Wolf Kanno's Bottom Ten JRPGs.

[Fynn]

better versions of FFXII with giant robot knights

*ears perk up*

Would you recommend WKC as a cheap pickup for a huge XII fan with no intention of experiencing the online content?

I don't know about WKC, but Xenoblade Chronicles should fill your quota.

[metagloria]

better versions of FFXII with giant robot knights

*ears perk up*

Would you recommend WKC as a cheap pickup for a huge XII fan with no intention of experiencing the online content?

I don't know about WKC, but Xenoblade Chronicles should fill your quota.

Already one of my top 10 games of all time. Just a hair below XII itself.

[Wolf Kanno]

better versions of FFXII with giant robot knights

*ears perk up*

Would you recommend WKC as a cheap pickup for a huge XII fan with no intention of experiencing the online content?

If you're in it just for the gameplay, I say sure why not. The combo system is inventive even if I felt the implementation could have been handled better.

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3 More Baby!

#4 Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings
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Let's think back to the Crisis Core review and how I mentioned that I don't like sequels because they are lazy and too easy to do. Yeah, we're here again except there is just something about Final Fantasy XII that makes executives at SE want to meddle. I swear, the only reason why we haven't heard about FFXII HD is because the suits in Japan are conspiring on how best to smurf it up.

The game that eventually became Revenant Wings started life as a project FFX-2 Director Motomu Toriyama was working on for the DS because SE was trying to figure out how to incorporate the touch screen as a gaming medium and the games other producer, Eisuke Yokoyama thought it would be cool to try their hand at Real Time Strategy. So the project began but then SE released FFXII and decided it needed a sequel and ordered Toriyama and Yokoyama to shoe horn in the FFXII cast and plot. Seeing how the Japanese are not exactly the RTS kings of gaming, there was certainly some trial and error, being on the DS didn't help either.
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As a game Revenant Wings is a nice second attempt at the RTS genre, I say second because technically Heroes of Mana was released a month earlier and is also an RTS game but that one at least had the good fortune to be worked on by people who actually develop the Mana games. Basically you are allowed five Leader characters, who each control a unit of summoned monster called Yahri. You use the stylus to select units and tell them where to go. You can select groups of units or individual ones but due to the A.I. and the DS' lack of precision, this can actually be a nerve racking experience and often it's just easier to select groups. Luckily you can compartmentalize this a bit better by selecting the unit leaders on the bottom screen which will select their whole unit and then direct them that way. The fudgy controls are a bit annoying but manageable, largely because the enemy A.I. is not exactly smart so making simply mistakes is not usually very costly except during battles with Boss Units who tend to hit hard and have more HP than you'll often wish. Unit types are split into four classes, Melee, Range, Flying and Healing. Barring Healing, the other three units work on a Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic where Flying has an advantage over melee, Range has and advantage over flying, and Melee has an advantage over range. Healing is kind of a sitting duck. Even the Leader units fall into these categories. Units are also separated by elements with Normal, Ice, Fire, Earth, Lightning, and Healing. As long as you have unlocked the unit type, you may choose in the setup screen before battle or between missions which units to use and so strategy largely comes down to elemental exploitation and making sure your strike the right balance between the four unit types. Units are also sub-dived by Class Level. Level I units are weak but require less crystals to summon and so you can pull off a Zerg swarm with them. Level II are more powerful and tend to have better skills and survivability but require more crustals to summon allowing for smaller groups of units. Level III are often Espers and Boss monsters defeated in battle, these creatures cost the most but tend to have devastating abilities. Unlike the other two units, you're only allowed to bring one of them on missions since they are effectively a re-summonable Leader unit.
