Ever since Final Fantasy IX the series struggled to get to the same levels of love and adoration that the earlier entries received. I myself only recently got over myself to check Final Fantasy X (in it’s HD form) to discover that it was better than I originally gave it credit. XI and XIV are solid MMOs, but due to the massively multiplayer nature don’t get necessarily the same audience who loves the series for the singleplayer stories and characters. XIII was a hot mess. And XV, while enjoyable, turned out to be a bunch of cool but rough ideas, which sometimes combined into something fun, but almost as often fell apart. There was one game, however, that I did play about 10 years ago, highly enjoyed my time with it, yet, when it was time to beat the last boss of the game, got tired and decided to return to it sometime later.
Well, sometime later is now. And replaying Final Fantasy XII in its The Zodiac Age remastered version on PC was far more enjoyable than I expected.
Some people call FF XII a “singleplayer MMO” and it’s easy to see why – it looks and works very similarly to how XI did despite having no online features whatsoever. Even its main side-content, called “Hunts”, feels like something out of a multiplayer title – go out in the world and kill a very specific dangerous boss. The fights are real-time too, with no special maps to load and unload every time you enter combat and no victory fanfare for fights, apart from the boss encounters. Which is helped by the fact that the farther the game progresses, and this happens quicker in The Zodiac Age, the less you control the characters you play as directly to avoid lots of micromanagement, since you can set up the system of “Gambits” – simple “If>Then” rules ordered manually that the characters will be following.
This changes everything. Locations are allowed to be big, enemies are always visible and, unless it’s a story encounter, fights can be avoided. Encounters you engage in are normally brief enough, yet can be challenging in a fun way. The world is a huge interconnected map with loading zones between each segment, which manages to perfectly translate the size of the territory you cover across the entire game while keeping the world fun to explore (and for the first time in the series, it is just one kingdom, not the entire known world). Even the story adapts to this and instead of going for some typical “saving the world” plot FF games are known for, goes for a much smaller in size (though still important in terms of implications it carries) attempt to save a neutral kingdom from becoming a battleground for a war among two huge empires.
And people tend to not be too hot on the plot of this game, which I can understand. It has some rather frustrating downtimes, especially if you try to complete the optional activities as well, it often times feels a bit too heavily inspired by the plot of the Star Wars’ Original Trilogy. And the “main” character, the one whom we always control in cities/non-combat areas, is easily the least interesting of the bunch. That said, however, I feel like one big reason people dislike him, or the plot as a whole, is due to the English voice acting in the game. While X had some questionable VA choices, its performances and audio mixing were top-notch. In XII English VA is genuinely not worth even trying – voices are mixed in a way that sounds like a cheaper dub, like they’re not part of the game world, and a lot of key characters sound completely disinterested in the events they are part of. Luckily, in The Zodiac Age this issue is easily fixed by switching to the original Japanese voices, which can be done in the options at any point as long as you can go into the menu.
And that’s far from the only thing The Zodiac Age improves upon. The biggest gameplay change here is the switch from a unified “License board” (that unlocks equipment proficiency and skills) for every character to the Zodiac Job System. The original made the game into a somewhat messy experience where it was easy to spec several characters in the exact same way and harder to choose who should excel at what. With the new system, you can choose a specific Job (a FF name for a Class) for each character as they become available, and later a second Job, turning everyone into a more specialized, yet balanced character. Now, it is possible to just make everyone the same and potentially ruin your experience, instead of giving each character a unique pair of jobs (there are 6 characters and 12 jobs available) and in the current PC and PS4 version you would be stuck with your questionable choice forever. However, the newer recently released Xbox One and Switch versions of the game allow you to respec characters, which might get added to the earlier versions of the game as well. I don’t think it’s necessary, especially if you’re going for the main game mostly, as only some of the harder optional content might require some minmaxing, but it’s still a neat option to have.
Another extremely important change to The Zodiac Age is how many little quality of life features are added. You get an autosave for every loading screen, every loading screen is super quick (DVD-based PS2 original was pretty frustratingly slow at times) and you get the return of the Turbo button, which still allows you to either times 2 or times 4 all the gameplay, except now it’s tied to the gamepad button as well, making it extremely useful for any backtracking, repeated actions or re-exploration of areas. If you’ve tried to 100% the original and remember some of those optional fights or optional grinding spots that could take several hours of real time to go through, this will probably be as joyous to you as it was for me. I did most of the things in the game this time and it took me “just” under 85 hours simply due to that magic turbo button. If I were to attempt the same with original PS2 speeds, the same would’ve taken me well over 150 hours and I would’ve gotten really bored.
