After a short story video of Vaan, Penelo, Fran, and Balthier landing close to some ruins, players are introduced to the main part of the game. As seem to be a growing theme with the Final Fantasy franchise, the game play is completely different from its predecessors. Instead of a standard turn based RPG, or an action RPG, Square decided to go with a real time strategy (RTS) format. The first few fights, players are just in control of the main characters. However later on, the characters find summon points where different units or espers can be summoned. There are three main types of units, melee, ranged, and flying. The three units bonuses and weaknesses work much like rock, paper, scissors. Flying works well against melee, melee against ranged and ranged against flying. At the beginning of each map, up to five captains are chosen and up to five different espers are chosen to use for summoning.

When the battle begins, the five captains are shown on the map, and then 2 espers are summoned for each captain. The computer is actually pretty smart in the selection of the espers, if the captain is a ranged unit, it will get ranged espers, a melee unit, melee espers and so on. The objectives for the maps are different but pretty straight forward, and can range from, get one character to a certain point on the map, to go rescue some people under attack, to eliminate all enemies on the field, etc. At the end of the battle, win or lose, all captains receive experience.

The gist of the game is played on the touch screen. Almost everything in a battle is done using the touch screen. Since Revenant Wings is basically a RTS, the stylus acts much like a mouse. Tap and drag to select a group of units, or tap a captain’s icon at the top of the screen to select the captain and all of his subordinates. With a push of a button, all friendly units are selected, or all selections are released. The controls up to this point are very well thought out. Orders are extremely easy to give, for movement or attack, all that needs to be done is have units selected and tap the screen. Gambits make a return as well; these are basically rules for characters to follow when not being ordered directly. Unfortunately, once any order is given, the units are no longer selected, so if a player wants to explore a map with a set of units, every time a player selects a movement point for the units, they have to be selected again in order to move them. This can get very frustrating very quickly, especially if the units need to move to different points quickly. The only other problem with the controls will only affect about a quarter of the players out there - there is no option for being a lefty.

The beginning of the game is loaded with full motion videos, which unfortunately have a poor framerate. There are obvious limitations with the DS hardware and storage capacity, but if is going to look so bad, it would have been better to find another way to get the story across. In some instances it almost looks like bad stop animation. The environments however are constructed and textured very well for a DS game. The details in the different stages are easily some of the best on the system. The sprites for the different characters and espers could have used a little work. When the camera is set at the normal height, the characters look fine, though when zoomed in, they look extremely pixelated. The soundtrack in the game is basically all from Final Fantasy XII, with very little new music introduced, which is a disappointment. If a sequel is made, I would hope that most of the music would either be completely new or a remix of some of the old tunes.

Overall, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is fun take on the series, especially if you can overlook some of the poor judgment in the control of the game. With how good the game looks, and all of the different types of espers that can be recruited, players can get really creative with their armies. If you are a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and like real time strategy games with a dash of RPG elements, definitely take a good look at the game.