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Rating: 
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I am offically let down by this game...I so wanted to love it, but after I got into and played through it, I just couldn't...The new battle system is wonderful..and some of the details in it are awesome as well...Like being able to see there weapons on them as there running around...But the story....There was no development of the story...I had no connection with the characters at all...I didn't care if they lived or died..And I actually stopped playing the game for a like a month cause I just lost interest...For me, I was hoping this one would top FF X...I thought that was the best game I had ever played..The music was wonderful..The music in FFXII was just ok..It sounded like they took music from every other FF game and just watered it down..The story on FFX was so capturing I couldn't stop playing it...I beat FFX in like a week cause I just couldn't get enough..Now, I don't want another FFX game just redone, but put some time into the story of the game...Thats what FF is all about...THE STORY and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT...Battle systems are awesome and the enviroment is awesome, but without a great story, all that stuff will just fall flat...But hey, thats just this gamers opinion....
Rating: 
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After a complete playthrough, I decided to give the positive and negative points of this epic campaign called Final Fantasy XII.
Positive:
- Better than its predecessor FFXI; FFXII takes the best elements of the online version and incorporates them well into this verson.
- Intuitive combat system, challenging when played live and not turn-based
- Beautiful graphics and a great soundtrack despite the system's limitations
- Better voice acting than FFX, contributes to character development
- The best storyline in an RPG to date, there is nothing better
Negative:
- Combat system is easy; essentially automatic on regular enemy fights
- Confusing license system
- Combat relies mostly on melee and healing spells, mages are slow and almost worthless
- No progressive scan feature (not a big deal, but would be nice for HDTVs)
- Setting up spell and auto attack features for characters becomes a chore
The game in itself is an epic story told through a video game. You could easily take the policial issues shown in this game and incorporate it into a Tom Clancy novel, only set in a mideval atmosphere. I am hard-preseed to see another RPG that has something this deep and adult-oriented on plot.
The main character you play unfortunately doesn't play into the political strife of the game, and I think it is mostly because of his age. You play a 17-year-old vagrant named Vaan. While I dreaded playing a whiney teenage character due to previous RPG experiences (dot hack and FFX being prime examples), Vaan is anything but. He does go off on tangent at times, but it is nowhere near the extent that I expected. Despite his maturity on the situation, you feel Vaan is more of an observer of the politics than a player. He stays quiet through many of the cut scenes. Basch would have been my pick for the main character. He was directly involved with most of the story, and had a great redeeming quality about him I felt could have been explored more if I followed him instead.
Beyond the storyline and character development, the combat system is a mixed bag of bolts. The gambit system, which dictates how your character friends fight for you, was a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing in that I didn't have to worry about taking care of other people in my party beyond myself, and a curse in that it made the game easy. You can set up the gambit system and ADP to automatically fight battles. This makes it so you run in the direction of an enemy and it is killed without having to press a button. I didn't understand how the core element of gameplay could be automated like this and not have been improved upon (Star Ocean's battle system is a great example of how FFXII could have been).
I also found that bringing a caster character that didn't heal was a worthless slot. Fighter characters do more damage over time, and you can set them up to heal themselves. If you bring a character that only does spell damage, they take twice as long to cast, and do the same damage as a front-line fighter. There were many instances were a mage character (Fran) wouldn't be able to get a spell off on an enemy till a boss fight. I had an easier time with a team full of hybrid healers with one primary healer than I did with a damage caster.
However I consider these nuisances small toward the total scope of this installment of Final Fantasy. Plot development is top-notch, and other RPG companies can easily take a lesson from FFXII on how not to make another dull manga-looking game about "saving the world from total destruction". This game will remain timeless because of its quality, and I recommend playing this to anyone who enjoys epic RPGs.
