Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings for Nintendo DS - Video Game Review

Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings is the handheld sequel to the popular FFXII game for the PS2. The game plays very similarly to an RTS. You control troops (with troop leaders) in full-scale wars against enemies, using the stylus as a sort of mouse. This actually plays fairly smoothly most of the time. Like real RTS games there is a map telling you where your troops are, your base locations, and you can use it to see other parts of the map quickly.

Gameplay.

The game is in real time. All the characters move at about the same speed. It's not too slow, but not too quick. If you take too long to think you can get in trouble, but if you are in an easy battle you may end up having to do a bit of waiting.

The game does start with a very well-done tutorial. You assign monsters to troop leaders and fight battles. Troop leaders will have special abilities, which can be automated, that they learn over time thanks to the leveling system; they can also own equipment. While regular battles will have you limited simply to the monsters you started with, in harder battles you will have summoning gates.

You can't just summon as many monsters as you want though, you have summon points. If a monster ally dies, you get the points back so you can summon more. You may need to catch the summoning gates before using them as some of them are under enemy control. If you let your enemies have too much control of these gates, they may end up summoning too many troops as well and attack you more and more. During battles you can take your time and wait to heal, gather berries for health, and find treasures. However the more time you spend, the more possibilities of enemies summoning more monsters to attack you.

Since this RTS has RPG elements, battles are often story related, but you can easily choose to ignore story missions and go on regular missions. The game tells you which battles are story-related and which aren't so that you may pick carefully.

The only bad aspect of the gameplay - other than sometimes it's hard to select specific troops - is that it's often easier to forget about strategy, get as many monsters as possible, and barge in. However some battles cannot be beaten using this tactic, so don't get too sure of yourself.

Graphics

The characters are very tiny and if you have a lot of troops it can become difficult to select any particular one. However you can pick out a troop leader easily, and all of the fighters within that troop will follow (you usually have about 4 troop leaders with 6-9 followers). However during story events, sometimes the screen will close in on the characters for effect, but they just end up looking like ugly sprites. There are also a handful of gorgeous CG cut scenes.

The sound is pretty good too, and will remind you of the original game. If anything, sometimes it feels a bit rehashed.

Overall this is a great game, and very unique for the FF franchise as well as the DS console.