Talking to the gang on bridge.
Besides the main missions in each chapter of the story, you’ll also find a number of side missions to play through too. Most of the time the goal just involves clearing a map of enemies but you’ll find it changes quite a lot such as opening all the treasure chests, keeping a character alive or just collecting resources even. There’s enough to keep missions varied even though sending a large army of espers to battle is the most fun of all. In terms of difficulty, RW isn’t hard to beat at all and I didn’t find myself stuck levelling up so that I can beat the next mission. The story itself isn’t quite on the same grand scale as FFXII was but it’s fairly entertaining all the same with a few twists here and there.

On the graphics side of things, Square-Enix has once again shown what beautiful graphics the DS is capable of with some very beautifully rendered 3D backgrounds from the lush green forests to the bright red heated volcanic caverns. The fun thing is you even get to customise your airship base a little by placing monuments!


Feel free to decorate your airship with trophies like this statue.
Sprites are presented in 2D and during all the story telling you’ll be seeing a lot of blocky characters as the camera zooms in. There is no voice acting and the simple character portraits next to the dialogue boxes don’t change. What you do see is the very same sprites wonderfully animated with smiles, laughter, sorrow etc. All those years of working with the early NES console seems to really shine through here! And if you’re a fan of those pre-rendered FMVs there’s quite a few of those too sandwiched between chapters but like Magicial Vacation 2, the characters look like clay models. Again, it’s just some optimisation for the DS.


It’s amazing what little facial expressions the artists manage to put on the sprites.
In the sound area, you’ve got all of the original FFXII music playing in the background composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto. Most of time you’re listening to cheery, light mood music as you watch the characters act out the script, particularly Kytes and Filo. You won’t hear the same realistic sound effects such as the clash of metal weapons but what’s present is good enough for the super-deformed character designs. On the other hand, seeing as how the PS2 game had voice acting, I would have preferred it if they could have added in some to this game too.


FFXII:RW easily sports some of the best graphics on the DS.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings offers some fresh gameplay for the mammoth RPG series and while the dominant RTS element may not be for everyone, it’s certainly been simplified a lot to offer a good 30 entertaining hours or so. You’ll probably miss knocking up those huge damage counters but I’m sure sending small armies of your favourite summons and FF enemies to battle will make up for it. Another beautifully presented Square-Enix game that I’ve enjoyed every moment of.

Import Friendly?

It’s fairly friendly since most of the time you just need to wipe out all enemies from the map. There are plenty of icons to indicate what various magic and skills so they shouldn’t take long to figure out. An English version has been announced for sometime in winter at the time of writing but if you can’t wait that long, you can always resort to our fully scripted translation guide!

• Beautifully presented graphics and music.
  
• Clean easy to use interface that looks inherited from FFXII.
  
• Simplified RTS gameplay lets you concentrate on the fighting action.
  
• Varying objectives.
  
• Side missions.
  
• License Ring system for unlocking new summons.
  
• No level grinding.

• Story isn’t quite as intriguing as FFXII.
  
• Units are de-selected every time a command is issued.
  
• Some voice acting would have been nice.