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If you are a fan of classic FF games then this game may not be for you the new battle system is completely different but that is not were the game lakes the battle system is nice and can sometimes make a battle that looks easy get intense, the game really lakes in story the story is good but it lakes a lot of classic FF story themes like a love interest and the ability to fly an air ship now I know that the "main" char is supposed to be an a wanabe air pirate but you never get to fly there air ship they show it a couple times in the beginning of the game but then they drop it off in the desert and you never see it again they make you walk everywhere sometimes from one end of the map all the way to the other it is Worse the World of Warcraft because at lease you get mounts in that game now i know you going to say well wait about Chocobos well that is another flaw in the game, you get to ride them but the rides are timed and it is rare that you even find a chocobo so mounts blow in this game the only thing that makes this game fun is the battle system I could go on and on about this game but I think I have said enough
Rating: -
FF12 is not by any means another FF7 or FF8 and, though it is far from being the least attractive of the series, signs are not wanting that the rich vein which Square and their various followers have worked for so many years is, at last, dangerously near exhaustion. In FF12, there are many parts where the plot is so convoluted and complicated that it can barely be followed. In the best examples of the series, we had characters that were easy to figure out, villains with clear motives, missions with goals that advance the plot, and customising options that didn't take all day to figure out. While I had a blast playing through this 100-hour game the first time, repeated plays were found to quickly pall and spread feelings of incipient boredom and audibly hostile responses. That said, the first playing of the game should wow anyone - when it's over, don't play it again for a long time. Let it pass completely out of memory if you can. Then replay from the beginning - if it bores you to death, you'll know what I'm feeling.
However, it is not a game without merit. The imagery is excellent, and so is the score (oddly *not* by Uematsu, though there are a few bits by him). The voices are often quite good, with the exception of Vaan, whose voice has too much glottal stop and reveals no personality at all. It is true that Vaan is a colourless, lifeless part, but even a colourless and lifeless part may be quickened into colour, animated into life by a well-chosen, consistently carried out reading. And this the actor failed to do. He does not seem to have any clear conception of what the part is like or what might be done with it. As Vaan is the central character for the first hour of the game, this works to the detriment of the story.
There is certainly much to explore and discover, and one cannot play the entire game without at least 100 hours put into it. This was obviously designed to keep the players occupied from first to last. A problem I suffered with the story was its lack of clarity. Oftentimes, you're told to get from point A to point B without a reason more than "go see this person", as if that could solve everything. By the time I got there, I forgot why I was there in the first place. I found many of the missions utterly contrived and almost unnecessary (not the Hunts - which are excellently designed! - the journeys to the Draklor Laboratory, or Giruvegan or Bur-Omisace didn't seem to have a strong reason to go there at all). And the subquests are so invisible as not to be noticed at all. To add to the disorder of the game, the mini-game is just trading information. You spend 90% of them just talking to people. How much fun is that? It's not blitzball, nor Sphere Break, nor the Gold Saucer. It's dull and unimaginative.
While I enjoyed the intellect of the dialogue and its construction, there are too many points where the action ceases entirely and we get the feeling that nothing in particular is happening, no progress being made. This lack of development hangs like a blight over the game. How could such an able team make so great a mistake??
I like the game, but I feel that judicious use of the pruning knife would be nothing but beneficial to a game with so much going for and against it. I'm not quite sure how it begins and I'm in considerable doubt about the ending. It's not an excruciatingly bad game to play, as some reviews may lead you to believe, but it has some challenges that just cannot be overcome, all of which are enumerated above. New-style Final Fantasy has mixed results: you either have to play it once and sometimes, you don't.
Rating: 
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I have played almost every Final Fantasy since the very first one for the NES. When I first purchased this game, I was looking forward to not being able to put it down. I find myself putting it down for a week at a time. Not standard Final Fantasy for me. The game itself is amazing. The battle system, the license system, the gambits, and the side quests are the best yet. The story on the other hand was not very good. At times I would continue the story just so I could have more hunts added. I did not dislike the story all together, but it was very boring and I honestly did not care what happened to the characters. One thing lacking was a main character. I missed that stand out main character from VII, VIII, X, or even X-2. You could play as any one of these characters and it did not matter. Others have knocked the license system for not having a certain class for each character. I thought this was a wonderful addition. You can customize each character the way you want and still give them the best weapons of the game and not just one specific weapon you have to jump through hoops to get. All in all this is a good game, but I play Final Fantasy for the story and this one falls a little short.
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