Final Fantasy XII was released before it would have been accepted by the FF fanbase.

[Runa216]

To date, I don't really understand why so many people hated Final Fantasy XII. Sure, Vaan and Penelo were kinda bland heroes, but aside from that it was great. (And to be fair, Vaan and Penelo were added later on in development for bishie japanese kids to have an in-game avatar; they were never meant to be big players in the story.)

I mean, the Battle system SEEMED like it took control of you, but it really didn't. Basically, you got to program your characters to act as you would, thus eliminating redundancy. So instead of mashing X ad nauseum to finish random battles, you had to prepare in advance so the battles themselves were mostly taken care of. And to make matters better, if something came up you hadn't anticipated, you could manually control each ally's moves and thus treat it like a traditional FF game. The choice really was yours, since there was options in place to either let you use the gambit system or have the game pause when in a menu much like previous games.

The story and characters were some of the best written in the series, and the world was one of the deepest, most fleshed out ever conceived in a game. There may not have been a massive open world like the first nine games, but the way things were done, it still felt huge, and there were tonnes of hidden areas and secrets to be found.

There was enough side content to keep you busy for hundreds of hours, marks were fun as hell to hunt down and get rewards for, testing your skill throughout rather than just being endgame content.