Final Fantasy XII is a great example as to why the intricacies of game development should not be made available to an audience. Few games achieve to be in such a state where every critic of the game has a head canon of the development that is sometimes inaccurate, often downright nonsensical. Here’s the kind of information you see a lot on message boards, a decade of complete nonsense that has colored the appreciation of the game by feeding newcomers and old-timers alike with false information as if some had a vested interest to depict the game as an incomplete mess.

Even with the wealth of information available and with the upcoming release of the remaster, we still live in a world where a sizeable number of people think Yasumi Matsuno, the original director who left during the latter half of development for health-related reasons, apparently ran away with all the design documents making his 200+ staff scrambling to finish the game. They also think that interim producer Akitoshi Kawazu is a hack who destroyed a 5+ year old game in the span of a short year and apparently also never made any good game, ever. Let’s not even dive into the socksmakepeoplesexy’s retrospective where it is said that Hiroyuki Ito (who merely made FF6 and 9 as a director), along with veteran art director Hiroshi Minagawa (FFT, Stormblood !) were “out of their depth“. What ?

How many people are interchangeably saying that X was supposed to be the lead character instead of Vaan ? X being Ashe one day, Balthier the next. It was in truth supposed to be Basch, and it is true that corporate meddling changed the lead, but again, a lot of people are changing the timeline as they see fit. It so happens that for some, the change has been made very late, a last minute bravado where a game into development for six years suddenly decided to change one of the most important aspects of its story. This is simply not how development of one of the highest budget game of its time works.

In Jeremy Parish’s “The Making of Final Fantasy XII” on Polygon, producers of The Zodiac Age remaster, who also worked on the original game stated as such:

There are things that are incredibly distorted without even having to sift through interviews, it comes to the point where we are getting false pieces of information that are simply debunked by playing the game ! In an era where a two-clicks youtube search nets you a 7h movie of all the cutscenes, anyone is able to see that the endless qualms about Vaan being utterly useless without a motivation beyond becoming a sky pirate is more than false, it’s incredibly dishonest. The very idea that a character that was added later cannot stand on its own and add something that is relevant and precious to the story is a mind-boggling experience and a very exclusive type of thinking to the videogaming space, something that is far less seen in any other form of entertainment. Concession and change is a staple of every work with money on the line, it doesn’t mean that creators suddenly forget that they have a creative drive allowing them to make something great with what they have been given. A high number of key staff members in the very same studio even agreed extensively that limitations made them more creative, more ingenious.

I think that the more limited people are, the more ingenious they begin to get. – Nobuo Uematsu

Things that are known and agreed upon by a good number of hardcore fans for other Final Fantasy games but clearly not applied in the case of Final Fantasy XII. What is the amount of people clamoring that FF7 should return to that time where main character Cloud was called “Joe” and was actually a detective in New York City during its concept phase ? Are they throwing horror RPG Parasite Eve under the bus for expanding on that unused concept while being created to appeal to the North American market hard with a Resident Evil-inspired coat of paint ? No one is. Because it is easy to understand that games are made by taking things out and putting other things in. There is simply no game fully delivering on its concept without making concessions or sacrifices, yet FF12 has been tried and found guilty of a wild collective dream it had absolutely no control over. Since everyone has a different interpretation of what happened during the development, it has become a wishing well where every dream scenario that has been mustered for years was surely meant to be realized if not for corporate meddling. Balthier was surely meant to be the leading man, right? He says so in the game so it must be true!

Disliking Vaan is anyone’s opinion, disliking the game is not a crime, but no one has to lie or to propagate a narrative that just serves to depict the game as an unfinished trainwreck. It doesn’t lead us anywhere towards a civilized discussion, something that has been thrown out of the window when people are still trying to figure out what is going on and why everyone has a different story. Let us try to understand what was truly happening, and maybe acknowledge that the issues the game has faced into development are par for the course for the mega-production that it was !

Development was rocky far before Matsuno left

As much as I like Yasumi Matsuno, whom I consider as one of the best designers of all time, he is not (yet) a divinity where his disappearance would leave everyone stunned and unable to work through a pipeline they had for years. His departure is unfortunate and the *real* reasons (if there are) outside of the health issues he mentioned might never be revealed, but the development was already rocky far before he stepped down. Akitoshi Kawazu (the producer who took Matsuno’s place), who was surprisingly too candid about releasing details of the development of the game imparted to french website Gamekult that the FF12 team, being a joint operation between the Final Fantasy Tactics & PlayOnline team, were both headed into different directions, creating some anarchy during early development and took a lot of time to resolve (Matsuno was one of the producers of PlayOnline).

