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Beginner's Guide to Gambits: Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age
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Thinking about Dragon's Dogma 2's interesting scrappy combat recently took me back to another time when a major RPG series tried something completely different with its combat mechanics. In this case, the designers' goal was the same as Capcom's with the first Dragon's Dogma: a single-player RPG that felt like a massively multiplayer online game to play. But the resulting system couldn't have been more different, and stands as one of the most fascinating dead ends in game design history.
The game is Final Fantasy 12 – a swan song for the PlayStation 2 when it was released in 2006, now available on current platforms in an excellent remaster, The Zodiac Age. (The Zodiac Age is leaving the PlayStation Plus game catalog on May 21, along with several other Final Fantasy titles.) With its hugely flexible Gambit system of party commands, FF12 staged real-time tactical battles that you could effectively program to play itself. It's one of the most elegant and satisfying video game combat systems ever devised – but also one of the least influential and least copied.
