The Nintendo DS certainly offers up some classic games, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, etc and now they have been joined by another classic in the form of Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which takes place straight after the events of the PS2 classic Final Fantasy XII.
Revenant Wings is a action/strategy RPG which sees you take control of Vaan the Sky pirate and his companions who stumble across the sky continent of Lemures, throughout the game you will make your way through the different missions moving your squad into action against the various enemies that you will encounter.
Much like in most role-play based games, each character in your party can increase in level and change equipment, as well as being able to assign one of their abilities to a gambit, meaning that the ability will be automatically used in certain situations such as combat. Later in the game other abilities also become available such as mist charge and quickening which have a devastating effect and can often swing the battle in your favour.
Thankfully combat really couldn’t be any simpler, you find the enemy you wish to target using the d-pad and touch them with the stylus, providing you have done this correctly a symbol with two swords crossing should appear and your group will then head into battle. Of course there is more to combat than just approaching the enemy with a sword, as each character has special abilities, that range from healing, jumping and duel welding skills to more devastating magic such as fire attacks.
Controlling your parties movement works in a similar way to combat, you simply touch the stylus on the area where you wish you party to move and off they will go, you can either select one member of your party by touching their name at the top of the screen or select them all by drawing a square over the entire party using the stylus.
One of the most exciting parts of the game is when you come across summoning gates, these allow you to summon Espers which act as your troops in a battle, to summon you will first need to acquire the Ring of Pacts, which you should encounter early in the game, you then need to approach the gate with one of your leaders and take control of it, once this is done you will be able to summon from anywhere on the field, providing a summoning gate is still in the area. Each Esper costs a certain amount of Affinity to summon, this means that you will be limited in the amount of Espers you can summon, however once they die you are able to summon more to replace them, just keep the enemy away from the spawn point or it can be a bit of a thankless task. Each Esper has it’s own strength, ability, magic and will fit into one of three unit types, melee, flying or ranged, so choosing wisely is essential.
The on screen action seems to work really well, although there are a few niggles, for example, when all of your characters are close together it becomes difficult to select an individual should you wish to perform a heal or use one of your other abilities, however since characters can be selected using their profile at the top of the screen, this is more an inconvenience than anything else.
Presentation wise Revenant Wings cannot be faulted, the cutscenes at the beginning of the game look fantastic, it also seems that much care has been taken to make sure each character has a personality of it’s own and this really pays off in the game, the environments also look wonderful, making this one of the best looking DS games out there. The sound brings a lot to the presentation by using the same style of music from the fantastically composed Final Fantasy XII and this really helps add to the whole atmosphere.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is a fantastic game, it looks and sounds fantastic and offers enough depth to keep even the most diehard Final Fantasy happy until the next major release, like I say another classic is born on the DS and if you are an RPG fan looking for your next fix then make sure this game doesn’t pass you by.
