![]() These take the form of ‘Hunts’, which see you fulfilling contracts for NPCs in towns who need you to take down certain powerful creatures in the surrounding areas for some contrived reason. Though it’s not exactly open-world, the on-rails nature of Final Fantasy X is long gone here, replaced by a gameplay structure that encourages you to take frequent breaks from the main narrative in favor of some good old-fashioned side quest grinding. There are much worse stories to be found in RPG’s, but relative to the rest of the Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is left a bit wanting.įortunately, the gameplay picks up the slack, coming off as something akin to a single player MMO. Though the voice acting is spot-on, there’s a general sense of detachment one gets when playing through this story it’s just hard to care about the plight of Dalmasca when the game doesn’t give you much reason to beyond the tired ‘empires are evil’ song and dance. They’re likable and well-written, but predictable and rather boring as a result. Everyone in the main party is like this to an extent. ![]() For example, Balthier is the ‘cool’, roguish sky pirate out to fill his boots with treasure he initially doesn’t want to get involved in the resistance movement because it’s not his cup of tea, but his kind heart eventually wins out and he shows there’s more to him then a trigger finger and one-liners. Much like how combat requires several different roles working in tandem, all the major players in the story are clearly there to fill a specific niche in moving the plot forward and they seldom break out of their cliché archetypes. While it’s impressive how much detail is put into the lore and history of the world of Ivalice, not nearly as much effort is put into making the cast particularly memorable or three dimensional. It’s all rather high-concept - even for a Final Fantasy game - and this comes as something of a double-edged sword. Vaan leads a relatively simple life of being a sort of Robin Hood-like figure, but his misadventures quickly lead to him getting caught up in a resistance movement with Dalmasca’s princess, Ashe, who aims to reverse the annexation of Dalmasca into the Archadian empire. After a lengthy and mildly confusing introduction segment, the plot picks up following Vaan, an orphaned petty thief with big dreams of one day becoming a sky pirate. In the land of Ivalice (which acts as the setting of several other games from Square) the two nations of Archadia and Rozzaria are at war with each other, catching the much smaller kingdom of Dalmasca in the crossfire. Echoing some of the earlier Fire Emblem games, this is more a story about the political intrigue surrounding an ongoing war between national superpowers. The story of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age takes a less character-centric approach to its narrative, a move which certainly increases the scope of the plot, but at the cost of making it less relatable than some predecessors in the series.
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