And Then, There Were Twelve

These years of our lord 2006 and 2007 are proving to be a really great time for my favorite game franchises. I've talked Twilight Princess to death the last few days because it's really all I've been playing. In fact, my household is actually playing in shifts---id est, Gabe plays while I blog and I then play while he sleeps, ad infinitum. Even now, I can hear sword slashes and monkey howls wafting up the steps. The dog, somehow, remains nonchalant.

But that's not all the gaming goodness going on in our casa these days. As giddy as gamers get over Zelda, there are other hallmarks of gaming fame that get get our airship motors running---chief among them the macrocosmic Final Fantasy series, with its thirteen titular installments, two movies, countless spin-offs (including Tactics, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crystal Chronicles), and appearances in other games such as the fighter Ergheiz and the blockbuster Kingdom Hearts series. (In comparison, the Legend of Zelda series has thirteen titles, plus appearances in the Super Smash Brothers series, and an ill-fated cartoon that I think we'd all best forget.)

Most gamers---at least, any gamers who are even remotely familiar with the RPG genre---count the brutal and totally unexpected death of Aeris Gainsborough among the most definitive moments in gaming history (right up there with Samus Aran's gender-bending striptease back in 1987). And if you can think way back with me, back to 1990, maybe you can remember another defining moment in gaming: when you rescued Princess Sara of Corneria but instead of winning the game, the title screen rolled down to let you know that the game was actually just starting. For most of us, I think it's fair to say that installments VII and X (and, by association, X-2) have made an indelible impression on our collective gaming consciousness.

Final Fantasy XII is being billed as the best of the bunch, but it remains to be seen whether it can live up to the hype. If it's going to displace VII and X at the top of the list, it's going to have to be truly exceptional. So far (about 10 hours in) the plot and milieux are very immersive. It helps that the story takes place in the world of Ivalice, which has already been established in previous titles FF: Tactics, FF: Tactics Advance, and Vagrant Story. The graphics are about the best I've seen in any PS2 game (though I'm partial to the watercolor realism of Shadow of the Colossus) and feature an absolutely astonishing level of detail (see, e.g., Vaan's hair). But my favorite feature so far is the gameplay. Killa and I were divided on this at first, but I was glad to see the end of the random encounter engine.

In March 2006, Final Fantasy XII received a perfect 40/40 from Famitsu magazine, joining an elite group of only six titles (six including FFXII). This makes director Yasumi Matsuno only the second person ever to have two games (FFXII and Vagrant Story) in Famitsu's elite 40/40 club, after the venerable Shigeru Miyamoto (LoZ: The Ocarina of Time and LoZ: The Wind Waker).