I started Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age shortly before I finished Fire Emblem Echoes and I was really looking forward to playing through it. I think Final Fantasy XII is a divisive game for fans of the series. Some really don't like it much at all while others consider it to be one of the best of the series. I still hail titles like Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy Tactics as the best the series has to offer, but FFXII is certainly in the top 5, despite its flaws.
One of the main problems I had with the original version of the game was that its License Board was identical for all the playable characters. This meant that once you'd reached a point maybe 3/4ths of the way through the game, you'd unlocked the entire thing and each character had access to the same abilities and equipment options. The only real difference between the characters at that point would be the Quickenings and summons they had access to. This might have been enough to distinguish the characters in terms of play style if not for the fact that in the late game, neither Quickenings nor summons really matter at all. It's far more efficient at that point to simply let the game auto-battle because the amount of damage summons and Quickenings did weren't worth the time it took for them to cast.
The Zodiac Age is an excellent remaster because not only does it makes a nice-looking game look even nicer, but it also completely overhauls the License Board. Each of the game's characters can now assume a set of character classes, limiting the types of skills and options they can access on the License Board. On the surface it might seem bad to limit the options each character has but I actually really like it because it forces you to make choices and construct builds that make each character very different from each other.
I was already a fan of the game's core gameplay, so fixing one of the primary issues I had with the original game results in a much-improved title that serves as the definitive version of the game for me. If I was hesitant to include the game in my top 5 Final Fantasies before, this remaster makes it a lot easier. The sprawling dungeons, exploration, and addictive and kind of strange AI customization combat all really work for me. I also like Quickenings and summons a lot, even if they still really fall off late game just like they did in the original version of the game.
The Zodiac Age does still of course have issues. Vaan and Penelo are still really bland and unimportant characters in the grand scheme of things and some of the ultimate weapons in the game have really annoying requirements to acquire. (Not as annoying as Final Fantasy X, of course, but still.) Also, Giruvegan is a tremendously irritating dungeon to traverse and I didn't enjoy playing through it a second time. Despite these faults, I still consider FFXII the best modern Final Fantasy and the remaster makes a good game great.
The other game I finished in August 2017 was actually Pokemon Moon. It took me quite a long time to get through this game because although I like Pokemon in general, I found Sun and Moon to be overwhelmingly tedious. It's been discussed online a lot that the game has a lot of really bland and overlong cutscenes. In a game where the story has never been the primary focus, including these long, irrelevant cutscenes seems like a big misstep. Some of the new pokemon designs are pretty cool and I thought the fact that it abandoned the more traditional gym structure was interesting, but the tedium of the story really detracts from the experience. It's interesting, too, because a lot of the changes Sun and Moon make are for the better, but so much of it just doesn't work in practice. I'm interested to see where Game Freak takes the series from here. At this point I wonder if maybe the series just isn't for me anymore.
Coming up in September, more Final Fantasy?!
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