Final Fantasy XII - Revenant Wings Review - A RTS Strategy for DS

Author's Rating:

Pros: fun-army/item management, top-notch graphics, fast missions

Cons: easy as pie, standard FF storyline, somewhat clunky controls.

The Bottom Line: 
Worth checking out if you're looking for some kind of RTS fix on the DS. Be warned though, this is no FF:Tactics.

Author's Review
While FFXII: Revenant Wings (RW) looks like Final Fantasy Tactics from the screenshots, it’s not. It’s actually a strange RTS-hybrid that is part FFXII in utilizing a gambit system, and strangely enough, part C&C, making it sort of a seemingly bizarre combination of games.

Gameplay – RTS Strategy in a Final Fantasy world

FFXII: RW might seem weird to most fans of the series because it takes a departure from the turn-based strategy we’ve been accustomed to seeing.

In FFXII: RW you control characters by dragging your stylus along the screen and boxing them much the way you’d select units in an RTS. You use the directional-pad to pan around the map, and you basically select units and send them to attack certain enemy parties in real-time in a 3d map. You can select individual party members to perform certain skills, and the goal of most battles is to eliminate the other team’s party leaders and / or capturing summoning gates along the way. Despite somewhat clunky controls for those used to a mouse, it's probably as good of an RTS attempt on the DS as one can manage.

The problem with FFXII: RW is not so much that it isn’t a bad idea, the real-time aspect certainly makes things more frenetic, but the strategy in this game is immensely lacking. For most of the game I basically selected my entire party, had them attack the party leader, and then took out each other enemy unit individually. Select all, attack, heal, select all, repeat.

The way the game is supposed to be played is kind of a rocks, scissors, paper system. You’re supposed to use your melee to kill ranged units, the ranged to kill air units, and the air units to kill melee. Then like most FF games, there are also elements to pay attention to. The problem is that you don’t have to do this at all to beat any of the maps. As far as I’m concerned, it’s like Starcraft, simply mass up your units, run over, and let them loose and watch them dish it out. The game does get harder on later levels, but this depends on how well you manage your army items/espers.

That said, like FFXII for PS2, the game practically plays itself. It even has the notorious “gambit” system, meaning you can tell certain party leaders to execute special moves whenever they become available- lending it to mostly a game about positioning. Move your characters to a suitable spot on the map so you don’t attract too many enemies, clean it up and move on to the next one. Attract too many and you might die.

To make things a touch more complicated you have to capture spots called summoning points. The enemy can basically call up a near infinite source of enemies from these points, so it’s important you capture them so that you can call up your own unlimited army of espers to win the fight. This adds some strategy again, but nothing that makes the fundamentals of the game all too complex.

Folks who have played FF: Tactics and enjoy the depth of strategy in that game will find themselves severely disappointed both with the difficulty and depth of FFXII: RW, but then again, maybe that’s not the point.

Great On the Go – Fun but Tedious Item Managing

FFXII: RW’s real winner comes in the fast pace of the missions and the item management. In maps you can collect resources which you can use to synthesize items for your party. This makes it most of the game about preparation. You can also level up your espers, and customize your party’s armies.

With fast missions that take a good 5-10 minutes to complete, FFXII: RW provides a real treat for portable entertainment that you can do in the middle of other tasks. I usually play this game while I’m walking somewhere (and hope I don’t walk into a tree or a signpost).

Finally, there's over 81 missions! Even if they go fast, there's plenty for the completionist.

Storyline – Crystals- Judges, yeah, yeah.

Same old stuff. The creepy Darth-Vader-like judges are back in FFXII, and you’re goal is to stop them from controlling crystals that will allow them to dominate the world. As a sky pirate you pick up a motley group of comrades along the journey and help them out in small bite-sized feel-good missions. Squaresoft-Enix sticks to its roots, which you can either see as a good thing or a bad thing. Yippy.

Graphically – Amazing but Laggy.

FFXII: RW pushes the limits of DS power with its combination of 3d maps and 2-d sprites as well as a few FMV scenes that are up to par with the FFXII series. Visually this is one of the best looking DS games I’ve seen. However the eye candy comes at a cost. With sometimes up to 30-40 sprites on a 3d-map, when you start attacking and throwing out all kinds of animation, from fireballs to sonic-waves, the game begins to lag like crazy. It gets slightly clippy but most notably, everything just slows down. Problem? This happens an awful lot…

Conclusion

FFXII: RW is a great DS excursion. Even though it does lack the depth I’d like to see from my strategy games and it is simply far too easy to mass up a powerful army to destroy everything on the map effortlessly, I still find it a fun waste of time as I fine-tune my already beefy army with extra gear they don’t need and gather rocks to add new espers to my army. For folks that enjoy army micro-management and are more interested in battle-preparations than actual fun battle-gameplay this might work out for you. The plot is nothing to scream about- but the production values from Square-Enix are always high and expanding the rich world of FFXII is always a cool distraction. Recommended with some reservations.