Final Fantasy XII has suffered just about every production mishap that can make fans feel uneasy about a game, not the least of which is going through three different directors and years of delays. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance even introduced us to the world of Ivalice assuming that within a year we'd be seeing it on our PS2s in FFXII. Instead, the game is shaping up to be Square Enix's farewell to the PS2 hardware, and perhaps the beginning of an entirely new era of game design for them. The demo disc for Final Fantasy XII contains two CGI movie montages that tease the storyline, and two short combat missions, basically enough to establish the setting and give the player some idea of what the gameplay will be. Most players can expect to spend about forty-five minutes playing it, and then the next ten months arguing about it on message boards. The glimpse of the game that the demo disc offers is tantalizing, but extremely incomplete and at points disconcerting.

The movies don't really establish much about the plot that isn't already known, so we'll focus on the new combat system the two playable missions show off. Each mission demonstrates one of the two different battle modes you can opt to play FFXII in, Wait and Active. The Phon Coast mission is in Wait Mode, and The Stilshrine of Miriam is in Active Mode. The difference between the two modes is whether or not monsters are allowed to keep acting while you have menus open. Wait Mode is slightly easier than Active Mode, but there's not a huge difference between the way the two modes handle. For the Phon Coast mission you'll use a party comprised of hero Vaan, along with unlikely heroine Penelo and disgraced Knight Basch, and hunt a T-Rex like creature called a Rock Eater. In The Stilshrine of Miriam, you'll use main heroine Ashe, along with sky pirate Balthier and his Viera comrade Fran, and try to find an enormous dragon called the Ring Wyrm. You can set any character of the trio as the group's leader, and this will be the character you control directly. The other characters will act as their AI dictates, although you can give them specific orders when you wish. The demo doesn't seem to offer any controls for customizing your party member's AI.

You may be boggling as you read this description of the combat engine, and for good reason. FFXII is the first console Final Fantasy game to entirely dispense with turn-based combat. However, it's not an action RPG, either. The battle system is a unique style that seems to exist somewhere between the Tri-Ace (Star Ocean, Radiata Stories) approach and the very action-oriented Kingdom Hearts style. In FFXII, monsters appear on the map and roam around in much the same way they do in Kingdom Hearts; combat begins when your party walks into an area where monsters are present. There is no change in screens when combat begins, your characters simply draw their weapons and begin closing in on the nearest monsters. For your part, you can tap the cross button to call up a menu that looks quite a bit like the command menus of older Final Fantasy titles. You can use this to command your main character to do a particular thing, like attack with their equipped weapon, cast a spell, use an item, or summon an Esper. Most of the time, you'll select the Attack option and leave it that way for most of the mission. Once you select the attack command, your character will automatically repeat that behavior every so often; other commands, your character will execute once after a certain amount of "set-up time". You can move during the set-up time for a particular behavior, but nothing you do will speed up the character taking their action. The same goes for attacking; you simply can't make your character attack more frequently in the demo. So, while combat is active, you'll still be grappling with the limitations of a turn-based system.

Once you've set the attack command, you'll be able to damage foes by moving your character within striking range of monsters. When you're in range and have an attack ready to go, a yellow conical icon will appear that points your character at the monster. Position your character, and make sure you stop moving. Your character must be standing still for a second or two before she or he will attack. It's hard to get the hang of doing this, and we were often reduced to forcing our thumb off the analog stick when setting up an attack to make sure we didn't actually break the set-up by moving. Of course, you have to do all this while the monster is still running around trying to attack you, which is the challenge of most battles. If you plant your attacking character in front of or alongside a monster, you run the risk of taking damage if they don't happen to block the incoming attack. Obviously, it's usually safest to get behind the monster before attacking. However, if you always try to do this, you may end up running in circles if the monster decides it would really like to turn around and try to attack you. This is something you can use to your advantage if your allies are in range and start pelting the monster with attacks while you're distracting it. If you manage to get the drop on a distracted monster, your character may attack multiple times in rapid succession, creating a chain. It also seems like it may be possible to create a chain combo of attacks if you set up a maneuver that lets you strike rapidly after your allies. The biggest chain combo counter we saw was three strikes, but it seems entirely possible to push it higher.

