The timing of Final Fantasy XII's release on the PS2 in 2007 was pretty bad for me, since it was released one year after the launch of the Xbox 360. At that point, I had invested in an HDTV (High-Definition TV). I enjoyed crisp, high-definition visuals, great sound coming from my home theater system, and a comfortable ergonomic wireless controller. 

Since Final Fantasy XII was released on the PS2, it was not on my radar at the time. I discovered the game when it filled an entire shelf in one of my local electronics stores. As a long-time fan of the Final Fantasy game series, I immediately purchased the game and brought it home to try out. Unfortunately, I was not very pleased with the game. The controls felt clunky, and the PS2 visuals appeared incredibly dull, with a matte and washed-out look on my LCD HDTV.

To make matters worse, the audio was heavily compressed and sounded like low-quality MP3 files. The gameplay also felt strange, since it reminded me of a single-player version of an MMORPG, such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI. In addition, I didn't like the Gambit system for programming the character's behaviour. After playing the game for about 20 hours, I quit the game out of frustration because of how slow and tedious the level grinding and general gameplay felt.

In this article, almost twenty years after its initial release, I will review the Steam (Windows) version of Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, a remastered and improved version of the game.

At a high level, Final Fantasy XII is a single-player, turn-based fantasy role-playing game set in the world of Ivalice. This is the same game world used in Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics. The world of Ivalice is a medieval fantasy world heavily inspired by the architecture and culture of the Middle East. The characters and locations remind me of the Prince of Persia games, as well as paintings I have seen from India and Egypt. To make a unique spin on the locations, the developers mixed in a bit of European design on armour, and some steampunk elements for the high-tech parts of the game, like airships and machines. 

I spent the summer of 2025 playing this game, and accumulated more than 80 hours of gameplay before completing the game.

The Zodiac Age version of the game offers several improvements that enhance the overall experience significantly compared to the PS2 version.

A proper Job/Class system! There is no longer a single licence board, where every character starts at a different location, and ends up with the same abilities. The game allows you to select a second job after getting your first Esper/summon. This makes the combat so much more interesting and fun.

Auto-save. Every time you go to a new location, the game auto-saves. This prevents you from losing time spent grinding, or from traversing long distances and dying because you happened to stumble upon an overpowered enemy.

Speed-up. At any time during gameplay, you can toggle a 2x or 4x speed in the game by pressing a button. This makes grinding and navigating areas with many enemies less tedious and time-consuming.

Access to ALL gambits at ALL the gambit stores. You no longer have to hunt for the good gambits that you need or want; you just purchase them for a relatively small sum.

Improved audio quality. The characters' voices no longer sound like they come from a walkie-talkie. And all the background music has been re-recorded using a live orchestra. This makes a huge difference in how I enjoy the game.

Improved textures and screen resolution. The game looks fantastic on 4K and 1440p screens. The character textures have been updated, and now look like painted miniatures. I love the new look.

Achievements. You can now play the metagame of earning achievements. Most of these achievements align with what earns you tokens in the in-game "Skypirates den" found in the "clan primer".

For unknown reasons, the games have a frame rate cap of 60 FPS. I suppose this is because the game was programmed to run at a specific framerate to calculate animations and game mechanics. Despite this, the game supports all resolutions and aspect ratios, including super ultrawide (32:9). 

To prevent screen tearing, you must enable vsync in-game, but if your monitor's framerate is higher than 60Hz, you should disable G-Sync. Before disabling G-Sync on my monitor, the game would bug out and run at 4x speed, making it unplayable.

It supports gamepads with rumble and maps the buttons with correct labels for both Xbox and PlayStation controllers.

At first glance, the battle system of Final Fantasy XII looks like an MMORPG for offline single-player. In reality, it's not like that at all. The game is somewhat based on the ATB (Active Time Battle) system from previous Final Fantasy games, but instead of being transferred to a battle screen where the battle happens, every battle is played out in the game world in pausable real-time. This is similar to Star Wars: KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, and Mass Effect. At any time, you can open the battle menu by pressing the action button. This will pause the game and allow you to take your time to select what actions you want each character to take. If you choose multiple actions, the actions will queue, and execute in the order you entered them.

You see every foe you might have to battle, and can choose to run past them, or to engage in battle. This eliminates the annoyance of random encounters, which I tend to grow tired of in most JRPGs.

