Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings

Having saved the world, rescued the princess and traipsed across more miles of open desert than Lawrence of Arabia, you’d think Vann, Penelo and the rest of the Final Fantasy XII team would take some well-earned time out for a long lie-in. But there’s no rest for the RPG hero, Square-Enix throwing wide open the curtains and kicking its characters out into an all new adventure.

Revenant Wings is a direct sequel to last year’s towering epic of an RPG. But, for this foray onto Nintendo’s handheld, rather than shrink and squeeze the original game’s staggering scope into a 64MB cart, the company has opted to try something altogether different translating the mechanics and style into a real time strategy adventure.

The game can be played entirely with the stylus, which is used to select individual units or whole groups of warriors and direct them around the game’s sizeable battlefields. As an RTS the emphasis is on management, directing your 25 onscreen units, pointing them at treasure chests to plunder or enemies to engage like a kind of football manager signalling frantically (with a stylus) from the sidelines.

Tapping on a unit reveals a list of possible commands you can issue, including changing target, setting a gambit (a slim-line version of the auto-behaviour commands from the previous game) or executing a special move. You can select individual units or groups of them if you so choose and send them around the maps however you see fit. All units are categorised into three types: melee, ranged and flying and, in the standard rock, paper, scissors style, each type is strong against one of the others and weak against another.

Another Final Fantasy design stalwart, Summons, play an important role in the game. These ethereal monsters (51 of them, in fact) can be called forth to provide back-up support as you work to clear a map of enemies and this mechanic combined with a simple synthesizing section to the game (whereby recipes are learned and new items forged) provides additional depth and scope to the core gameplay.

The game is a fairly standard take on the genre but its gentle difficulty ensures much of play consists of simply directing a swarm of units around a map, mopping up the various goodies and taking out various targets. On the small DS screen, micromanaging so many units becomes a chore reasonably soon into proceedings, an issue that’s eased somewhat by Square’s ever-delightful presentation.

Gamers hoping for Final Fantasy XII redux will leave disappointed: this is a straightforward and simple excursion for the series’ characters that, while often enjoyable, is at best only a dim reflection of its parent’s creativity and style.

3 out of 5