FFXII has some incredible world building. It's just a shame people couldn't wrap their head around the Gambit system and perhaps JRPG fans were a bit overwhelmed by Ivalice's politics? Idk, like you said, it didn't help that they had to rewrite large chunks of the story since the higher-ups decided that the players needed a younger protagonist to associate with. That is proly the reason why Vaan is such a plank of wood, so any player can self-insert themselves onto him. Right now I am finally playing through FFX, and I will admit, after seeing Spoony's review of FFX, I think he really exaggerated the faults of the story. Yes, it has some weird moments, some stupid moments too, but in the grand scheme of things, both Tidus and Yuna are relatively flawed people with an uncertainty of who they really are or wanna be, imo.
Back to FFXII: Rate me optimistic, but I feel like Ivalice will eventually get revisited in the future. The whole world they have created is just too vast to not have some spin-off games or maybe even a proper Remaster with the original script and some more additions.
Ivalice is effectively birthed from the mind of Matsuno who seems to just be in project hell where he can't really get his own stuff off the ground unless it is backed by SE. Everything else he tries to touch just falls through like Lost Order and Unsung Story. If you don't know what those things are, that's my point. This man can't catch a break, the closest thing he's managed to get off the ground is side quests based around his Ivalice work in FFXIV.
I personally think narrative wise FFXII is probably the weakest of his more known works. I'm playing Tactics Ogre Reborn right now and that is quite a ambitious project given it tries to have an alignment system that actually fucking matters with little changes and branches across the story, even making characters willing to desert you because the game isn't too much of a bitch to inconvenience the player for their choices. This is while still having Matsuno's usual medieval political story.
FFXII tends to spin its wheels a little bit too much and get lost on what it wants to focus on, and I think it was done that way because suits thought Matsuno's work would be too confusing to the average main FF audience so they tried to dumb it down with characters like Vaan and Penelo. FFXII took many years to made finished, it was the longest video game development for a small period of time before the likes of Duke Nukem Forever came out.
FFXVI has the same art director as the co-director of FFXII, so that’s one of the reasons it gives FFXII vibes.
I noticed the character designs were similar, so I looked it up to confirm.
I think that’s interesting because I always liked the art of XII. And I like XVI expanding on the warring nations idea from XII.
FFXIV's team has some clear appreciation for Matsuno's work such as FFTactics, FFXII, and Tactics Ogre. There's a reason Palace of the Dead was reintroduced into FFXIV's setting, and Return to Ivalice and the Bozja side quest story line were written with his help. FFXIV's Heavensward expansion story line is also pretty Ivalice-esque, and honestly FFXIV's first half of its plot does the whole political war stuff better than FFXII did (if you can stomach just how long FFXIV is).
So I'm not really shocked that XVI is trying to have a more Ivalice like flair to it.
As for FFXII as a game, FFXII is pretty much an exploit simulator of varying degrees of insanity. How much you understand the game shows how much you can break it, it has some extremely open ended design that lets you pull off a ton of exploits and random nonsense that lets you smash the game in half. It has very unclear design that most people just won't like, such as how unique monsters spawn is fucking random as shit. You can spawn an early game (like before Balthier shows up early) EXP exploit by randomly walking back and forth through some far off load zones at low hp, and then some level 20 guy will show up but if you throw a phoenix down at him he gets one shot. You can then repeat this for about 10 hours and be way above the EXP curve for the rest of the game now, because all party member join to match your level. So you can be level 20-30 when you should be level 6.
Same with how you can get the 3rd best gun before raithwall, but trying to steal from a dragon hunt mark (and an elemental ball that one shots you with firaga) and this gun will two-three shot bosses for the next handful of hours.
You can also casually walk into enemies who are way too powerful for you which some people hate. I personally find it makes FFXII's world feel like it has a pulse of its own and isn't just some complete playground for the player to stomp around it like it doesn't matter. So having big fuck you elementals who will bomb you if you try to cast magic near them is fun, and you can even exploit them for drops early if you're brave enough to try like with the gun example.
FFXII has a lot of weird design choices that appeal to people who don't mind grinding to exploit the system, and having a game with less than obvious secrets and side quests for you to find. I am one of those people, so I like 12, but I get why people won't like 12.