During gameplay, you control three characters from your team of up to six characters. If you want to, and as long as an enemy does not target that character, or the character is not performing any action, you can swap that character out with a character in your team that is not in play. To reduce the micromanagement required for each team member during battles, the game features a system that allows for programming each character's actions using ordered "if-then" statements, known as gambits. This system makes the battles fast and fun, and in a novel way, makes you feel how powerful characters get when they gain new levels, learn new abilities, and get new equipment.

Before a new spell, skill, or equipment can be used by the characters, the characters have to learn to use it by spending LP (Licence Point) on their Licence board. At the start of the game, each character has to choose a Licence Board, by selecting one of the 12 job classes available. The licence board for each job class allows the character to learn skills related to the job class. In practice, this gives a White mage access to healing spells, and equipment that is typically associated with a white mage. A knight will learn to use skills and equipment related to a Knight. This makes the character progression feel natural, and makes each character specialized in the job class you selected for them. Later in the game, each character can spend some LP to unlock a second job class, making it possible to have a sword-wielding black mage that can both do terrible damage with double-handed swords, and cast powerful black magic.

Final Fantasy XII: Zodiac Age is an incredible case study in how game design triumphs over game mechanics. Fundamentally, the game mechanics are identical to the original PS2 release. Still, the seemingly simple change in how the license board is structured into job classes makes each character more interesting and fun to play with. On the original PS2 version, all characters shared the same, large license board. This made all my characters feel the same during the late stages of the game. This made me uninterested in the characters themselves, simply because they became too generic and bland. By assigning each character a distinct role that matched their personality in the story, the entire experience became significantly more enjoyable.

Another significant consequence of the new game design is how you gain new gambits. The biggest frustration I had with the original PS2 version was that I often missed a special gambit that would have made the gambit system work the way I wanted it to. In the Zodiac Age version, I can purchase all the gambits from any gambit store in the game. Because of this, I'm only limited to what spells, items, and techniques my characters have, and my creativity in how I set up the gambits. I think it's fun to see that my "programming" of each character makes the team effective during battles.

The ability to speed up the game makes some of the more drawn-out boss battles and longer travel sections a lot less tedious. With a proper gambit setup, I can confidently speed up the game to 2x speed during long sections of a boss battle, where my characters follow my gambits, and do, just as I programmed them to do. This might sound boring, but I love how the game rewards me for setting up clever gambits in preparation for difficult battles.

Final Fantasy XII is the first truly open-world JRPG I have ever played, and it is also the first JRPG I have ever played where I never felt I had to level grind before boss battles. This is because of how well the maps were designed and how fun the sidequests were. The game and story were linear, but each area in the game was so open that I always felt like I was exploring the world of Ivalice. When entering a new area, I always felt the urge to explore the entire map before proceeding to the obvious next section of the game. This exploration made me discover valuable items, and gain XP and LP. Because of this, I always thought that the boss battles were a challenge, but never so hard that I had to go back and grind for many hours, like I have in every other JRPG I have played. 

During my explorations, I often came across areas where my party did not stand a chance against the monsters in that area. When revisiting those areas later in the game, when the story took me there, or when venturing on my own on hunts, or searching for new items or espers, it was fun to feel how powerful my characters had become.

I especially liked the hunt system, where you could take on challenges to kill monsters posted by the inhabitants of Ivalice. These hunts gave me incentives to revisit areas in the game, uncover hidden places, and challenge myself with more difficult battles to earn Gil (the currency in the game) and valuable items.

The open-world nature of the game makes this entry in the Final Fantasy franchise seem a bit disconnected from the rest of the games in the series. The world of Ivalice is one of the most lived-in and living game worlds I have ever played in, even rivaling my all-time favorite game world of Mass Effect. Looking at the game in 2025, I find it remarkable that they were able to add so much content, and have so much geometry in a PlayStation 2 title.

Compared to any of the other games in the Final Fantasy series since the Super Nintendo era, I thought the story was a bit weak. Four of the main characters felt somewhat strong, but the two youngest characters, Vaan and Penello, had too little character development for my taste. This made them often feel like sidekicks that was just thrown into the game to appeal to a younger audience. This felt strange since Vaan was presented as the main character in the game, similar to Tidus in Final Fantasy X and Cloud in Final Fantasy VII. To me, the main characters were Basch and Ash, Balthier and Fran. Vann and Penello are just along for the ride because they apparently have nothing better to do with their time.