Pros:
-Grid board thing
-So much weapon diversity
-The world was huge for a ps2 rpg
-Variety in the places you visit
-Graphics were impressive for being a ps2 game
-Monster hunting
-collecting items to create weapons/armour

Cons:
-story was weak
-Characters were unintersting at best
-Sometimes I felt like i was grinding instead of having fun
-Summons were uncontrolable but this was fixed in the japanese special edition.

Over all i give FF12 an 8 out of 10

So it's sort of like an MMO? And the story is rather weak? Those are certainly a turn off.

I'll wait for more impressions.

I've tried to get into the game twice and both times I just hated it. It's been a while but I'll try to remember all my gripes:

The characters: you have absolutely no reason to care about any of them. They're all boring, they're all whiney and annoying, and none of them really have any reason to be there.

The story: Both times I tried to get into this games I made it through around 12-16 hours and the game was just boring. The story does nothing to keep you going. Mixed with the beyond boring characters with no real motivation the game just sucks. I don't know if it was because it was trying to be too political or what but the story just bored me to tears.

The Gambit system: good idea but doesn't work that great. I love the idea of the gambit system and how you can customize it, the thing I hate is that you have to buy the cards and work to an actually good system. By the time you finally start getting the good gambits you just don't care. I remember both times when I quit the game I was starting to finally get some really good options but I just stopped caring. If they would have just let me have a lot of those options from the start I would have loved it.

The license system: shitty. This was by far one of the dumbest leveling systems I've ever seen. Every character has the same exact grid so there's no reason to make your characters any different. Congratulations SE! You've managed to make your already boring characters even more boring by making them all carbon copies of each other. Sure, I could level them different through the grid but there's no reason to. License points are easy to come by so yeah, no reason to make them different.


So yes, FFXII sucks. Sure it's pretty and the voice acting is wonderful but that doesn't make up for the terrible characters that have no reason to be there, the boring characters, the pathetic excuse for a story that was copied anyways, and the bad leveling system just make it a bad game.

I liked it, but it did have some serious flaws. I didn't "love" it though. As for what konnichiwa said, I don't really like FFVII much at all. I always get bored with it about 4 hours into it.

Well this saved me some time.  Ctrl C + Ctrl V.

I disliked FF12 so much that, some time ago, I actually wrote a scathing review of it.

http://www.skyrender.net/ff12_review.txt

Looking back on it, that wasn't entirely professional of me, but just the same. I cannot see what it is about FF12 that actually appeals to people.

I still vote yes for this game. You did less then 10% of the game and you call it bad???? 

 A game shouldn't take more than 12-16 hours to get good.

I think people are hating on the story because it doesn't have some sappy love story. I liked the more political story, not everything is laid out in front of you. If you paid attention you would know why all the characters where there.

Quite frankly I used to love FFX (and still do), but with the enemies on screen in FF12 and there being no more random battles it is hard to go back to a game that doesn't have that.

You could make all the characters copies of each other, but then you would have to do a lot of grind/buy a million gil worth of high potions. And the characters are exact copies of each other, Vaan is the "balanced" character, Penelo/Fran/Ashe are more adept at magic and Basch/Balthier are more adept at fighting.

The gambit system works exactly how you won't it to, it can do the minor annoying heals, or you could try to automate all the battles, just don't expect to beat the game easily by doing so.

The only bad thing about it is that it is a touch on the hard side. Some bosses are a major pain in the ass to beat. The easiest way to beat them is to go and catch up on all the hunts to level up some and if you need more spells, get the money to get them.

Of course the graphics are great, music is great, voice acting is great and the game is huge. One of the things people might not have liked about it is that it didn't quite have the same feel as older games as it wasn't the normal FF team working on it, it had the tactics team. So probably all the gripes you hear about the feel of the game not feeling like a final fantasy you will hear about FFvs13 because it is being made by the kingdom hearts team.

Overall I would give FF12 a 9/10 because of the difficulty.

I think FFXII had a lot of great ideas, but implemented them poorly.

The story was both good and bad to me. I loved the political aspects of it, and found the villains vey well rounded characters overall, especially the Judges. However, your party is of six were poorly made characters. The main character Vaan is actually not the main character at all, but more of a whiny sidekick. Basch and Ashe are the main characters of the story and they are merely a means to forward the political vehicle of the story. Nowhere in there do you feel at all attached to anyone's plight. Balthier had good comedic timing however. I'll give them that.

The gameplay was genius in thought but was handled badly. Like twestern perviously said, you don't get the option to update Gambits for sale at shops until certain storyline sections happen, but you usually require the skills way before you have the ability to buy the gambit for them. In some cases, with magic especially, I didn't get magic gambits in shops until almost 15 hours after having acquired magic for half of my characters, which is unacceptable. It took away from an otherwise killer system for grinding levels, as otherwise you could twirl the analog stick around with your eyes closed and have the game basically take care of the work if you undestood well enough how to properly gambit. Overall, it was a great fighting system marred by improper execution.

The graphics were vey well done, but the music didn't stand out to me.

One aspect of the game I really loved was the Hunts and the Thieves Guild surrounding it. I had the most fun hunting creatures that in many cases were well beyond my reach.

Another great aspect was your ability to basically travel beyond your levels and get clobbered or barely survive fights in high powered areas. It allowed leveling up to speed up and let you get your hands on some nice items you shouldn't have had yet.

The weapon selection was fantastic even if most kinds of weapons weren't very different from eachother when it came down to actual gameplay.

The license system was horrible. It's basically a checkerboard with mystery tiles, like Smash Bros. Brawl's Achievements where one tile will show what's in the surrounding tiles and so forth. You couldn't use any accessory, weapon, armor, or summon monster in the game until you purchased the license for it. Unfortunately you very often need to purchase unnecessary licenses to get to the ones you want.

As for my RPG background, i've played FF 6-8 and 10, Vagrant Story, some Chrono Trigger, Persona 2, Growlancer Generations, Arc the Lad, Tales of Symphonia and a few others but mostly enjoy Turn Based Strategy RPGs like Disgaea, Fire Emblem, and FF Tactics. I'm also playing through Planescape Torment, Jade Empire and Fallout on the other side of the RPG spectrum.

I don't know what your history with RPGs is, but for the relatively cheap price, you might as well jump in. Maybe give it a quick rental just to try it out before you decide. This is one game I wouldn't trust the high review average with. Reviewers were very lenient with this game, and I don't feel many of them really played too far into it.