Final Fantasy XII: Beat it. The last boss was rather annoying as every time he managed to down a character, it turned into a race where I revived the KO'ed one and he downed another. Fortunately, sooner or later I would block two of his attacks in a row which would bring me back on my feet. Then when he had not so much HP left, his Giga Flare Sword decided to kill all three active characters despite them being at full HP. At that point I switched in the rest and unloaded a quickening chain that did 30,000-something points of damage and killed it. Against the other bosses a quickening chain of equal number of hits did just about 8,000 points of damage. Whatever, boss killed and crisis averted.
Fighting cannon fodder enemies was rather fun, but strangely enough it became less fun any time the enemies became challenging. Due to the game relying on gambits doing most of the work, selecting commands for the characters became much more bothersome than usual. As such, whenever I encountered enemies that couldn't be defeated with my Gambit setup alone, it was easier to just grind for better equipment rather than micromanaging the characters.
It reminds me a bit of .hack infection which also had the problem of not handling challenging enemies well. Both games had real-time battles combined with near instant full healing, a combination I think is a bad idea.
Still, the battles are better here than in any of the Playstation FFs where most enemies could have been beaten with an "heal if any character has low HP and attack otherwise" AI setup, but nevertheless required manual control. Compared to FF X however, it's a major downgrade. Seriously, if you finally fix the problem with every enemy being vulnerable to the same strategy, don't unfix it the next game.
Story was pretty bland. FF XII went for a political plot, but for some reason I still found myself running into old temples and ancient ruins way to often. I can't say I cared for the characters either. None really bothered me except for Vahn, but that was just at the very beginning. On the other hand, none really interested me either. The judges were also typically handled as Organisation XIII members, introduce them in one cut-scene and then kill them the next time you see them, only the judges had less style.
The game is playable, but not more than that. I probably give it a 5/10.