A project as big as this one was bound to have issues, but the departure of Matsuno likely wasn’t the breaking point that a lot of people are keen to theorize. FF12 was unique in the sense that it took them 2 and a half year to have a playable version, leaving developers in the dark of what the product would look like for a disheartening period of time. No one knows enough to know what was wrong, but to say the making of the game during Matsuno’s helm wasn’t without its fair share of issues is disingenuous. Yasumi Matsuno might be a stellar designer, but anybody would be overwhelmed with the scope of the project, especially considering the giant storm that was brewing at Square-Enix and the changes in production after the loss of Hironobu Sakaguchi as their flagship tyrant, something that was shared in the fantastic oral history of FF7 at Polygon. It is also fair to see that the departure of Matsuno likely hasn’t resulted in a huge fallout between him and Square-Enix. While some laments that he hasn’t been able to go back to a huge project since then, he has worked with Square-Enix several times since then, like the Tactics Ogre remake in 2008, or the Ivalice raid for the surprisingly XII-inspired Final Fantasy XIV MMO. The truth behind it all may never be fully known, but the legacy of Matsuno hasn’t been lost to time and pettiness by Square-Enix. As in they didn’t throw it all out when he had his back turned.

Akitoshi Kawazu didn’t mess up the game

It is easy to blame Akitoshi Kawazu for the shortcomings of the game : the latter half is considered to be lacking, and SaGa series creator took the role of executive producer in the latter half of development too, so that means it’s his fault, right ? Well, development doesn’t exactly work like that. Kawazu said himself in the same interview that his role was mainly to supervise the development teams and to motivate them towards a single goal. Most of all, he himself expressed regrets concerning the game’s story.

When you’re coming into the production of a game that is already well underway, you cannot change the story, because the universe is already built and the dialogues already written. The course of events of the game cannot be altered too. It’s in that sense that I am frustrated, because it was impossible to re-balance some parts of the story that didn’t sit well with me. – Kawazu

Kawazu couldn’t change things even if he wanted to, and it’s something that is believable considering the scope of the project, his arrival into supervising it, and the time left up to release. This means that the way the game was made was such that the story of the game was unlikely to have wildly changed from early development (when Vaan & Penelo was likely introduced) up to the japanese release. Kawazu is not the hack that some are want to categorize him, and I don’t know how one of the founding fathers of the franchise who introduced staggering changes to the JRPG genre as a whole could even remotely be one. His biggest mistake was that he talked too much, he added fuel towards shifting the narrative to a development hell with many “fans” labeling the game as an unfinished mess. It was he who said that Vaan was created to cater to the needs of the market and hinted that the staff wasn’t especially rooting for this change.

[…] Vaan in particular is obviously a little bit younger than the series is used to and there are a lot of people on the development team who aren’t necessarily feeling like this is the right character – it does kind of clash with the other characters and environments in the game. But, traditionally for the Japanese RPG market, you start out with a young, inexperienced character who grows throughout the story so, to an extent, having the lead be this younger immature character that is undeveloped is somewhat expected. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we as producers and designers always even like that but certain concessions must be made to cater for what the market wants. – Kawazu

A lesson well learned for game creators to never impart anything remotely interesting as it WILL be weaponized against them. Just a few weeks ago, Yuzo Koshiro made the gravest mistake of speaking his mind as a studio head about the latest Nintendo console, saying : “[The Nintendo] Switch strikes me as a very Nintendo-like piece of hardware” and was met with a staggering amount of negative comments about him and his family-run studio. It is no wonder that the opinion and thinking of game makers who possesses a knowledge that is absolutely crucial for video game history keeps their lips shut when armchair investors are waging a war and can only be truly content when the whole industry will only be filled with a wasteland of carefully selected PR soundbites made to satisfy their egos. FF12 stands as the scarecrow, the constant reminder of what happens when you dare speak about a recent product.

FF12 still had stellar directors

It is a point I already mentioned, but let’s talk about the directors and squash the idea that Matsuno’s departure is sure to have derailed the game off its tracks. After he left, Hiroyuki Ito and Hiroshi Minagawa took his place as directors. Having two directors wasn’t unusual in a FF game as FF6 was also directed by two persons. But let’s look at their resume :

Hiroyuki Ito :

– Worked on Final Fantasy since the first game

– Created the gameplay system of FF1, but also the ATB system, as well as the job system

– Worked with Matsuno on the battle system of FFT as game designer

– Directed Final Fantasy 6 and 9

Hiroshi Minagawa :

– Worked as an art director since the first Ogre Battle with Yasumi Matsuno

– Worked on Tactics Ogre, FFT, Vagrant Story, still with Matsuno

– Directed the stellar remake of Tactics Ogre on PSP

– Currently is Lead UI designer on FF14 since the reboot and Art Director of the Stormblood expansion

It’s clear they aren’t nobodies. They were extremely involved with Matsuno and they also are the very people who helped shape the Ivalice universe. In reality, FF12 had one of the most competent staff at Square-Enix. It would be absurd to say that Matsuno’s departure didn’t have any effect, but the extent is likely to be not as great as some would think. Keep in mind, the story was already set in stone early into development, and there weren’t any known sizeable loss of staff after Matsuno left that would have made the game much less than it could have been.

