Not constantly stressing about when you last saved makes for a far more enjoyable game. The Zodiac Age adds an auto-save feature that saves your progress at the beginning of every new zone, meaning that if you do manage to let your entire party be wiped out you won’t lose a great deal of progress. Improvements over the game’s original incarnation help make this process of designing and testing your character creations less tedious. In a way, you’re becoming a junior AI programmer and watching your creations succeed or fail based on your design. Having characters play out your meticulously planned set of instructions is immensely satisfying. I found this idea of designing a combat recipe for success super engaging, and found myself examining the general strategies I used in turn-based games and mapping those to Gambits. As encounters become more difficult and varied throughout the game you’ll need to re-evaluate your Gambit choices in light of new abilities and changing opponents. Rather than primarily reacting to an enemy encounter, you’re pre-emptively trying to engineer the best set of Gambits for your three (or occasionally four) character party to deal with any upcoming situation. This change of combat style has huge ramifications on how you approach situations. You can also assign importance to each command, so you can make a character prioritise healing over combat magic as an example. As an example, I might choose to have a character use healing magic if a party member’s health falls below 40%, always attack the enemy targeted by the party leader, or use elemental magic when a nearby enemy is weak to a particular element.
#Final fantasy xii the zodiac age series
This is where Gambits come into play, allowing you to utilise a series of if/then logical instructions to dictate how your characters will approach situations. You can still give each character individual commands, but juggling a team of three or four characters in close to real-time is a near impossibility. The MMORPG comparisons go deeper still when you look at how combat actually plays out.
#Final fantasy xii the zodiac age free
There is no separate battle screen and you are free to navigate and avoid counters at your leisure. Rather than randomly entering battles while in combat areas, enemies you encounter share the field with you. Final Fantasy had flirted with the idea of making turn-based combat more ‘active’, specifically through the various iterations of the Active Time Battle system – XII takes this active combat concept and combines it with more MMORPG-style encounter design. It is completely unlike any Final Fantasy title before it, and while different to what would come later it hints at some of the series’ future direction. To me, the defining aspect of Final Fantasy XII is it’s combat system. It turns out I’d really missed out on something special until now.
The Zodiac Age was a chance for me to experience the game for the first time with the expectations of a player in 2017.
I never played Final Fantasy XII during its time, and so knew only of its reputation as being a bizarre black sheep of the series. Gone are the traditional turn-based battles and the characters defined by their own personal melodrama – in their place, a character programming combat system and a story concerned with the rise and fall of empires. With newly implemented trophies and share functions, as well as stark visual and sound improvements in true HD for the first time, players both returning and new to the game will experience a grand adventure that spans the world of Ivalice in an entirely fresh and improved way.Most of my Final Fantasy experiences come from the so-called golden age of Final Fantasy, the PlayStation era – so Final Fantasy XII is a bizarre left turn compared to what I’m used to from the series. The high-definition remaster introduces several modern advancements, including reconstructed battle design and a revamped job system. In a fight for freedom and fallen royalty, join these unlikely allies and their companions as they embark on a heroic adventure to free their homeland.Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age improves upon the 2006 classic Final Fantasy XII, now more beautiful and easier to play than ever. Vaan, a young man who lost his family in the war, dreams of flying freely in the skies. Princess Ashe, the one and only heir to the throne, devotes herself to the resistance to liberate her country. The small kingdom of Dalmasca, conquered by the Archadian Empire, is left in ruin and uncertainty. Enter an era of war within the world of Ivalice.