"Doesn't fly high enough"

Not everyone enjoyed playing Final Fantasy XII. Sure, it featured an evolutionary battle system and endless customisation possibilities, but the political overtones, dull cast of characters and frequent dungeon raids made it an exercise in tedium. Enter Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings -- a real-time strategy spin off set in the same world, Ivalice, with most of the surviving characters making a more invigorating appearance. Gone is the fiddly license board and overly complex story, replaced by a simpler interface and more easygoing proceedings; it just had to a DS game. But does this RTS succeed where Square Enix's previous effort, Heroes of Mana failed? Well, it is an improvement, so to speak.

If you are unfamiliar with the plot of Final Fantasy XII, I don't blame you; even if you played the game, it was so unnecessarily convoluted that the more you thought about it, the less sense it made. However, what is for sure is that Ivalice came out with one less powermonger to worry about. Revenant Wings carries on with the misadventures of Vaan, Penelo, their Rabanastre friends, and a few of the more interesting characters carried over from the original. This time the focus is on Vaan as he seeks to unravel the mystery of the winged race, the Aegyl, that inhabit Ivalice's skies. There is no voice acting whatsoever, just plain text, which means that if you don't care for the still plodding storyline, you can cut right to the chase in most instances.

Revenant Wings is broken up into chapters, each of which contains several core missions that are a requirement to move things along, as well as optional ones that are an avenue to levelling up your team members (gaining new special abilities along the way) and your Espers -- the fantastical creatures that you summon in bulk, capable of clearing enemy forces in a matter of seconds.

There are a variety of mission types, from escorting non-playable characters through thick and thin, to all-out map annihilation. Most of time, though, it boils down to summoning as many Espers as your quota will allow, and then sending them out as a single messy wave to engage with enemy forces. The reason for this is the control interface, which may competently imitate the ease of a typical RTS mouse-and-keyboard setup, but makes it virtually impossible to micromanage with. There are shortcuts assigned to the face buttons to make team selection a little easier, but once the little sprites entangle themselves with the enemy forces, it's near impossible to make them do exactly what you want; for example, attempting to heal a terminally drained troupe leader when barely ten pixels of their head show up amidst the chaos of butting helmets and fireballs thrown about the place.

For a real-time strategy game, Revenant Wings doesn't have a lot of strategy. You can beat most enemy clumps by using a single unit to lure them out onto your own turf, and then overwhelming them with your constantly summoned forces. There is a weapon triangle in play (melee beats ranged beats flying), traditional elemental weaknesses and a myriad of status effects to worry about, but past the initial planning stages where you choose your heroes and the Esper types you can summon (a paltry five at a time), you're pretty much relying on the combined stats of your mob to conquer the opposition's before they can do the same to you.

The lack of strategy is a real shame, especially when you consider the amount of depth (for a DS game) poured into weapon forging, party support abilities, and most importantly, making pacts with the Espers you bring along with you (via a sweet mini license "ring"). Many of the quirks present in Final Fantasy XII make their way over here, albeit in a more compact form. Gambits are back, but you only assign one instruction at a time per character and there are much less (although more useful) abilities to select from. Licensing has been forwarded exclusively to creating Esper pacts instead of fastidious weapon equipping, which is now handled in a typical RPG format of select and use. And if you loved/hated the excessive Quickenings of the past, you'll hate/love the simplicity of it now as a single desperation move that is a real game decider.

The graphics have obviously been downgraded into lowly 2D sprites, but most surprisingly they still maintain the charming appearance of Final Fantasy XII's world of Ivalice. The dungeons, however, are as plain and boring as ever, nearly always composed of murky polygons on which the cute Chibi sprites walk across. The dual screen FMVs maintain the high standards that Square Enix have set for themselves with regards to presentation, but they are rather empty given the lack of much audio here.

Within the actual game, though, the soundtrack is mesmerising, if nearly entirely unoriginal; virtually all of the tracks are DS remixes of the PS2 game. Obviously the sound quality is not as good, but funny enough, the music matches the pace of this game better. Perhaps it's because the melodies are more defined (due to less instrumentation), but it would seem to me that this RTS mould serves as a better backdrop to Hitoshi Sakimoto's original score than Final Fantasy XII ever did -- how ironic.

Square Enix meant for Revenant Wings to be as easy introduction into the RTS/S-RPG genre, a scene already dominated on the handhelds by the developer's own Final Fantasy Tactics franchises. It succeeds in this respect (although the difficulty has been increased during the localisation process -- lots more grinding now required). Revenant Wings is easy to learn and even if you have never played a Final Fantasy game before (or an RPG for that matter), you'll soon be ploughing through tons of enemy troops at a screen's touch.

Sounds fun, right? Thrashings usually are, but the ones seen in Revenant Wings are painfully slow. This was done so that the player would have more time to react and act accordingly (which they usually don't), and that's fair enough, but why do the characters move about the arenas at a snail's pace, too? Each mission averages at the ten minute mark, which is an ideal length considering the platform, but much of it involves you waiting for your team to traverse the many maps. The entire game is done within ten hours, and you also have plenty of bonus missions to tackle if you want 100% completion, but only if you don't tire of the repetition.

If you love dungeon-raiding and are interested to see what the original Final Fantasy XII characters get up to when there's only one megalomaniac running amok, this is made specifically for you. However, the combat is rather lame given the difficulty had with micromanaging units. Revenant Wings is a fair sight better than Heroes of Mana, with path-finding woes now a thing of the past, and some light S-RPG mechanics that borrow the some of the better elements from the original PS2 RPG. There aren't that many RTS games available for gaming on-the-go, and if you're dying for a competent one, this is your best bet for the DS. But it does leave much to be desired, and if you don't settle for anything less than typical Final Fantasy quality, you will be disappointed.

VERDICT – 6.5/10 FFXII was too hardcore, RW is too soft.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/30/07

Game Release: Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (US, 11/20/07)