Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings Review




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Developer: Square-Enix Publisher: Square-Enix
Release Date: November 20, 2007 Also On: None

I’d say it’s about time SquareEnix published another DS Final Fantasy game. Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy III wasn’t bad—but I have been thirsty for some magick and Revenant Wings. Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is a confused game to many: SquareEnix also announced a game that is now called Final Fantasy Tactics A2: The Sealed Grimoire, which is the spirited sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Although Revenant Wings isn’t a sequel to Final Fantasy XII, it continues the story. Both games are strategy-RPGs, but A2 is the turn-based strategy-RPG, where Revnant Wings is the action-based strategy-RPG. Got all that?

Vaan’s dreams of becoming a sky pirate finally came true. Just a year after the events of Final Fantasy XII, Vaan and his team of friends (including “fan-favorite” Penelo) find themselves thrown into another catastrophic struggle to save the world. The Judge of Wings and her powerful espers are bent on destroying Lemures, the sky continent above Ivalice. To do so, she has to march upon several auraliths and destroy them. Vaan and several familiar faces (Penelo, Kytes, Fran, etc.) make up your primary party throughout the game but supporting characters (Tomaj, Ba’Gamnan, etc.) also reappear in Revenant Wings.

There were a few points throughout the storyline where I was interested in what was going on though truthfully the story doesn’t even crack into anything as deep as what Final Fantasy XII had to offer. The primary form of entertainment came from gameplay. I enjoyed the gameplay so much that if I didn’t like the story at all, I could have ignored it for the sake of just playing the game. SquareEnix couldn’t have recreated the gameplay of Final Fantasy XII any better than they did here. The Gambits and Quickenings return, and function almost exactly like they did in the original game. You can direct units around with ease thanks to a select-all button and a simple HUD on the touch screen that utilizes handy tabs and large icons. If you need Kytes to cast firaga toward a group of oncoming ice enemies, you can do so easily while still having him perform his selected Gambit. Short of directly controlling Vaan and his cohorts with directional buttons (which you do on the overworld) and selecting commands on a sub-screen, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings feels very similar to the original.

The fact that Revenant Wings was done so smoothly is primed with the obvious alternative: it doesn’t handle poorly. Similar games (Lost Magic, ew) were much harder to play, and despite the fact that some of the sprites on the battlefield are a bit on the small side, Revenant Wings never becomes difficult to play. I will always recommend this to DS gamers; pick up styli with smaller tips than the DS’s included stylus. This makes selecting units and directing attacks (as well as simple directions) a lot simpler here. A small complaint is that the unit A.I. across the board isn’t very intelligent. Neither your group leaders (Vaan, Penelo) nor their esper monsters (I’ll describe these in a second), make the best decisions on the battlefield. The same goes for enemy leaders and their espers. Summoning gates often go ignored, and they are an incredibly valuable asset for either team: think of them like a King of the Hill where the Hill spits out monsters for you.

All more annoying is that it seems your party’s healers and revivers never want to use these very crucial skills. As you charge head-first into packs of powerful enemies or boss characters your weaker espers will drop like flies, and weaker characters (Penelo, Filo) won’t be able to hold up for long. Not long into the game Penelo and Lyyud (he’s an aegyl, emotionless creatures that resemble angels) learn curing and reviving skills but even when I’d set the revive spell or curaga to a Gambit, they’d go ignored. Fortunately some of the espers that you can summon are capable of curing your party as well.

Next, I’ll explain the espers I’ve been talking about. These creatures are similar to the monsters you could capture and use in Lost Magic, but they are expendable and can be re-summoned if Summoning Gates are found and captured. They come in ranks; Rank I monsters like Bomb, Cactaur, and Sylph don’t do a ton of damage but they can still annoy enemies by swarming them and distracting them from Rank II and III ones. Rank II creatures (Diablos, Tonberry, Ixion) are more powerful and make up the bulk of your strength when Summoning Gates can’t be found. Rank III espers require summoning from a Gate, but they are incredibly powerful and often act as another party member. These espers include some classic Final Fantasy favorites like Ifrit, Leviathan, and Titan, among others. All espers can be leveled up with AP crystals collected over time in each battle, making them more powerful and useful in the long run.

Of course, you don’t start with all of these espers: throughout the game you have to scavenge and pillage auracite, a powerful crystal used to form a “pact” with the espers. On the “ring of pacts” (which is very familiar to the license board and sphere grid) you can manually select which espers you want to form a bond with and each of the game’s six elements are represented throughout the ring. Neutral creatures like Chocobo show up as grey espers, while lightning ones like Tiamat will show up yellow. It’s a very simple system. Also, the weapon synthesizing system is easy to use, effective, and rewarding. Collecting and scavenging in each level is incredibly beneficial, as well as finding and equipping items that boost your item-collecting luck: using elements and materials found in battle, you can forge incredibly powerful weapons. I would say that none of the weapons Tomaj offers at his shop could stand a chance against a synthesized weapon made with rare materials.

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings uses an interesting visual style, mixing colorful sprites and backgrounds akin to watercolor paintings. I’m not getting carried away: the game doesn’t look as great as Odin Sphere or anything like that, but it certainly looks nice on the DS. Things get slightly grainy up close, but I have come to expect that from any game on the DS. The music and sound effects are familiar and effective. Finally, I applaud SquareEnix for their use of CG video sequences—they are exciting, look great, and sound great.

To play Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is fun and rewarding. Almost every hour you put into it will have a satisfactory conclusion. With almost 100 missions, it is a long game: I would estimate most players could spend up to 50-60 hours doing everything. This is why it is a great game for Final Fantasy fans, DS owners, strategy-RPG gamers, and the curious alike. Hours could be lost in battle leveling characters, learning spells, forming pacts with espers, and fighting through every single challenge the game has to offer. Really, the game’s biggest and nastiest flaw is a lack of Nintendo WFC multiplayer matches. I would have loved to take my favorite troupe of espers up against a friend in an epic battle above Ivalice. However, that doesn’t keep this game from being one of the better DS games this year.

Graphics: 8.5
Sound: 8
Gameplay: 9
Creativity: 8.5
Replay Value/Game Length: 10
Final: 9
Written by Cliff Review Guide

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