Last night, I finally beat Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. Revenant Wings is a squad-based real-time strategy game that takes place after the events of Final Fantasy XII proper and reuses most of the characters. My brother gave it to me for Christmas last year (2008) and though I played it a bit at the time, I didn't really grok the game at the time. Over the course of last year, I eventually played through the game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II. It uses a similar enough play concept (though obviously divergent due to source material and the differences between the DS and PC) that once I eventually went back to Revenant Wings, the whole thing just sortof clicked.

The game itself is played with a squad of (up to) five "hero" character with each hero having a set of supporting espers. It uses a relatively standard rock-paper-scissors of unit types with melee beating ranged which beats flying which in turn beats ranged again. There are also healing units which don't really enter into the RPS (aside from mostly losing to everything). The game is divided up into about 90 different stages. Each stage takes about 15-20 minutes to beat (usually) which makes it an easy game to pick up and put down.

My main irritation with the game is actually something I didn't discover until I had almost beaten it. In addition to the plot missions (which make up a little less than half the total), the game also has side missions. These missions provide various benefits--crafting materials, unlocking additional espers, special weapons--but are otherwise completely unnecessary. The game keeps track of all of the missions that you've beaten, and, should you beat all of the missions, there is a secret ending. I decided to go about getting the special ending which necessitated me going through the Optional Dungeon of Ridiculous Difficulty^TM. After doing everything else, I figured it would be trivial to walk up to the final boss an just destroy him. Instead, it turns out that getting 100% completion causes the final boss to go from being about level 60 to being level 99. This effect also applies to all of his mooks and thus dramatically raises the difficulty of that fight. At the time, I was otherwise around level 55 or so. I was unable to beat even a single part of his 3 part form, despite having cleared every other obstacle in the entire game.

I then began a depressing level grind that has gone on for weeks. The Optional Dungeon's first level gives the most experience of any fight in the game (about a quarter of a level) and can be cleared in under 4 minutes. At this point, it would be difficult for me to say for sure how many times I beat it, but I finished the game at level 93, so you can perhaps do some interpolation. Luckily, since I could clear the level in such a short period of time, I rarely spent very long doing it continuously.

Aside from this glaring deficiency in the end game (or player hate from the developers, I'm not sure which), the game is actually pretty solid. There are some pathfinding issues, but since you're mostly micromanaging your units, it usually isn't a problem. If you enjoyed FFXII, it will also provide some information about what happened to the characters afterwards.

Published by XPost^curses