XII was absolutely impressive for it's time and it's scaling worked for the most part considering the hardware it was working on, seeing how the only things that worked better with it's design were PC titles or MMORPGs. Besides, XII is technically a small region anyway and was never meant to represent some vast planet like FFs of old nor could it cheat like old-schools RPGs either. Even DQVIII cut corners and used lots of old and new slight of hand cheats to fake a large world.

There are probably too many to list for me in regards to the question asked and I like some in each type of style to not really have a preference over another.