When was ff12 released

In a preview last summer, producer Hiroaki Kato noted that under the original character progression system in Final Fantasy 12 , all the characters would "basically become supermen" by the end of the game.

But the International Zodiac Job system provides greater variety and customization in a player's party. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Gaming PlayStation Xbox Nintendo.

Movies TV Comics. All Reviews:. Popular user-defined tags for this product:. Is this game relevant to you? Sign In or Open in Steam. Languages :. English and 8 more. View Steam Achievements Includes 41 Steam Achievements. View Points Shop Items 3. Points Shop Items Available. Publisher: Square Enix. Share Embed. Add to Cart. View Community Hub. The small kingdom of Dalmasca, conquered by the Archadian Empire, is left in ruin and uncertainty. Princess Ashe, the one and only heir to the throne, devotes herself to the resistance to liberate her country.

Vaan, a young man who lost his family in the war, dreams of flying freely in the skies. In a fight for freedom and fallen royalty, join these unlikely allies and their companions as they embark on a heroic adventure to free their homeland. Players both returning and new to the game will be immersed in a grand adventure that spans the world of Ivalice in an entirely fresh and improved experience.

Newly implemented trophies. True 7. Endless adventure including hunts, battles and mini-games. Screen resolution: x Like with the charming Final Fantasy 9 , the idea behind FF12 was to double down on series traditions and easy wins. Its creative team brought together Yasumi Matsuno, the visionary writer and director responsible for Final Fantasy Tactics , and Hiroyuki Ito, the systems designer who created the series' two defining play mechanics: The Active-Time Battle system and the flexible Job class system.

FF12 would combine the best and most beloved elements of the franchise in a setting steeped in Final Fantasy's established rendition of Western high fantasy: Kingdoms and royalty, knights and airships, pirates and nihilistic gods. While Yoshinori Kitase's team explored sci-fi futurescapes with Final Fantasy 10 and 13 and Hiromichi Tanaka led the charge into massively multiplayer online collaboration with Final Fantasy 11 , Matsuno and Ito's names hinted at a game that would embrace fans who felt increasingly disenfranchised by the series' movement into new settings and genres.

Of course, Matsuno and Ito didn't create the game single-handedly. Their collaborators on Final Fantasy 12 included such luminaries as illustrator Akihiko Yoshida, composer Hitoshi Sakimoto and designer Hiroshi Minagawa — all of whom had been largely inseparable from Matsuno since working together at Quest on groundbreaking tactical RPGs Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. They'd all moved over to Square together to team up again on 's Final Fantasy Tactics and the stunning cinematic action RPG Vagrant Story , and Ito had contributed heavily to Tactics , refining the character class Job system he had designed for Final Fantasy 3 and 5 to its next evolution.

Square as a company, and Final Fantasy as a property, were collectively in a state of flux around the time FF12 was announced. In , the company released the ambitious first and, it would turn out, final full-length motion picture of its Square Pictures movie imprint in the form of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

That film's crushing failure at the box office in part led the "father of Final Fantasy," series lead designer and producer Hironobu Sakaguchi, to depart from the company and establish his own studio, Mistwalker. Amidst this turmoil and the uncertainty surrounding the online-only Final Fantasy 11 , fans could at least rest assured that the next numbered Final Fantasy would be a mature, grounded work created by some of the most talented people at Square.

And so it would be — but the end result wasn't necessarily what series fans had been dreaming of. Now, more than a decade later, two key personnel on FF12 hope series fans will give this polarizing entry a second chance. Takashi Katano and Hiroaki Kato make for something of an unlikely pair. Katano is every inch the classic vision of a game programmer: Round-faced, soft-spoken, with his fashion choices tending toward buttoned-up shirts a conservative hairstyle.

Meanwhile, Kato sets off his lean features with an unruly mop of hair and trendy, thick-framed glasses, while a hint of wry amusement frequently tugs at his lips. Yet the two have worked together on Final Fantasy 12 for almost a decade, all added up.

While neither saw their names bandied about as marquee talent on the PS2 release, they both played critical roles in the original project. And with most of 12 's project leads long since having departed from the company, Kato and Katano have taken charge of the game's upcoming remake, The Zodiac Age. Having been entrenched in the FF12 project more or less from day one, Katano confirms that despite struggles that beset the team, the final product closely resembled the team's original creative vision.

It turns out that, despite assumptions by many players, the radical upheavals FF12 brought to the franchise formula were always a part of the plan. It had the Gambit battles and the seamless open world. FF12 represented a fundamental shift in design from FF That game had largely pared down the concept of what a Final Fantasy game could be. While it brought considerable technical advances to the series, including fully voiced story sequences and an end to the pre-rendered static backgrounds of the PlayStation One Final Fantasies, it stripped away any pretense of freedom to explore.

Even more shockingly, FF10 abandoned Ito's trademark Active-Time Battle system — a hybrid of real-time and turn-based menu-driven command — in favor of a strictly turn-based format. Ito, with Katano's help, hoped to push FF12 back in the other direction.

Even the name the team came up with for its new battle system, Active Dimension Battle, suggested an evolution of the old Active-Time Battle. In many respects, ADB combat felt inspired by the inventive 3D combat system that had appeared in Vagrant Story , Matsuno's previous project. Where Vagrant Story focused largely on one-on-one combat, however, FF12 needed to work for a party of three or four characters against half a dozen or more enemies at once. Even more ambitiously, FF12 's battle system would break down the barriers between exploration and combat, allowing fights to unfold in the same virtual space as standard dungeon-crawling.

So it really took some resolve to kind of dig down and say, 'We're going to do this. While I wasn't on from the very beginning, I was in just about when things really got moving in terms of building the game.

Working with a high-level view of the FF12 project allowed Kato to grasp the enormous scope of the game and the unexpected complications that arose from relinquishing so much control of the player's experience.

For example, he recalls the headaches introduced by giving players the freedom to change around the makeup of their three-member combat party by swapping in reserve team members at any time. We'd get to work on it and then run into a wall: 'Oh, we hadn't accounted for this one thing. Even more than the Active Dimension system's ability to target foes and seamlessly initiate combat, the Gambit system sat at the heart of FF12 's battle mechanics.

It also proved to be, by far, the game's most controversial inclusion. Some players felt it removed their agency of the action or trivialized the strategy of combat. In effect, Gambits allowed players to set the behavior of their party members in battle by rigging a simplified programming language. As players acquired additional Gambit rules, they could largely automate combat by setting conditions to guide their team's actions.

At the most basic level, you could set characters to automatically use fire-based spells against enemies weak to fire. But you could also connect more complex commands: For example, using the Oil skill to render an enemy vulnerable to fire, which could then be exploited by the character set to target elemental weaknesses with fire spells.

Gambits could allow you to set your party to perform incredibly sophisticated sequences of commands, freeing you from the need to micromanage their every action — though you could still bring up the command menu to freeze time and adjust tactics on the fly as needed.

Naturally, granting the player so much control over the behavior of the game's artificial intelligence posed unique challenges. So they might wander off over there instead," he nods, pointing to a space near his right hand, "and trigger a cutscene. In order to prevent things like that, we had to explore different methods and find a way in the programming. It took about two months. We had to make sure the characters didn't run over there to make sure we could prevent it from happening.