Though, even with the improvements and the joys that were already part of the original, some design elements of FF XII are just obnoxious or tedious. There’s a huge over-reliance on randomness – most treasures are randomized, for example, and unless they have some unique loot in them, have a chance to re-spawn as you re-enter the area. Which is annoying in itself, but in The Zodiac Age, where most of the magic and skills were moved from the shops to said chests that you randomly find, it’s obnoxious that some of these chests actually don’t even have a 100% chance of spawning. Yes, you might be lacking a skill or a spell because despite cleaning the entire area thoroughly you missed the chest with it, because it simply didn’t spawn. Concepts like “rare game” are also cooler on paper than in reality, where if you decide to actually hunt them down you are again at the mercy of pure random chance. Some of the optional fights actually got even more annoying and hard in Zodiac Age due to bumping the levels or difficulty of the enemies for seemingly no real reason. Though, even without these bumps, a lot of the boss/hunt fights have this annoying tendency where you spend 75% of the fight easily winning until the boss enters it’s final throes mode and starts combo-one-shot-ing your entire team and eliminating the last several minutes of progress for no discernible reason.
There are minor but constant annoyances as well. For example, the Gambit slots for your characters are unlocked as part of the License Board, instead of just being all available from the start, while the rules are sold (you do get almost all rules from the start of the game this time, though). Which turns this “cool strategic feature that makes the game fun” into a “reward”, despite the fact that without this “reward” this game is just utterly tedious and unfun, requiring you to micromanage 3-4 people in real time with a gamepad. There are no “profiles” to save for the gambits as well in the PC/PS4 port, so if you need to re-adapt for a specific area and then go back to the earlier set of rules you have to redo the whole thing every time manually. Luckily, this is another thing that got improved in the Xbox/Switch port with 3 “profile” slots, so here’s hoping that gets added to the rest of the versions as well. The Loot and Bazaar systems are also ridiculous – during the early game when you don’t really even care about trying to get specific bazaar items you might as well just have an option to “sell all loot” which is absent, while during the ending parts of the game, if you are going for optional things, the limitation of the original game was kept in the update. So if you need to get specific item several times, you can’t just sell all you have and get multiples of what you need on sale, you have to portion selling and buying manually, otherwise, whatever you sell in excess is “wasted”. Oh and all of the side-quests that aren’t Hunts aren’t even saved in any sort of a Journal, so if you’ve been doing something, stopped playing, then returned to the game you will probably forget all about what you were doing. Despite the fact that some of the side-quests can get pretty complex.
Yet again, I’m going far deeper into this whole game and its optional stuff here than a lot of people might want to go. When played for story only or mostly, doing the optional stuff that is just along the main way, the game’s exciting and fun. And all the Zodiac Age does makes the original more fun and more enjoyable. Visually it’s a really good looking game with the art design very easily improved with the “HD” remaster facelift to the point where some realtime rendered scenes look as good as the game’s CGI cutscenes. Music in the game is fantastic and easily one of my favorite Final Fantasy soundtracks ever. It’s also probably the only “consistent” and easily recognizable score of all post-Uematsu Final Fantasy titles. The world of Ivalice is interesting and I actually enjoyed the story far more than on my original playthrough, most likely due to the Japanese VA. And the gameplay is just really fun to get into. It takes some time getting used to and the game does take at least 10 hours or so to give you most of the options and then probably 5 hours more until you get all the basic options for planning the jobs, the license points, the (mostly useless but cool looking) quickenings/limit breaks and gambits. And despite being a game where you end up rarely controlling your characters during combat directly, it’s one of the most engaging and fun combat systems in FF series so far.
Of all the post-IX Final Fantasy titles Final Fantasy XII was the most enjoyable to me almost 10 years ago. Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age made the game even better than it originally was. FF X might have the most well-paced story of the voice acted FF games, XIII-2 might be one of the most risky and bizarre games in the franchise and XV probably has the most memorable main cast that you grow to care about (and the best English voice acting overall). But XII is the best Final Fantasy game since 2001 to play. Heck, it’s one of my personal favorite Final Fantasy titles, come to think of it, one of the ones I enjoyed most. Would highly recommend checking it out, as long as you have time to spare on it.