Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

I didn’t know what to expect from Revenant Wings, the Nintendo DS sequel to Final Fantasy XII, the PS2 game that as far as I can tell I enjoyed more than most. I liked the sketches I’d seen and I thought there was definitely more story to tell.

In the event, Revenant Wings was more or less a Final Fantasy Tactics game, without the turn-based system. It had c ute sprites, a fun slow-paced strategy system and rather strange video clips that made the characters look like puppets – but was still appealing to look at. The story is also so very different from the tone of FFXII that it feels like something wildly different, which somehow has a lot of charm. It’s like the world of FFXII transplanted into a cute old 16-bit RPG, which suits the sprites.

A year after the end of the main game, and with Vaan now a fully fledged sky pirate, he and Penelo get mixed up in Balthier’s latest pursuit, finding two strange crystals whose power is connected to a kingdom in the sky, and can summon creatures to do the bidding of the stones’ owners. Along with his urchin friends Kytes and Filo, who features extremely briefly in the main game and here receive redesigns and turn out to be quite adorable, along with the slightly more prominent and wily Tomaj, they head to the sky kingdom and meet Llyud, part of a winged race called the Aegyl, currently under attack by the ‘judge of wings’, who looks like the armoured judges of the main game but has no affiliation with them – and is winged.

The game is fun to play, a real-time strategy engine where five characters command little groups and have to meet various objectives. There were little complexities to figure out, which I generally waited until I was getting stuck to tackle, and by the end you have a wide range of characters and so many abilities it can be quite frantic switching between characters to get a good use of the best. It gets very hard at the end if you want to get 100% (and the secret ending, that is frivolous other than developing Vaan and Penelo’s relationship a little), and grinding for the final boss took several hours.

Cute, interesting, fun and actually a challenge unlike most of Square’s portable games, I’m glad I gave this a chance – and it’s made me want to play the updated version of Tactics, as well as its various sequels. After a whole lot of others waiting!