I liked Final Fantasy XII for the most part. I thought the license board was an interesting mechanic. I still though FFV (which I played via translated ROM) had the best mechanic of all with the job system, but the license was nice.
It had an interesting storyline, though, I still think VI had the best.
My main complain of FFXII, which is common to most of the later FF’s, is that to experience everything requires an insane amount of next-to-impossible to achieve without a walkthrough grinding. (e.g. Chocobo breeding from FFVII. I don’t know of too many people that didn’t just look at a hint book or GameFAQs for that one).
In FFXII, there is a secret uber-powerful boss–following two other fairly difficult bosses and all three are outside the main story line–which gives a nice closure to your clan. To defeat this boss takes around 7 hours of the same fragging battle tactics, at character levels of the high 80’s/low 90’s. The payoff, though interesting, isn’t really worth the drudgery. Bear in mind, that to just to be able to fight this boss requires you defeating just about every other enemy in the game at least once, including the previous two bosses (one of whom took a considerably less annoying 60 minutes or so to kill). Now, many of these enemies you have to kill in order to take on the final boss require special conditions to spawn. Most of these enemies are classified as “rare”, but even some of them that aren’t rare only spawn under certain conditions (and a few enemies that are in the game don’t ever show up in your list of kills, oddly enough). These conditions can be anything from the minutes on your game clock, to random percentage, to a certain number of a chain of a single enemy, to bringing a certain monster critical, to only having members of one gender in the party, yadda, yadda, yadda. So expect to spend at least 30 hours hunting down every monster even with every online resource available. Granted, you get the best weapon in the game after this provided you finished two other side-quests (it’s not the strongest, but it’s considerably faster then the weapons at its level, making it do more damage over time). However, at this point, there’s not much purpose to this powerful weapon, since there’s only one boss left.
Additionally, after getting to this point, the final story boss fight is pathetically easy. I killed him in five minutes. He’s meant to be a challenge for characters roughly 30 levels lower.
I like games where the sidequests give you a sense of accomplishment. One’s where you feel like even though your sidequest has little bearing on the overall story, you still have fun doing them and they enrich the gaming experience. Fallout 1 was great for this. (Fallout 2 had overkill.) Mass Effect, though I’m not too far into it at this point, seems to treat sidequests much the same way as Fallout 1. Side quests should never be a grind, and I wish game designers would keep this in mind.