Square-Enix has been quite busy churning out Final Fantasy remakes lately as part of the series’ 10th anniversary and it was really about time they actually released something new. Following the last RPG title “Heroes of Mana” which was the first in the “Mana” series to have an element of RTS gameplay mixed in, here comes another title doing something similar. A spin-off title from the last major title in the FF series and its name is “Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings”.

The story takes place after the original PS2 game when Vaan and Penelo now finally have their own ships to live out their dreams as sky pirates. Amongst the sky pirates, there was a legend about an unknown place in the sky where floating islands existed, a place filled with treasure. It is when Vaan and Penelo obtain the mysterious Glabados Treasure that they and their orphan friends are transported to these floating islands of Lemure. There, Vaan finds out his treasure allows him to summon and control monsters. They also meet a familiar powerful foe who is ready to throw the world into chaos.


Vaan and his friend’s big adventure begins when a ghost ship arrives.
Turning a what has been traditionally, a long running turn-based RPG title into an RTS will be quite a surprise for fans of the Final Fantasy series. But, if you’ve never played a Real Time Strategy game before such as the popular Starcraft or C&C on the PC, don’t worry because RW spends quite some time easing you into the new style of gameplay with some quick easy missions. You could say it’s all very much been simplified even! Those who have played “Heroes of Mana” or some other RTS before will know that the first thing you’ll have to do is go around collecting resources before you can build facilities and churn out units to battle. RW has none of that, allowing you to jump into battle right away! This really helps cut out the tedious nature of building the same things over and over again.

Controls are simple; select one of your party members then tap on something or somewhere and they’ll perform the appropriate action. For example, tap on a blank area of the map and they’ll make their way there or, tap on an enemy and they’ll attack. You can drag a box around your units as you would with a mouse, tap on individual tabs that are lined along the top of the touch screen or use the X button to select all instantly. You can be sure you’ll be using the X button a lot because for some reason, your units are de-selected after issuing a command but it’s not too big of a problem. You can scroll maps with the D-Pad or by holding down the stylus and dragging but unfortunately, you can’t rotate the camera. During the early missions of the game, this proves to be a small problem because of how some big objects obstruct your view. Fortunately, most of the later missions don’t have this problem!