Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings (Nintendo DS)

...it's a spin off from Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. Stripped of its origins, Revenant Wings would likely end up in the nearest bargain bin of your local video rental store.

What RW tries to be is a real time strategy game like Command & Conquer or Starcraft. Anyone who has played either of those will be familiar with the old-but-effective click n' drag system, which is what RW tries to replicate with the stylus and the touch screen. ...
...off rehashes old sprites from Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, which was a Game Boy Advance title released more than three years ago.

Picking up a year after where Final Fantasy XII left off, Vaan - a self-styled sky pirate - and Penelo, his faux love-interest, fly about in their airship in search of treasure and adventure. To begin with all you control are the main characters. Vaan whacks things with his sword. Penelo is support, healing ... more

There are two types of spin-offs in the world: one is where the videogame builds on its predecessor's material and tries to take the experience one step further. The other is a cheap and shameless cash-in. Revenant Wings is hands down one of the worst games available on the DS. Forget those rubbishy film-to-game adaptations like Ironman or Pirates of The Caribbean - Revenant Wings tops all of them. And it would seem that the only reason why Revenant Wings materialized on the DS is by virtue of the fact that it's a spin off from Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. Stripped of its origins, Revenant Wings would likely end up in the nearest bargain bin of your local video rental store.

What RW tries to be is a real time strategy game like Command & Conquer or Starcraft. Anyone who has played either of those will be familiar with the old-but-effective click n' drag system, which is what RW tries to replicate with the stylus and the touch screen. A noble feat, even more so for a portable device, but for all its good intentions, RW is loaded with glitches, has an extremely fidgety interface, boasts the difficulty curve of a brick wall, and to top it off rehashes old sprites from Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, which was a Game Boy Advance title released more than three years ago.

Picking up a year after where Final Fantasy XII left off, Vaan - a self-styled sky pirate - and Penelo, his faux love-interest, fly about in their airship in search of treasure and adventure. To begin with all you control are the main characters. Vaan whacks things with his sword. Penelo is support, healing Vaan when he gets whacked with someone else's sword. Along the way you pick up a few more non-descript team members each with different skills. Ground units, like Vaan, have the edge on magic users, while magic users are far more effective at zapping aerial units, and aerial units do more damage against ground units, and so on. This is all fine and dandy for the first couple of levels, but the major problem with the gameplay soon rears its ugly head. Vaan and friends soon obtain the ability to have their own personal set of monsters to ward off the other monsters that are exactly the same as the monsters that you are fighting against. So much for being creative. Initially, to each main character, you get paired with, depending on how powerful your monsters are, about three in his or her respective party. If your monsters fall in battle, you can re-spawn them from particular nodes, but if your team leader dies, you can't re-spawn any of them and your monster quota is lost, as well as any skills that particular character has. Of course, that outcome is to be expected in any strategy game, play effectively and don't screw up, but given the fact that the ability to revive any fallen team leader is extremely limited at the beginning of the game, it forces you to play very conservatively with your choice of available units.

The worst part, however, is actually getting any of your characters to do anything in any sensible order. Along the top of the onscreen interface are the faces of your team leaders. Tap one and it selects both the leader and his or her team of units, allowing you to move them as one. Yet, ninety percent of the time, you only want that one character in order to use their respective skill (like blast a group of unsuspecting enemies with a fire spell). What you don't want is an entire legion of your crappy AI minions walking straight first into a skirmish they have no chance of winning. Thus begins an uncomfortable series of taps just to select one measly unity. And if that weren't enough, as the missions progress, you end up fighting more and more enemies that will overpower the units with the aforementioned advantages simply by sheer force of numbers. It is at this point that the only reasonable thing to do is send every single unit you have as one mangled crowd into battle and hope for the best. None of this is in keeping with a strategy game - it's just a roulette of dumb luck.

There's really no point in detailing anything else about this game's foibles. It's just bad. Really bad. And shockingly, on nearly every other website or magazine, this game is lauded as a must-have DS game. The mind boggles as to why this is the case, but depressingly, it shows that every man has a price, be it promoting rubbishy games or invading foreign countries, all for a quick buck. Yet the real criminals here are Square Enix - the creators. They should be ashamed, given their reputation and back catalogue, for allowing such a poor title to get the green light.

Fret not - there is light at the end of the tunnel. A far more worthy title on the DS, also produced by Square Enix, is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance: Grimoire of the Rift. A mouthful to say, but in terms of gameplay and longevity, you're far better off choosing it over Revenant Wings. 

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