Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (DS)

Revenant Wings flies high, but not quite high enough.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

The extraordinary thing about role-playing games isn't the role you play. It's the sheer depth of fantasy that happens when you're transported into a world that takes you away from your mundane life of toenail clippings, bathtub rings and empty potato chip bags and into the exciting existence of a hero visiting different worlds. At its best, the RPG changes you, lets you take that fantasy with you even when you're away from the game, even years from now when you need a jolt of sanguinity.

Final Fantasy is nothing if not full of hope. I admit I came to the series later, with Final Fantasy VII, arguably the best of the series due to its epic movies and imaginative yet occasionally helter-skelter story. Sakaguchi-san was still involved in the series, bringing Cloud the mercenary to life and making me smile roundly with Cait Sith, the psychic alley cat who rode astride a Moogle and was so stuffed-animal-cute, I wanted to hug the f'in' thing. Ten years later, the fantasy is yet to be final. The series still aspires to achieve ever more glorious missions won by the handsome, sweet-faced hero. Now comes Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a real-time strategy game with deep role-playing elements for the tiny, handheld Nintendo DS. Is it great? Well, kinda.

Before you play the game, you should know what a revenant is. A staple of fantasy fiction (and horror novels, too), a revenant is a creature or monster that can be summoned into battle to attack. You'll be doing a ton of summoning in Revenant Wings.

You can feel the thrill of adventure enticing you from the moment the opening 40-second movie begins. It's full of sky ships with unusually detailed, PS2-quality graphics and those attractive 18-year-olds, the cocky sky pirate Vaan and his faithful childhood pal Penelo, a girly girl with braided blond hair who's smart and witty when she speaks.

Once that movie is done, though, you have little sprites on the touch-screen that are about as graphically sophisticated as what you might find in a GameBoy Advance game. While the characters, seen from a third-person perspective, aren't so enhanced, the backgrounds indeed are -- better than most DS games, for sure. Still, as I constantly level up, I get movies with great graphics, and then I'm back to the less cool-looking sprites. It's a small thing, but it takes away from the immersive feeling for which I'm looking.

There's one other minor issue which keeps me from living the fantasy truly and finally. While the narration is full of purple prose, it's nicely penned. Same goes for the occasionally punning and witty banter you read between the characters, especially between Vaan and Penelo. But the game makers have chosen to go from a plain black typeface to a typeface that's white inside with black borders. It's damn hard to read, as small as it is. It's so poorly implemented, reading it gave me a pounding headache, the same kind I associate with dumping someone or getting dumped by someone in a relationship. And in a way, that's what playing was like: I wanted a relationship with the game, but the game was sending me signals that it didn't want to date me.

But it's freakin' Final Fantasy. You have to plod on to see what's around the corner, to see what the next mission has in store. The first few are taken up with tutorials: how to fight, how to move, and how to choose your items before an attack. There's a fairly unique way to move your characters in for an attack, too: Just draw a box around them in the way you'd draw a box around an image you'd want to crop in a photo editor. Then, tap on the enemy you want to approach or the direction in which you want to go. Early on, you'll flub the drawing of the box like I did, but you'll get used to it by mission three.