The Zodiac Age is coming to X Box One and Switch with some new features.

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Square-Enix has announced that the PS4/PC HD remaster of FFXII needs to come out for more consoles. Spreading the love and all that. The real interesting thing is that the game will come with a few new features that at the moment are exclusive to these versions.

• License Reset Function: Feel like you messed up with job classes when assigning them? Well now you can go to Montblanc and he can reset your choices for you so you can experiment with more class combinations.
• Additional Gambit Slots: Now you have more leg room to customize your party members into death machines.
• Improved New Game +: A new mode that allows you to start with all your party members at Lv. 90 and carry over some items and equipment for a breezy mode for players who simply want to enjoy the story.
• 60FPS: For X Box One players only, you can actually play the game at 60fps.

So is this enticing enough for some people to want to double dip?

Source: Siliconera

Honestly, the best thing about FFXII on Switch is that you get a portable FFXII

That'sa kind of my feeling as well. I was hoping they would add in a new difficulty mode though.

I wonder if they'll patch that stuff in. I'd like to change my jobs.

Honestly, that part as a whole feels very redundant imo

I've never played FFXII. I heard that in the original FFXII the gameplay was imbalanced and black magic was useless or severly weak once at the mid-end game. Since I like to use magic and magic based jobs heavily it made the game unappealing. However I also heard that in the Zodiac Age remaster the programmers rebalanced the game and made magic of all kinds way more powerful to where is one of the strongest options even end game.

I hope that's true because I'd buy Zodiac Age in a heartbeat if it's system is well balanced.

Magic is actually useful in all versions of the game. Most enemies outside of some bosses and several marks don't have hp in excessive amounts like in FFX or XIII. So the damage cap is similar to older FF games in the vanilla version of XII. The Zodiac Age removes the limit all together and magic can now break the 9999 limit, though there were several abilities in the original that could do that as well. Even then, XII made buff/debuff magic so important that I feel it's naive when people say magic is useless in this entry. Of anything, it's more viable than in the popular entries.

The real stigma against it comes from the PS2 versions having something called the Effect Capacity. Basically, spells were marked with a certain priority based on their power level so bigger spells tended to have longer load times until execution than weaker spells, but this mechanic ended up causing some interesting munchkin style shenanigans.

Actions like basic melee are not effected by this mechanic so if a mage cast a spell like Flare against a group of enemies that used weak melee attacks, the enemies would likely trounce the mage because their actions don't cost much in the EC tables so they could effectively take their turns even before the player could even if their ATB mechanic says otherwise. Likewise, you can delay an a spell action by simply having the player or enemy cast a bunch of lower tier spells. This is why melee was considered superior and magic was considered useless, but more crafty players learned that this works both ways, and if you had a grasp of it, you could effectively stunlock and defeat powerful opponents by flooding the EC with low cost spells. Enemy trying to cast Scathe? Delay the attack by having your party cast a lower tier spell like Thundaga that not only has it's own long casting time, but has a lower EC cost to delay the enemy spell while your other two party members get extra turns in using melee. Knowing how EC worked could save you a lot of headaches though it can work against the player as well.

The Zodiac Version, thanks to being on modern hardware, doesn't need this system any longer, so it was removed. Meaning players could simultaneously cast spells at the same time in this version. I'll tell you now from personal experience that classes like the Red Battlemage and Time Battlemage are super useful in this game, and Black Mage was a wrecking ball in it's own right with my only regret having been making it Penelo's secondary class instead of her starting class. Of anything, the only mage class that kind of suffers in this entry is really White Mage since several classes can learn White Mage spells through careful planning with Espers and Quickening panels on the License Board. Even then, it's a great secondary job thanks to it's magic buffs, ability to equip Holy Robe for the Holy Boost, and access to the high tier spells.

I think this will be the ideal version for me since I last played the ps2 version and passed on the ps4 version.

That being said i'm waiting for the price point to drop down from $50. It has hit $20 for ps4 and even with the little tweaks it's still basically the same game.

I played Zodiac Age with my Switch Lite and imho the best feature was the "License Reset Function" , so I had the possibility to experiment more class combinations. ;)

Can anyone explain why those feature sets were previously exclusive to the Switch and XB1 versions of FFXII:TZA?

Probably to spur people to buy it again, but it looks like hey were patched into the other versions now except maybe the frame rate part. Honestly the other features don't interest me because I feel the game is too easy as it is.