Published on: 11th May, 2009
The Final Fantasy for everyone. That’s a promise likely to make hardcore fans fear for this spin-off from the epic PS2 game, but while it’s definitely not in the same league of complexity as last year’s FFIII remake, it’s undeniably a more immediate experience.
So out go the menu-driven, turn-based fights, the random encounters and the giant dungeons. Instead of all that daunting stuff, Revenant Wings has a combat system and open battlefields reminiscent of a realtime strategy game, simplified enough to negate the requirement for fiddly micro-management. At its most basic level you just show your team the enemy, wind them up and watch them go.
Of course there’s a little bit more to it than that. You have five team leaders, each of whom can summon allies, called Espers, from the monster generators dotted around most of the levels. The maximum number of Espers depends on the experience of the team leaders, and by assigning units evenly across the team you end up with five squads that can break up a larger enemy army and attack from multiple directions.
The squads can have different specializations, depending on the team leader. You might assign a healing character to stand towards the back of the melee, casting spells and protected by allies with long-range attacks, while a tough soldier-type would have hard-hitting squaddies to help him smash through the middle of the enemy’s defences.
Making progress through a level generally involves hacking your way to the next monster generator, where you can summon new allies to replace any that didn’t survive the journey. Some of the best levels pit your team against an evenly matched group of opponents, with generators of their own which you must commandeer to force the enemy back towards the crystal that marks the ultimate victory point. And they’ll be attempting to do the same to you.
With a close-up view of the battlefield and limited stylus controls, the game isn’t really designed for intricate strategies. In fact it has some strange quirks that are probably designed to discourage players from treating it as a traditional RTS – for example, groups of units are instantly deselected after you give them an order, and are hard to find again once they wade into battle.
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Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings | 
