In my opinions XII is one of the best. The story starts out as the standard fare "Empire takes over a country and now they secretly rebel" and as the game progresses it turns out there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than even the emperor himself knew. The empire didn't take over these countries for power or conquest (Final Fantasy II).The characters are great. Balthier is likely my favorite character in the game, and one of my favs through the series.Gameplay is quite different from the rest of the series. For starters you only control one person. One. While you have an entire party of six people (Seven when a Guest character is in play), you can have three out in the field but only one leader. The rest is controlled by the AI thatset up. The "Gambit" system AI is in a hierarchical type, where the condition on the top is most important, and if the condition isn't met then the AI simply continues down that list until it finds a condition that matches.During the course of ASephiroth's fight against the boss, he had the party leader with an accesory to make him immune to Stop (Since the boss'es killer attack inflicts Stop) and after the spell went off, he went into the Gambit menu (The AI) and swapped one of the conditions to look like this:Ally:any - AriseAlly:any - Esunaga*Ally:status = Stop - Chronos TearAlly:any - BubbleFoe:flying - TelekenisisSelf - HasteFoe:lowest HP - AttackSo if no ally is KO'ed, no ally has any negative stats effects, no ally has Stop status, all allies in range have Bubble status (Doubles MAX HP), no flying enemies in range, and the character has Haste status, then he will target the nearest enemy and attack. While attacking, if one of the "important" conditions are met, like a KO'ed ally or Haste wears off, then he will stop attacking and get on fixing that.The random battle system has been removed entirely, and you still run around in the field, but instead of random battles all the enemies are running about as well. You can either engage them right there or run past them and or flee while fighting them. You cannot do this in boss battles, with the exception of three specific bosses. You still save at save points, and there are certain save points you can use to teleport to other savepoints. No enemies drop gil in this game, but your main source of revenue comes from loot that enemies drop when killed. You sell this to a shop, and after meeting certain conditions (Selling certain loot) specific items become available for purchase. Some of the rarest items can be gotten this way - such as the Tournesol and the Wyrmhero Blade. Most can only be bought once though.The wyrmhero blade is almost overkill - by the time you get it you won't even need it anymore!You have to complete this fishing challenge, defeat the Hell Wyrm, aquire all the summons, defeat Omega Mk. XII, and defeat the Wyrmgod Yiazmat. After that the only thing left is the final boss which is nowhere near as tough as the aforementioned bosses.Final Boss - A few hundred thousand HPHell Wyrm - 8 million HPYiazmat - 62 million HPThe three battles you can flee from are the Hell Wyrm, the Bomb King, and Yiazmat. Note however, that if you are outside the battle too long, they will quickly begin to regain HP until fully healed, but you can flee if you're way over your head.Some enemies can double their level, like Pylaster and Yiazmat, effectively increasing their resistances and damage output. Others can literally eat other enemies to increase their level. The tyrant (Supposedly an ancient species of dragon. Looks more like a dinosaur.) in the first area you visit is neutral and will walk around eating wolves. It can get to level 99 that way.There is also bonuses for killing the same type of enemy over and over, you build up a chain that goes through several levels. With each level it increases the odds of killed enemies dropping rare items, and the possibility of dropping bonus items that restore a % of HP for your entire party, or granting Protect or Shell onto the entire party when picked up. Killing another genus of enemy breaks the chain, as does entering a city or activating a save crystal.e.g. killing a ton of wolves and worgens will increase the chain, but if you kill a cactaur then it breaks it.I have seen level based spells for the first time in this game, though they may be present in earlier games. These spells target everyone in range and calculates if their level is a multiple of 'X' and if it is, it hits with 100% accuracy. If not, it misses.e.g. Zodiark (Summon you fight to get) early in the battle will use Level 4 Break and Level 3 Disable, as well as Piercing Graviga (Which ignores Reflect status and hits you anyway)So the main differences in this game is the open field battles, the customizable AI, a liscence system much like FFX's sphere thing. I personally like the game more than the others, but that's just me.There is a damage limit of 9999, but as characters (And enemies) can pull off multiple combos of up to 16 or so... Zodiark uses a spell called Limit Break, but I don't know if it has anything to do with the damage limit.Part one of the Hell Wyrm battle: [link] Fast Forward to about [link] here at 3:18 in the video (If the link before doesn't work). The cinematic attack the Hell Wyrm pulls off "Judgement" matches up with the music PERFECTLY. IMO it is incredibly epic. Notice that everyone but one person got inflicted with Stop after it.I feel XII is worth playing, and I hold it to be as good as VII and Tactics: WotL. The music score is incredible, and when I think of mysterious ruins and long lost cryptic locations, I recall the music track to the jungle from XII.