Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age Review

Because of when it launched, a lot of players didn’t get the chance to experience Final Fantasy XII. By doing a remaster, Square Enix is letting a lot more people in on one of the series’ best-kept secrets: it marked the first true move to (sort of) non-turn based combat, re-introduced us to the wonderful and politically complex world of Ivalice and starred some of the series’ best auxiliary characters (Fran and Balthier, naturally).

Thing is, the game is still flawed. No amount of HD spit and polish is going to completely fix that, but what we’re surprised about is just how fundamental some of the changes in The Zodiac Age are: by allowing each character to commit to two classes (instead of being locked into one set of skills) and re-addressing the balance in the combat, the game’s original weird difficulty spikes have been flattened into something altogether more manageable. That makes a huge difference, and makes the game more accessible, which is wonderful, because this is one of the best FF stories overall.

Yeah, OK, it’s a bit much to digest and it’s going to take you a while to get used to the olde worlde way a lot of the dialogue is parsed, but once you penetrate the strange language choices (and even stranger voice acting) the story is compelling. Your main character, Vaan, is nothing but a passive actor on the stage of Ivalice, really, and watching the royalty, the politicians, the engineers and the gods around you wrestle with the fate of kingdoms is as captivating as it ever was.

Characters in your main party are mostly introduced one by one, coming in slowly to help you manage what eventually becomes one of the most convoluted battle systems in the series (and that’s saying something). There should be a lightbulb moment for new players about 20 hours in, where the automated Gambit system clicks and makes you go ‘oh, I see!’ The Gambit system is effectively a flowchart paradigm, and good lord there’s some depth there if you really plumb for it.

Basically, you need to set up auto-attacks for your party if you want them to do a certain job. For example, we made Penelo our White Mage, so we set up Gambits for her, forcing her to heal any character who’s HP dipped below 50% and automatically cure status conditions as soon as they were inflicted. If she became mute - unable to cast spells - that would be the end of our party, so we made main character Vaan drop everything he’s doing and automatically heal Silence from Penelo if she was nullified.

Now, imagine that level of complexity with four active characters. It makes the start of the game a bit of a chore, but when you unlock all the abilities you need for everyone to be able to do their job properly (maybe halfway through the game), Final Fantasy XII really starts to sing for you. As it happens, that’s when the story really picks up, too.

Thanks to the ability to speed up the game, though, it’s not hard to harvest monsters for experience and LP (skill currency). We recommend playing at 2x speed for most battles and 4x speed for grinding, simply because at 4x speed the game becomes a bit cumbersome and navigation becomes a nightmare, too. The option to alter speed really helps: there is a lot of backtracking and fetch-questing in FFXII, and this becomes trivial thanks to tapping LB to speed up. The addition of the smooth overlay (a big translucent map) also helps matters by making navigation amazingly simple, too.

He's gonna blow!!

There’s also a kind-of survival mode in the game that feeds rewards into your main game if you clear certain benchmarks. This can be activated any time from the main menu, and offers quite a nice respite from the main game if it all gets a bit… heavy. It’s a wonderful playground to try out new character setups and Gambits, too, and often shows off just how tight and satisfying the battle system in Final Fantasy XII is.

Fans of the series will no doubt be impressed by the job Square Enix has done with remastering the audio, too: some tracks are rebalanced for modern setups, some are completely reorchestrated. The soaring classical vibe of Ivalice is authentically brought back to life, and - again - will hopefully do a wonderful job of showing people that missed out on the game the first time what a classic they overlooked.

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is an exemplary remaster, and does a lot of little things to address the flaws of the original game. There are still some underlying issues - dodgy voice acting, an overlong second act, weird level layouts - but for the most part, our issues with the base game have been addressed in a satisfying, you-get-your-money’s-worth kinda way.