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I know this all sounds complicated but eventually combat devolves into summon spamming minions and throwing them at the enemy until one of you falls, so it's all Russian Strategy for the most part and you don't often have to make painstaking decisions about what units to deploy. The gameplay largely comes down to missions against other units with simple goals like capturing enemy bases, defeating the boss, or just beating all enemies. On the maps, you can find resource points your units can mine/gather resources that can be used in the Hub shop to make new gear. Course you'll need recipe books to make any use of them.
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Gameplay is a mix bag. It's obvious that this game was designed as newbie friendly entry into the genre. It's not terribly difficult except a few late game missions and some boss battles where the game inexplicably pulls an Arc the Lad 2 and makes enemies jump 20-40 levels with no warning. Collecting the various Espers and Yahri is fun with some of the side missions, especially since the majority are even returning from FFXII or in the case of the Yahri, representing classic FF Summons like Ifrit, Shiva,Ramuh, and even Gilgamesh. The controls are not as precise as most RTS vets would like but the game's relatively low difficulty makes this a non-issue and frankly we all know SE doesn't exactly specialize in this genre so why demonize them for it?
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So why is this ranked so low on the list despite the gameplay being a bit simple and amateurish? Well it comes down to the issue of giving someone else franchise to another team who frankly doesn't understand the source material. One artist, and two of the three composers for FFXII returned to work on this game. No one else.
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Revenant Wings is about Vaan and Penelo being whisked away to sky island Lemures, hidden away from the rest of the world inhabited by the Aegyl, a race of winged people who have no emotion. There the people have suffered because their "god", Feolthanos, fled from Ivalice and the Occurians and created Lemures as a safe haven from the evils of the world by establishing a strict religious society that shuns outsiders. Feolthanos cursed the people by utilizing Auroliths which drain his people's emotions but grant him immortality, as well as giving special crystals called auracite, the power to summon the Yahri, which are basically like the souls of the Aegyl given physical form needed to perpetuate his immortality and strips his people of emotion.
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If that all sounded a bit familiar, replace Feolthanos with Yu Yevon, Yahri with Fayeth, and Lemures with Spira/Dream Zanarkand and you'll understand how absolutely original this all is. The plot and world was the mastermind of Motomu Toriyama, one of the creators of FFX and X-2 at the time. The party encounters Lluyd, a Aegyl who is a heretic that accepts the outsiders help and they try to stop the Judge of Wings from destroying the Auroliths that maintain the world, up until Balthier and Fran show up and explain how it's a good thing to do this because the Aegyl religion is a sham and Feolthanos isn't actually a god but a douchebag who went insane after being immortal for so damn long. Eventually Vaan meets the Yahri who beg him to stop Feolthanos and destroy the Auroliths so they can finally be free and stop living in their World of Illusion. No that is not me making a clever allusion to Dream Zanarkand, that is actually where the Yahri reside until they are summoned.

