Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

This game definitely brings back all of the characters from FFXII and throws some new ones in to boot. The soundtrack is typical FF awesome, the dual screen FMVs are awesome and the story is even decent. The only downside to this game are some of the aspects of gameplay. You could only set up 1 gambit for each character and there are times where managing each character was a chore. There were a lot of abilities from each character that I didn't even consider it worth my time to use (mostly buffs and debuffs).
The gameplay revolves around rock-paper-scissors with combination of combat type (flying > melee > ranged > flying) and element (fire > earth > lightning > water > fire) with healing and null elements thrown in. You can summon up to 5 different types of yarhi during gameplay to effectively counter the enemy set up (if your enemy has flying fire you would summon ranged water to counter). The problem here is that even during later levels you are limited to 2 level 1s, 2 level 2s and 1 level 3. There are some battles later where I would've given my left arm for another level 3 or even level 3 slot to make the battle easier. Since there are 3 combat types + healing, you have to choose to nerf at least one every round. And if you want to bring in a level 3, which u can only have 1 at a time, you have to nerf another combat type. The L3 yarhi are tough but require summoning after the battle starts which can some times be a pain in the rump. But the biggest complaint is the selection mechanism. You can point to a char on the screen to select but the bad camera angles and large jumble of people make that difficult some times. You can select main chars from top panel so this is only really a problem when you need to heal or resurrect a fallen comrade. All in all, I thought this was a good game and liked revisiting the FFXII universe.

I played thru the entire game from start to finish. While I enjoyed seeing the FFXII characters miniaturized and put into a light story I'd have to say the actual game play elements such as unit control were fustrating at times.

Often game play consisted of simply overwhelming your enemy in a wave of units. The rock, paper, scissors style of strategy helped make it a little more interesting but I was expecting more from Square. Overall though I enjoyed the adventure and found it challenging from time to time depending on the mission (especially the extras toward the end). A good game but it won't blow you away.