Depending on your perspective, the changes made to the standard Final Fantasy formula can be viewed as either good or bad. Some are happy that age-old Final Fantasy traditions have been abandoned, while others protest these changes mean that XII isn't a true Final Fantasy game.

To that end, we've brought together two members of the Gaming-Age staff that each represent one of these sides. Travis has been a huge Final Fantasy fan for a number of years, to the point where he's played them all and beat most of them. He's also fairly serious about his role-playing games.

Meanwhile, Chris is more of a casual RPG player. He'll often beat the game but not seek out many of the optional sidequests. Due to frustrations with the genre, he doesn't play many RPGs per year, and was instantly attracted to Final Fantasy XII for its many changes to what he perceives to be a tired formula.

Travis: It's been so long since I saw my first glimpse of FFXII that it feels like it predates the PS2. Knowing that this game was influenced by the creators of Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, put my initials expectations at an extremely high level. Once the playable demo was shown at E3 years ago, and we saw our first look at the massively-multiplayer-online-style combat system, those expectations took an immediate turn for the worse. Suffice to say, going into the final version I had mixed emotions over what I expected to be the next great epic RPG due to hesitations with the new combat system.

Chris: Personally, I was thrilled when they showed that XII would mix things up for the series. To me, while Final Fantasy X was a solid game, it wasn't at all what I was hoping for. Though quite detailed and animated, the world was even more restrictive than it had been in past games, and seemed to embrace the random battles and load times instead of attempting to do away with them. Random encounters themselves have been a major pet peeve of mine for a while, as being forced into a battle every so often really messes up the pace of the game. Things only got worse there with the PSOne, as you then had to wait for the game to load the random encounter and then re-load the dungeon once it was over. It's something I had hoped PlayStation 2 games would do away with, and I was disappointed to see FFX continue that tradition.

Thankfully, XII doesn't disappoint in this regard. Combining exploration and combat into the same engine, Final Fantasy XII does away with the traditional random encounters and the related load times, and also heavily modifies the standard battle system to work within the 3D world.

T: Like Chris said, gone are the random battles of all previous offline Final Fantasy's, and if there's any kind of major change to be made to the franchise, that's one I can agree with. Although I think the development team took the idea a little too far. What they've done is borrowed heavily from Final Fantasy XI, a massively multiplayer RPG that bears little resemblance to any other games in the series. When I say "borrowed heavily," I mean from a exploration and combat perspective, this could be FFXI offline. If you ask anyone that plays or has played MMOs, I think most will agree combat is not one of the reasons for the success of those games. I always said, I play MMOs from time to time in spite of the combat systems, never because of them.

C: In all actuality though, I don't think the combat has changed much from the past Final Fantasy titles, except now it's just in full 3D. Instead of the random encounters, enemies inhabit the area, and will attack once within range. The combat itself is standard Final Fantasy fare, manually choosing among the various commands provided by the menu.

Despite the 3D stylings, there's none of the action elements many had feared the shift would bring with it. If a character is out of range, the action that relates to them is then automatically executed once they're close enough. In other words, you can't run to avoid an enemy's assault and then move in to attack without them first getting their chance to pummel you.