Wes: Final Fantasy 9 is that one game I'll probably wax poetic about for the rest of my life. It feels like a proper world you're exploring, at a level of fidelity no Final Fantasy game had delivered before. It's also hard to overstate how much FF12's world design-broken up into MMO-like zones, where everything is the same scale, rather than a world map or the disappointing list of locations like FF10's-adds to the believability of it as a place. But the flavor that story brings sets it so far apart from your typical teens-save-the-world JRPG. There's some great wartime politics to dig into here, though the throughline never quite explores them as much as it should. But before that: great stuff! The world and writing, like in Matsuno's Final Fantasy Tactics, are fantasy by way of Shakespearean tragedy, with a quippy rogue, a dutiful but disgraced knight, and a princess forced to step into a leadership role she never expected. It just, uh, kinda disappears and then completely falls apart in the last third of the game. Wes Fenlon: Sam and Tom are nuts: Final Fantasy 12 has probably the best, least cliche story in a Final Fantasy game this side of Tactics. Give me a good party of pals who go on a journey and kill lots of cactuars. Final Fantasy has never been good at telling stories about politics, kings and queens. Plus the story never quite gains momentum. You can’t really coast through it without engaging pretty heavily with the combat and character building, which can really drag in the first few hours. 12 has a different appeal to the rest of the series. Luckily 12 has my favourite RPG systems of any Final Fantasy and the fast-forward command added by the remaster means I can blast through zones, level up quickly, and test out new party lineups. Tom Senior: There were apparently a lot of rewrites and story-shuffling during development and it really shows.

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