About the only really original part of the game is the Judge of Wings, who is connected to an interesting, if poorly underutilized inner-species romance plot that is kind of the core of the game's story as opposed to a Thousand Year war between Bevelle and Zanarkand.
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If the plot sounds like FFX, the the characterization is largely influenced by X-2 as the majority of the cast are bubbly and silly, even ruthless Boba-Fett wannabe BaGamman returns and spends time as the party's "pet" after he gets badly outsmarted by Vaan and Penelo. The game upgrades two very minor NPC in the form of Kytes and Filo into full characters and their are is not very different from Vaan and Penelo's own from XII in terms of hanging around more experienced adventurers and quickly being sidelined when more interesting characters show up. If you were hoping the XII cast was going to get some real development, think again. Balthier and Fran largely stick to their roles from XII as scene stealing wonders with better dialogue and what sounded like a more interesting story to follow going into the plot than Vaans. Ashe, Basch, and Larsa also show up to do absolutely nothing in the story. All three could be written out for the amount of screen time and purpose they actually carry into the story. Vaan and Penelo get some development but its mostly about Vaan always being one step behind everyone and being too dense to realize Penelo has the hots for him. There are some amusing side missions but the game is filled with the same kind of issue as X-2's story where the slapstick nature of the characters running around doesn't mesh well with a plot that actually has a much darker tone. The serious dissonance is only exasperated by the tone shift from FFXII itself, whose story is more about subtlty and has an English Theatrics flair whereas this game is cutesy and kiddy all the time. I spent the bulk of my time playing this game asking the question of "what the hell did you do to FFXII?".
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It's interesting to note that Revenant Wings producer Yokoyama doesn't consider the game a sequel, being quoted as saying "It is not accurate to call this a sequel. We want people to view it as the latest FF game. This is not FFXII-2" Indeed it is not, but I feel bad for the XII/Ivalice fans who picked this up hoping for a cool new chapter in the Ivalice series only to get a game that runs so counter to what the Ivalice franchise has stood for. This is why I hate sequels, this also why you should never hand over the reigns of a series to another team that doesn't bloody know what they are doing and whom their artistic preference is in stark contrast to the original. It's interesting to note that the Ivalice team has never really acknowledged this game. FFTA2 introduced a Winged Race to Ivalice and despite the Aegyl already existing they chose to make a new race instead. The games own producer doesn't consider it a sequel and the Ivalice team itself ignores it, I feel it's safe to say that SE is giving us fans to ignore it and say XII never had a sequel.
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[Pumpkin]

This is also on my list of games to play

[Wolf Kanno]

This is also on my list of games to play

I think you may actually like it to be honest. It's certainly less depressing than XII and despite it's grim plot premise, there are probably only two scenes that feel a bit dark. The game is largely the FFXII cast high on sugar and rainbows.

With that said, it's probably not as tongue and cheek about its lightheartedness as X-2 was.

[Pumpkin]

I do like XII a good bit, it made it to my top 20

Also for the record, I'm not opposed to dark games or dark scenes xD I'm opposed to dark environments because I don't need to see brown and grey EVERYWHERE

A lot of my favourite games are actually bright environments with depressing stories because I think it shows good contrast and makes it deeper than just having everything dark for the sake of being dark and edgy. Not that all games do it for that reason, but come on, you know some do.

Kinda like Xenoblade deals with things like genocide and the like, Majora's Mask deals with all different depressing issues of people realizing they're about to die, Tales of Symphonia dealing with things like suicide, the mental illnesses shown in Xenosaga (and Xenogears) in characters like Albedo but you know what THEY HAVE A SUN AND COLOURS

[Wolf Kanno]

True, sorry I misunderstood then. On that account I can agree that I'm not fond of darker tones all the time myself.

[Pumpkin]

Yeah not fussing, just making it more clear so people could understand more where I'm coming from. I do have a lower tolerance for dark environments than most, I just get tired of looking and greys and browns ya know?

But I do hope I end up liking Revenant Wings because, you know, I paid money for it >.>

[Wolf Kanno]

You might. Hope you can like it more than I did.

Also, we only have three games left on this list. Some more hints:

Only one more Final Fantasy... I'm going to let that sink in.
All three games are on different platforms.
One is a handheld.
Two of them are "sequels".
One is technically a port.
Two of them I actually hate and were the first ones on the list.

[Fynn]

So X is actually not making the list?

[Pumpkin]

Could still be, but yeah I'm guessing X-2 made the list (one of my favourite games btw :P)

[Fynn]

Nah, it's definitely XIII.

[Wolf Kanno]

So X is actually not making the list?

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I remember renting this game as a kid and being SO disappointed. Part of that is my fault because I didn't look into it at all; I just knew it had final fantasy in the title. I hadn't beaten XII or anything when I got it (still haven't), and it makes me wonder why I ever bothered renting it.

Anywho, I still kind of want to get it and play it to completion someday just because I want to say I've beaten every Final Fantasy game/spinoff available in the US. XI and XIV will probably be my exceptions to that.

[Mirage]

I played white knight chronicles for like... a few hours, but then I lost interest.