Often many monsters are rushing you at once, and finding ways to cope with this is tricky. Generally you'll want to focus the group's efforts on a single monster, and helpfully the ally AI generally focuses its efforts on whoever the leader is attacking. However, you still need to pick your targets carefully. The demo gives the impression that you quickly want to eliminate spellcasters, and find ways to use the terrain to keep other monsters from hitting you while you're focusing on putting one down. You can pick which target you want to focus on in a given combat in the menu; simply press cross, select attack, and then a list of potential targets will helpfully pop up. Select the name of the monster you want to go after, and an arc of light will sprout from your character's head and point the way toward wherever the selected monster happens to be now. You target magic spells and items in much the same way, but for healing items you select a target from your own party list. The targeting system makes finding monsters you want to take down easy even if you lose track of their location during the confusion of a battle. However, it also makes the combat screen very busy, as it will also be full of guide lines showing where your allies are going and other sorts of bright, flashing indicators.

Combat with lesser monsters more or less boils down to isolating your targets, trying not to get hit too much, and heaping on attack damage where you can. Your AI allies can actually handle taking care of healing duties, and will also cast attack spells fairly liberally. A sound tactic, at least in the demo, is simply to let them do this so the main character conserves their MP for the inevitable boss battle. The AI doesn't burn through their MP reserves or your item store too quickly, but we were left wondering if there would be some way to order your allies not to use up resources if you were, say, running low on Potions and money. Your can also cast a selection of white and black magic with both of the default main characters, but you don't want to. You really want to save their MP for summoning an Esper in the boss battle. Summoning an Esper is basically cashing in all of your MP in return for the chance to hit the "I Win" button. Espers in FFXII are similar to the Guardian Forces of FFVIII or the Aeons of FFX, powerful god-like creatures. But instead of appearing to take a single action and then disappearing, they appear and fight alongside you as an AI ally. Once you've summoned one, your other AI allies will disappear and the Esper will take their place. The enemies onscreen will all focus their attacks on the Esper, leaving your character free to keep attacking the monster. Your Esper can't really take damage or be killed, and will also attack the enemies at every opportunity. Esper attacks do huge damage while they're materialized, but there seems to be some sort of time limit on how long they can remain in a battle. After so long, or perhaps after soaking up so many attacks, the Esper will cast some catastrophically powerful magic spell before disappearing. If your Esper somehow didn't manage to kill the enemy you were fighting before this happens, their final spell usually does the trick. Esper damage is enormous, and most boss combats will probably consist of figuring out which Esper to throw at the enemy to take it down quickly.

We're still not sure exactly what to make of the new combat system. It's definitely different from anything else out there and encourages players to approach the task of fighting monsters in unusual ways. It also makes for a very visually appealing game, because the lovingly rendered backgrounds become your battlefield and your character looks just as good in-battle as they do when walking around. There's more of the feeling of exploring a contiguous, single world. Make no mistake, the way FFXII presents this world is gorgeous. The blatantly pre-rendered movies aside, your in-game characters are rendered with remarkably life-like detail. On the way they move and the relatively low-resolution of the graphics betray that the title is even running on a PS2 at all. With FFXII, Square may very well have completely maximized the potential of this console. Still, the missions were both short and extremely easy, and the combat seems like it could grow too repetitive to be interesting over the dozens of hours it takes to clear a Final Fantasy title. Of course, with nearly a year left before the game's final release in August 2006, Square Enix has time to change - or not change - a lot about the way the combat engine works. If they add in more control over your AI allies and up the difficulty factor a bit, they could have the next revolution in console RPG gaming on their hands.