You're so Vayne

After a bit of trial and tribulation, Final Fantasy XII is now officially on my kill list.  There's still some stuff to be done left over (I really wanted to take on the Necrohol and snag the Zodiac Spear) but ultimately, I went ahead and faced the final boss and brought it all home.


I can see why there was some fanboy raging at the final dungeon; it literally was a few screens of tearing through a giant airship and wrecking a few dozen mooks before the final boss.  Frankly the penultimate dungeon (the Pharos Lighthouse marathon of terror) served the purpose just fine, while Sky Fortress Bahamut is more of a final battleground stage than a dungeon proper.  The final series of boss fights were a total blast, ranging from another Judge Magister battle to watching would-be overlord Vayne go from airbender to the hulk to a creepy awesome meld of man and magitek machinery that would made your average AdMech Magos oil his cogs from the sheer awe of it.  A fine bonus was that he was enough of a threat to my pack of badasses that the entire set of matchups had that extra edge of danger going for it.  It truly adds some kick to the proceedings.


FF12 actually kept that challenge and sense of danger up very well throughout my playthrough.  Modern Final Fantasy has had a hard time of doing that, but here the old spark still burns bright.  The whole thing actually did feel like a 8 or 16-bit Final Fantasy game brought to the Playstation 2 era.  The monsters and locations just have the whole look and feel, while the combat system is still clearly of the ATB lineage.


What else can I say?   FF12 is the first of the main series Final Fantasy games that I've completed in a very long time, and one of only four (if you count Tactics) that I've beaten.  Most of the others wound up getting stalled for one reason or another, but this one kept compelling me to come back once I plugged it in and got going.  It also stands as one of the longest playthoughs I've ever sunk into an RPG (clocking in at 83 hours of playtime), with maybe Skyrim being anywhere close before I hung it up.  This is a worthy game, I can tell you.


In any case, it is time to move forward and start on my backlog of slightly more...obscure...titles.  Next up is a bit of classic RPG quesadillia goodness:  Lunar:  Silver Star Story Complete.  Are you a bad enough dude to become the Dragonmaster and collect all the bromides?