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Cutty Flam
FFXII is the best PS2 main Final Fantasy game for me, one that greatly advanced the JRPG genre and the last great Final Fantasy effort that felt like an articulated dichotomy. That said, I can only imagine how it aged on some fronts, I have it on PS4, but I haven't played it extensively yet.
This is not a simple Final Fantasy to judge by any means. For one, it didn't start of as such, when it comes to planning this felt like it was vagrant story 2, through and through. Basch (36 year old guy in the final draft of the game) was the main character, Vaan and Penelo didn't exist. Square execs first made it a numbered game, then got involved, pressured for a lot of demographic checkboxes (teenager main character, androgynous, love interest/love comedy sections, stupid FFVIII/X prom influenced staple ideas) because this was a numbered title now and those were popular things with "modern final fantasy"... Things started to go sour and at the peak of it the director Yasumi Matsuno (Vagrant Story Director) burnt out and quit the project, Hiroyuki Ito (FF9 Director) and Akitoshi Kawazu (SaGa series) had to be drafted in to keep it together.
They did their job really well, the game is really polished content-wise and balance-wise as they didn't pull a Joss Whedon on it... But there's something keeping it from being the best game it could be in some areas they respectfully chose not to touch. Gameplay-wise they probably played a huge role, considering their credentials and end result , it really has their footprints all over it, for the better. (even furter on FFXII:Zodiac Age, which is the version these news versions are based on)
The things that let it down are, well, one is that it was too ambitious for the PS2, it wanted to pull this huge world, but had to chop it into smaller areas and did so by keeping it seemingly open, but adding some lines signaling that past that you'll have to load the next area (on the PS2 this was a 20/30 second wait, and it really slowed down the experience) this also had a clear impact on the level design of some areas for the worst, because graphically you could see the level continued past the loading line, but the thing you wanted to reach wasn't immediately adjacent to it, otherwise you wouldn't need a loading screen at all - you needed this loading screen because there wasn't enough memory nor polygons to pull it.
It made it so that these "smaller maps" together were bigger than if the bigger map was possible. This makes makes the experience more systematic than it could be otherwise. A more powerful platform, or HDD (which I wonder if they thought early on they could recommend using seeing the japanese FFX and Kingdom Hearts had the option) could have mitigated this a little.
Well, and the other thing is story. They didn't change the core story much, Vaan is an afterthought, Penelo is there so they don't have to spend time with character development for a developing love interest for him and they just keep away from "grown man business" making them protagonists by proxy. Story develops through their eyes, but they're not very important. This is an acceptable compromise I guess but it's not great, and they easily become a slight annoyance as FFXII would be a better game without them. Not to say the story would be shakespeare, as it wouldn't but it would flow better. It's trying to tell one story, through another.
Other things FFXII pioneered in, became staples (wanted poster hunt sidequests, for instance) and started being done mostly better once the next generation came around (PS3/X360), it really feels like a next generation concept on the PS2 though. The cities also feel modern, level-design and interaction-wise, properly done and streamlined. They don't feel like a remnant of other time.