I am invading this forum to ask a question. Is Final Fantasy 12 any good? I've been on the fence with it for a while.
It's hard to say, as it is a very divisive game.
It is RtwP, where you manage a party of 3 but can change party members mid combat. The game allows a significant amount of customization thanks to the license system, allowing you to equip your character with numerous spells and different kind of weapons. You have interesting systems like Quickening, Esper summoning among others that help spice up the combat. Buffing and debuffing is important, and for regular enemies status effects are very useful. Ok difficulty, can throw some curveballs at times. Tons of content, sidequest and big maps to explore, a lot of them with very interesting little details like wandering NPCs that may help you and such. The Gambit system is great and I wish it had become a staple of the genre. Art direction and music are fantastic, and the graphics look great, they are pretty much late era PS2, when developers had tons of experience with the console, but in HD if you play the PC version which looks even better.
It also has some flaws of many of RtwP games, namely that melee jobs are quite a lot more boring compared to other FFs. They are pretty much auto-attack machines, while the mages get all the cool toys. Also the spell selection may feel a little bit small compared to other games, but is still pretty decent.
The plot is interesting, but is painfully obvious that there was a lot of executive meddling on the development. In particular the characters of Van and Penelope are pretty bad, specially the second. Not so much because they are badly written, but because they are obviously unnecessary, specially Penelope. They are the definition of "tag-along kid", which is even more bafling because if the wanted a teenage hero, they could had gone with the tutorial character, which had at least a bit more to do with the plot of the game. Basically, Princess Ashe and Balthier are the real protagonists of the game.
Overall, I would recommend it, but perhaps you would want to try it out before buying.