As part of my seemingly never ending quest to complete every Final Fantasy game, I finally swung around to playing Revenant Wings. I have completed, to date, all of the main FF games (not counting XI and XIV, which aren't really completable in the purest sense of the word, or XV, which bored me to tears but I will complete some day), as well as a good number of spin-off games. There are still more that I haven't completed than I have, however. This is due to the fact that there are just SO many. I now officially own every single one in some form or other, so I felt that it was time to start cycling some of the spinoffs and handhelds through my rotation.
Many people do not like Final Fantasy XII very much, although I do. It was a fun and fresh take on Final Fantasy, the environments were gorgeous, and the combat actually wasn't too much more hands off than normal "mash X" combat in your standard Final Fantasy. I'd put it somewhere around the middle-low tier of Final Fantasy games, but that's just because the vast majority of the games in the series are excellent.
Anyway, due to the fact that so few people like XII, I feel like this one doesn't get very much attention. And it probably deserves about as much as it gets. It's a strange spinoff, in that it's more similar to Warcraft III than Final Fantasy. It's a real time strategy game with heroes and role playing element, but it's an RTS through and through.
I enjoyed the visuals of the game, and the controls were about as good as could be expected with the limited inputs available on a DS. Controlling multiple groups is challenging, but Revenant Wings contains a system in which minions are attached to a hero, and by commanding a hero, the minions will do the same. Each hero has a shortcut at the bottom of a touch screen, so moving between groups is fairly simple.
The story, however, was fairly boring. The strategy lacked a lot of depth. Most missions required capturing spawn points along the way, building up a huge army, and sending them all at your enemies. Spells were largely autocasted, and attempting to accurately select a spell's target showed why. When a ton of enemies are crowded around each other, it's nearly impossible to select the right target with your stylus. The main strategic elements came before the battle, when you are selecting the minions and heroes to bring with you. The game uses a rock-paper-scissors approach in which there are three types of units, melee, ranged, and flying. Ranged beats flying, flying beats melee, and melee beats ranged.Part of the strategy is picking the right type of enemies to counter your opponent's units.
This strategy is completely undermined, however, in that there are frequent "surprise" reinforcements that will come and completely overwhelm you in many missions. What's more, these "surprises" are not suggested in the preparation screens, so you may get a host of melee units sent at you when you packed your lineup full of ranged to take care of the flying units they told you were going to be there. This requires a lot of frustrating repetition of missions with the anticipation that these unpredictable and annoying things will happen.
The game was also a bit too long for a handheld game, and the repetitious nature of the missions made the length feel every longer. I think I spent about 15 hours on it.
Anyway, it's an average game that does some things well, but is mostly a drag. The beginning is enjoyable, but once you realize that the rest of the game has little to offer, it's a chore to finish it.
I'd give it a 7.5/10.
-TRO
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