Apparently incapable of learning lessons from mistakes made in the past, I went ahead and purchased this Final Fantasy XII follow-up before I'd even finished off Final Fantasy XII proper, a task that took me five and a half years to complete. Fortunately, this DS-based sequel only took me about a week and a half to begin and finish over a total of 27 hours. Actually, that kind of shocks me. This didn't feel like a 27-hour game, and not just because it was far shorter than its 60-hour predecessor; as a handheld game, Revenant Wings got plenty of playing time while I was in bed, watching TV, or listening to podcasts or the radio, so it doesn't even feel like I spent more than an entire day playing it. The game itself was enjoyable overall, but I'd be remiss not to vent at one point about a specific aspect of the gameplay. Let's start with a description. It's been over a year since the events of Final Fantasy XII, and Vaan and Penelo are now sky pirates, sailing the... skies, I guess... in search of treasure and adventure. As the game begins, they and two friends find a floating archipelago of sorts, inhabited by a race of winged humans (bird people!) called "aegyl." The majority of the game takes place up on these floating landmasses, which sort of nicely allows fans of the first game to experience an entirely new world while also featuring several of the same characters. In fact, of the nine eventual playable characters, six of them are the playable characters from the first game. That said, you have to get through two thirds of the game with Vaan, Penelo, and the three new fighters before the original crew returns. The game even features one battle that has you fighting against two of these old friends, which only added an extra element of frustration to an already difficult battle. The battles themselves can best be described as RTS (real time strategy), not unlike those two StarCraft games I just played, but slightly less complicated. The biggest controversy around Final Fantasy XII was that it did away with turn-based battling in favor of more of an open world adventure game battle system where players and enemies attack in real time. Here we go one step further; in Revenant Wings, you can't even take a breather to strategize, as opening up the attack menu does not pause the game. In a lot of ways it felt like a combination of Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics, but was more frantic and chaotic than either. This led to a few control issues, and one fundamental flaw in the gameplay (for me at least) that nearly had me chucking my DS at walls until three in the morning on some nights. As with any RTS game, your success in Revenant Wings will largely depend on how quickly and adeptly you can issue commands to your fighting party. On the aforementioned StarCraft games, there are an endless bevy of hot keys and mouse clicks designed to speed the process along. In Revenant Wings, you use the DS stylus for basically everything, from movement to player selection to attacking to selecting menu options, all in real time. This isn't quite as disastrous as it sounds, but it's absolutely infuriating when, in the heat of battle, I need to frantically select my healer, tell her to use her spells, select the "cure" spell, and then select the guy I want her to use it on, especially when that guy is in a clusterfuck pile of enemies and very hard to find, let alone tap accurately with a blunt stylus. There were far too many games, too, where my ranged attackers and healers would hang back and start shooting at enemies, but my melee attackers couldn't walk past them to get to the proverbial front lines, leading to a quick and easy massacre of my forces all because the AI on my ranged fighters was having them form some sort of barricade against their own allies, and the AI on my melee fighters was too simple to have them try walking around said barricade. This was easily the most infuriating the gameplay got, and also never stopped catching me off guard; when I tell certain party members to attack certain enemies, I just expect them to be able to figure out amongst themselves how not to get in each other's way. Due to the limitations presented by the relatively small and simple pair of screens on the DS, it was only possible to watch one area of the battlefield at any point in time, too, so if I sent one group of fighters to attack someone, then panned the screen over to focus on another group, I had no way of knowing that the original group was busy walking into each other while getting picked off by enemy archers and gunmen and dragons and such. Combine this with a tougher-than-it-should-be difficulty curve (if I've done every available sidequest, I shouldn't still have to grind my way up to higher levels) and there were several key battles that took me more than five attempts, which is just kind of annoying more than anything else. Ultimately, this wasn't a bad game, but I couldn't have picked a worse pair of games to play alongside it than StarCraft and its expansion pack; I'm pretty RTS'ed out right now, and won't be revisiting the genre anytime soon. Revenant Wings was more or less what a handheld direct sequel to an epic platform-based RPG should be: simpler, leaner, but without doing a disservice to the characters and world created by the original. I can't "highly recommend" it, but you probably already know whether or not this is something you'd have any interest in playing.
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