Final Fantasy XII. It’s a PS2 game that got amazing reviews from most review sites. I won’t bother covering the game itself. You care or you don’t already. In short, it’s a fantastic ride with some of the most convincing acting and modeling I’ve ever seen in any game not to even mention a previous gen platform. Unless you are an Atlus and JRPG elitist with too much time on your hands, this is RPG créme de la créme and cannot be avoided unless you don’t like cream at all.

True to how I beat X & VII, I was on a mission to beat the hardest “weapons” of the game. Then I could blaze through the ending like a warm bullet falling effortlessly through a warm ocean (knife / butter metaphor avoided). Such was FF12. It’s an adventure for about 50-80 hours and then you have a choice to make (as in past ones). Should you just end it or should you spend more time getting everything done? In FFVII, this choice was made when a friend of mine and I decided we’d take on the Ruby and Emerald weapon. This had some implied baggage, firstly that we had to get abilities and gear to make this happen (I can’t remember the exact things). The same decision point came and went and the very same friend and I decided that “yes we were going to uber”.

So we (in parallel game save universes) sought out to get the materials to make The Tournesol (The Sunflower). The best sword in the game. It’s a real beauty and it took forever to get it. It’s just like grinding in an MMO. Kill stuff, sell stuff and get goal done. The mechanics in XII are actually pretty entertaining. You have to sell a number of items and then an item is unlocked to buy. Once you buy it, the item count resets and you could start all over again. Of course, if you read online you can figure out the minimum path to unlocking an item. The Tournesol is such an item that you’d want to follow this path because it could save you 20 hours of gametime. I don’t know what my time was but it took about a week (after work) to get this damn thing. In the end, it’s funny because just like other FF games, you don’t really have the cool stuff until the end and then the game is over. Feh.

So then I’m approaching 150 hours in game and I leveled to about 90ish. Vaan is 90 and most others are low 80s. Time to take on a “weapon”. In XII, there’s a corelation that the Internet hasn’t summarized, Yiazmat is the Ruby Weapon and Omega Mark XII is the Emerald Weapon. There was an Omega Weapon in X, I believe that would be the equivalent of the Ruby Weapon or Yiazmat. They’re not exactly all the same but whatever, those details I don’t care too much about (join a ff forum and argue until you’re a hermit). I’m just trying to set the stage here.

I downed Omega Mark XII, no problem. Tom had beaten him before me and I got all the strategy from watching him. Youtube (as always) has some monkey-see-monkey-do tips that make him a non-issue. I really wish I had the same resources during FFVII for the Ruby Weapon fight. Looking back, I didn’t have gamefaqs or net sharing, just AOL on a 386. Perhaps this is the “walking uphill to school both ways” geezer talk of the modern era. *pause for effect*

So now the game is approaching the singularity point. I’m not maxed out and there’s only one thing left. Yiazmat. Oh noes. I had read about this one. See, in the game it’s described as a fight that NPC’s in the game had heard about from their fathers. Yeah, this boss fight has been passed down from generation to generation. One NPC said his father died after fighting him for a week. Ha! Ok, so this guy is some kind of HP-sink-hole of doom, how bad can he be after I level to 99? Hmm. Reading the Brady game guide, my eyes tear up in horror … “Yiazmat has 50 million hit points”. I then proceded to run around the room like Christopher Lloyd shouting “1.21 gigawatts?! 1.21 gigawatts?!” I put it away for about a week and did other things while muttering “50 million hp … feh”.

Eventually, I started back up again and I piled all my party peoples into the Henne Mines. I set up my gambits to kill the undead bats that drop in on you. It’s a great place to grind out XP. You just mass sleep everything and mass-Curaja “Target: Undead”. I was able to practice drumpad and recording while I slowly leveled everyone to 99. Then when I had a block of time on a weekend, it was time to start on Yiazmat. It wasn’t actually too bad. It took me a little while to learn the best gambit setup and I had to babysit it most of the fight. I only saved once and I was mostly holding the controller for the entire 4.5 hour boss fight. Yes. Longest boss fight ev-ar. 4.5 hours. I ate dinner, I vacuumed the room, I recorded some stuff and I left the room for breaks while my guys pounded away on 50 million hp (6999dmg hits at a time). Eventually he fell and things were done.

After the hardest fights are done, everything else is easy (makes sense). The ending is really, really good. I won’t say anything about it. The ending fights at level 99 is a lot like being 99 and fighting Sepiroth in VII. It’s a non-issue.

Fantastic game. Best game on the PS2 if you ask me.