People seem to have all but forgotten about this game. For some reason I never got around to playing this one, but I gathered that the reviews were decent.

According to the FF Wiki it was originally a game unrelated to FFXII until Square decided to make it so:

Although inheriting the Final Fantasy XII title, Yokoyama downplayed its link to its PlayStation 2 predecessor, 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".
It's been about 10 years since this game came out. So I was curious if anyone who played it would recommend it to a new player off the back of FFXII HD or if you otherwise have any fond memories of it.