It is, perhaps most famously, the game that plays itself. Final Fantasy 12 was a peculiar entry in Square Enix’s banner RPG series in so many ways, but its most fascinating trait also proved to be its most divisive.
It’s called the Gambit system, through which you can programme each of your characters, their responses and approaches to each encounter, until the combat is almost entirely automated. Push forward into a mob and let your scripting do the damage; sit back and admire your own ingenuity as it’s written across the screen in a flurry of metal and magic.
Optimisation is a part of every RPG, but in Final Fantasy 12 it’s pushed to a brilliant new extreme – your party’s a machine that must be constantly tinkered with, tweaking one variable here and tightening up another there until you’ve got an engine that purrs. It is glorious.
No surprise, then, that the gambit system was the foundation of a game that underwent several changes during its six-year development – at a time, it’s worth remembering, before the likes of The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy 15 when six years to make a video game was considered a very long time indeed – including a change of director, the mantle moving from Yasumi Matsuno to Hiroshi Minagawa with Hiroyuki Ito providing the bridge between the two.
Through all the turmoil, though, the gambit system remained – itself a nod to the then-voguish MMOs, the success of Final Fantasy 11 making Square go gooey-eyed for the rapidly emerging online market. Getting such a system working on a PlayStation 2, however, would prove to be a struggle, as Final Fantasy 12 programmer Takashi Katano recalls today. “I remember the first day working on the project, they handed me the design proposals for the two major features – the seamless combat and the gambit system – and I remember looking through them and thinking ‘wow you want me to do this on a PS2?'”