Final Fantasy XII - Revenant Wings : DS
You can’t suggest that the Final Fantasy games aren’t addictive. Revenant Wings had me like a drug; it’s one of the cool things about the DS that you can play the games anywhere - in the bath, in bed, on the toilet. Revenant Wings was one of those experiences which had me clocking up almost thirty hours of play inside of a week without more than a couple of sessions where I was anti-social and went away to play. You have to love the DS for enabling that level of addiction (and ruining the odd night’s sleep).
So what is this game? The story follows on from Final Fantasy XII, so they say, but it does so in that way that games have to do where for whatever reason all my people have forgotten how to fight despite being single handed death machines by the end of the previous game. Admittedly, this time they are fighting in a different way with all this real time strategy lark and leading little troops but still, some allusion to the fact that I’d clocked up 130 hours of play in the previous game and there was no way that these guys were likely to be killed by a little level one blob ever would have been nice! Yes, Revenant Wings is an RTS game, on a DS, using the stylus… and it works! You can select your leaders (i.e. the characters you know and love) from little tabs at the top and each one has a little group it controls. Click on the bad guys you want to fight and let it do the rest. There’re special abilities each leader has which are based on their class giving you a good range of extra things to do in the fight though I used little more than the magic spells from the party Black Mage and raise. All in all a good little system - it’s no full screen RTS computer game, but it sits in your hand.
There’s a really nice percentage complete counter which tells you just how missions you have done, counting up the side missions as well as the story ones. I ended the game and watched the credits roll with a 94% completion rating which is a little annoying, but I missed a couple of missions on the way (I believe I’ve worked out how to go back and get them now) and there were two sickly difficult, nay impossible, missions which I couldn’t be bothered to struggle through to the end. One annoyed me as I was on the very last bit of a 30 minute fight when the final boss monster teleported in right over my white mage, killing her and meaning I no longer had raise. Believe me, in this game, if you lose raise on the hard fights, you might as well click the ‘restart mission’ button, but I digress.
The missions range from too-easy-to-bother-with to ridiculously-bloody-hard-should-I-go-level-some-more-and-come-back. The final final boss is one of the latter and I honestly think I only accomplished it (on the fourth go) by sheer luck and some good use of my specials. I am proud to say though, that the one monster that gave me the most trouble was Bahamut. He was the git who teleported in over Penelo and then he gets summoned right in my way in the final boss fight to annoy me there too. Good ol’ Bahamut, never gets tired.
The story is quite fun too. It suffers from having been obviously written after the original rather than alongside it, but you can forgive that. The fan-touch is the return, two by two, of your original team from FF XII, giving you that smiling moment. Shame that the graphics have been done by a different group because they don’t look quite right, and you miss Fran’s beautiful accent (no voice-over) though in my head, every time I read her words I heard her voice - that’s what five solid days of doing something’ll do to you.
I’ve played three ‘Ivalice Alliance’ games now, and I think they’ve been successful in building a world that you can immerse yourself in and the little nods from game to game are lovely. I wish I’d played Tactics A2 after FF XII, but that’s my own fault. Revenant Wings is a great addition to the set, and one of the finest strategy games on the DS. It has the occasional AI problem (units walk from A-B in the shortest line, often getting themselves killed in the process by walking into the badguy group) and the clicking can be inaccurate in a big fight; both situations that have lost me a mission I should have won, but you can forgive these problems easily because this is one of the best games I’ve played on the platform. I’m still looking for that DS game that Nintendo claim is out there - where you can pick up your DS for ten minutes, play something and then put it down - and this isn’t it, but if you want to get seriously addicted to something for 30 hours of your life, then maybe this is that instead. Thank God it doesn’t have an online PvP battle mode…
