I like maybee and I enjoy reading her respectful and entertaining arguments, even when I disagree with them as here.

All I'm hearing is subjective. Whatever. I think XII had wonderful art, beautiful music, and fantastic writing at the script level. If you don't like the narrative pacing I recommend playing through the main story as fast as you can. It's amazing.

I will admit, it reversed all of VIIs innovations that blurred the line between cutscene and game play, putting back up the walls that Kitase worked so damn hard to break down. The global RPG genre and Square have never recovered since.

I'll leave with this: FFXII was extraordinarily ahead of its time. When you look at modern console RPGs, Japnese or Western, they all have something FFXII pioneered back in 2006. And none of them do it better than XII did. I can't play Mass Effect or Dragon Age just because of how much better the game design of similar concepts was in XII. The amount of control and strategy in the gambit system is jaw-dropping. But even if the game didn't have so many groundbreaking and revolutionary features, I'd probably still say it's arguably the best Final Fantasy of all time.