At most, one could theorize they didn’t have enough time to complete everything but the complete product paints another story : it is surprisingly robust and devoid of game-breaking bugs, and has a wealth of content some JRPGs would only dream to have. It doesn’t even have hints of unfinished content that could be found in-game or in the game files. If we were to go by the same metric, Final Fantasy VI and VII would be much further considered as unfinished than Final Fantasy XII could ever be as the amount of bugs were plentiful, fraught with content from the main story and side quests that were simply dropped mid-way in order to meet deadlines. Yet it would be foolish to judge these games to the impossible standard of what they could have been. Scrapping the scene bridging the timeframe between Cloud’s arrival to Midgar and his recruitment by AVALANCHE before the introduction sequence is a huge deal, but it doesn’t make the game any less better. They are liked for what they offered, yet this favor has conspicuously not been granted for every Final Fantasy.

It plays itself

There are so many ways to rebut this but the thing is we are often enough unable to contain ourselves and put limitations in what we do. It’s easy to imagine what happens when a system, instead of letting the AI do things (often stupidly), lets the player do the work and tune it however they want it to: the issue is that some doesn’t know what tuning is because they aim for an end goal that is simply not a goal: full automation. It is supremely bizarre that people who has spent time on gambits, enough to learn the intricacies of the game through hours and hours of tinkering suddenly forgets all the work they’ve put in and just simply says that this game plays itself. It is nonsensical that people who acknowledge that they’ve seen guides on the internet to make sure they don’t have to touch the controller ever again as if committed to some arcane oath are suddenly criticizing the game for something they did on themselves, and are not aware of it.

The gambit system is as good as you want it to be. It’s the answer to micro-managing every character painfully. You can still do exactly just that, but you can also decide what are the best parts of the gameplay and what you want to focus on more. But Final Fantasy XII is again a stark reminder that freedom is not something players want, the only thing they desire is illusion : the illusion that the process of pressing the confirm button to attack is a valuable moment of their time, the illusion that they are doing something that can only be quantified by the amount of buttons pressed per minute. Yet, this is what the game also offers, especially when 10+ years after its release, we have seen countless fans deriding FF13 for not allowing players to control every character. The FF fanbase is not a monolithic one, but their stance on micromanaging characters has never made any kind of sense.

The gambit system is in many ways a logical evolution, it just make sense to let the players be able to do whatever they want. Few games are as head-scratching as FF12 as it is derided to offer a comprehensive system when, a few years later, games such as Dragon Age Origins are lauded to offer a similar style of play. It is in my firmest belief that the diverse community of Final Fantasy fans lacks any serious kind of logic, entrenched in a warfare of opinions that contradicts one another every day of the week. The only thing that matters is the weapons at their disposal to serve their narrative of the Last Great Final Fantasy (throw a dice to choose between FFVI and FFX), and The Merger Ruined Everything and other nonsense in order to protect their precious nostalgia sentiments.

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I wasn’t even a long-time fan of FF12 ! I had been a staunch critic of the game, especially as my young self was smitten with FFX. The brazen FF12 was as an insult to my taste, disregarding my zone of comfort, smugly towering with its own unique universe in such a way I couldn’t readily accept what the game offered. Yet, as time grows, I managed to enjoy FF12, as its own product, I understood it was a real (whatever it may mean anymore) Final Fantasy, not afraid to go against the currents. I simply opened my eyes as I grew up, and I suspect the remaster opened and will open the eyes of many other people like me.

But, in order to make sure people enjoy this game for what it is, as many haven’t been able to experience it yet as a late PS2 release, we need to go against the current narrative that is being laid out through every message boards in order to colour their expectations of the game with nonsense struggle.

To this day, I strongly believe this fan-made narrative launched by critics of the game is instrumental in dragging the game further down than need be through false information. I only wish this will help some to find their way into finding what FF12 truly is, and not an hypothetical what it could be that might have never existed other than in the minds of imaginative fans.