According to quite a few fans, too.

How many RPGs did you play? This kind of comment remind me of the Xbox fanboys saying lost odyssey is a masterpiece, obviously its prolly the first RPG they played. If FFXII is a masterpiece, then how can we qualify games like dragon quest 8, suikoden 5, FF VII or X??

If you ever try FFXI, released around 2 years prior XII, youll also prolly find lame that they use same engine and all the same names for everything. Filled the game with fetching subquest, because they didnt put enough work in it to put story instead. Dont get me wrong tho, its not bad, simply average, if you played through it all, theres no reason to say its a masterpiece if you compare it to other much better RPGs. If you had played other RPGs and still think its a masterpiece then I would say that you probably prefer action games over RPGs, and you would hate xenosaga lol.

....My profile displays this kind of information for a reason.

I started my love affair with the series with FFIV on the SNES, and thereafter with FFVI (II and III in the US, respectively).

More, many of my favorite gams are RPGs - Mother 3 is one of the greatest games ever made, and it's from a series that began as an homage to Dragon Quest. Hell, I actually love Dragon Quest.

I detail earlier in the thread why FFXII is a masterpiece. In short: it's the best-written, best-plotted, and most thematically consistent game in the series. The characters are masterful. The only respect in which other entrants in the series trump it is in terms of music, and not every other entrant even does that.

Ugh worst FF ever. Controls were... beyond awful. Idk how we could go from something like FFX (amazing), to this... crapppppp

Ok, I respect that, but I really dont understand, for me it was really bland, I feeled nothing playing this game, and I did understand the story. Im not playing a RPG to do combat over and over for 5 hours and finally have a 5 minutes cutscene. And for someone who played FFXI a while, a big part of FFXII was copy and paste. At least in FFXI there was multiplayer interaction.

Final Fantasy XII never requires grinding if you play well - but from that I'm going to assume that you never play many old-school RPGs like Dragon Quest, which traditionally have few if any cutscenes at all. You mention DQVIII, but did you play IV? V? The original?

LOL, I played nearly all RPGs for the last 17 years. Sure when I was playing dragon quest 1 or FF 1 on nintendo there was not much cutscene, but it was ok by that time, we were limit by the system. Its not ok anymore to not have cutscene or dialogue in RPGs. The good time of RPGs start a bit on Snes (chrono cross, final fantasy 3) and sega (phantasy star, shining force) but really on PS1 (a lot). FFXII was bland even if you run through the story without doing subquest. My comments about 5 hours combat with 5 minutes cutscene was an exageration but still...

Edit: sure it didnt required grinding, it was easy as hell, you didnt even have to buff or use any kind of strategy.

I found it to be quite the opposite - Final Fantasy XII's storytelling conventions borrow rather heavily from western theater (that is, plays) and carries the signature mark of many of Matsuno's works: it's like Vagrant Story, or Ogre Battle, or works based on those. I'd compare it to Ogre Battle 64, too, but I don't think Matsuno actually directed that last. The point of that, though, is that it does not tell a story in the way that the majority of JRPGs do nowadays, deviating considerably from the norm of that mode. Again, Mother is the only series that tends to deviate as much as Matsuno's work, but they do it in radically different ways.

Nearly all RPGs for the last 17 years? Bravo. I would not think there were enough hours in the day. You must play the genre almost exclusively.

You have to be joking. Status magic was all that kept you from needing to grind at any given time, and was the backbone on which any successful strategy was built. It was the most intensely strategic game in the series excepting maybe FFIV on the DS.

Hell, if the game was tht easy, then you would have been seeing cutscenes left and right.

the game is good but it don't have memorable characters like others ff games