time. The gambit system in combat is really interesting, but unfortunately not quite sophisticated enough. It's pretty clear it was inserted as an attempt to solve the problem of how much time it'd take to actually play the game with traditional Final Fantasy ATB, with this essentially being a single-player MMO, but you can't do things like "If ally has 2 or more negative status effects at once, cast Esuna" or "if enemy has 2 or more positive status effects at once, cast Dispel", you can't do things like "if the party doesn't have Protect, cast Protectga", and if you want to exploit elemental weaknesses the number of elements means you have to use an ENORMOUS amount of gambit slots on "if enemy is weak to fire cast Firaga" and the like. You also don't have negative gambit overrides, such as "If enemy absorbs the element of your weapon, don't attack". The system could be made more sophisticated without being made Turing-complete, but unfortunately Square abandoned this system after FFXII and didn't bother to enhance it for Zodiac Age. The plot is a bright spot - the game actually took a pretty serious approach to the story that works well. Unfortunately, the pacing is such that you go for a very long time between plot beats. I'd almost describe it as a plot suitable for a 20 hour game forced into an 50 hour game (that would have been 80 without turbo). Ultimately, all the problems with this game stem from the original FFXII. Zodiac Age adds features like turbo and license boards which help patch over some, but not all, of them. I really don't know if I can recommend this game in the abstract, really. But if you want to play FFXII, this is definitely the version to play.