I haven't beaten FFXII, and let me tell you why...

Stirling,

I haven't beaten Final Fantasy XII. I've progressed as far as the City of Archades, and my game is saved in there somewhere.

That game puts me at odds with myself. On the one hand, the game is beautiful. The setting of FFX may be prettier in itself, but XII's attention to detail (and controllable camera) take it to another level. Also, the storyline is much, much deeper than that of any RPG I've ever played. It's full of intrigue, diplomacy, espionage, and statecraft, and all of its mysteries are only slowly revealed. Trying to keep track of the competing motivations of each of the characters reminds me of reading Balzac or Dostoevsky. And unlike in FFX, the voice acting adds to the appeal of the game.

But it has its own set of problems. Like FFX, it suffers from Yellow Brick Road-syndrome: the mini-map makes it so easy to determine where you need to go that you never really end up exploring. You just follow the Yellow Brick Road from the beginning of the game to the end.

Also, the characters are not very distinct from one another in terms of their abilities. There's nothing stopping you from making Basch a wizard, or Fran a tank. Just acquire the relevant licenses from the license board. Somewhat related to that concern is this: I can't remember a single instance in the entire game where I had to change out my party members. At first, you might think it's nice to only have to deal with the characters you like. But every time you go to the menu, you'll be reminded, like I am, that you're wandering the world of Ivalice with three characters above level 40, and three characters around level 12. This is aggravating, and a better-designed game would give you some sort of incentive to try different party combinations. But since each character is so customizable, there's no incentive to change party members to access new abilities. And since party makeup has no effect on in-game dialogue or cut-scenes, there's no incentive to change out party members to try to learn a different side of the story. Despite the fact that I've never used Balthier in battle, he keeps showing up alongside me, making quips and casting foreshadows.

You complained about the bosses and the random battles being too hard after a certain point. I agree with you about the bosses, but I actually never found the random battles to be too difficult. The only exception I've found is in the Jungles where the Viera live, there's a monster called a Hellhound that's obscenely tough for the stage in the game where you face it. Other than that, I didn't have too much trouble with random encounters. Bosses and Marks are another story. Marks especially so, but that may only be because I'm impatient and try to defeat them as soon as they show up on the bulletin board.

But I think what I may dislike the most about FFXII are the gambits. Because FFXII isn't turn-based, gambits are a necessary evil; although you can give specific instructions to your characters, to do so is so cumbersome that most of the time, you'd prefer to give them some AI governing what they do when you're silent. I always have equipped Attack Enemy with Lowest HP, and it gets you through random battles nicely. You can also equip Cure Ally when HP < X%. That's another one you'll appreciate if you've ever played RPGs before. But to give you an idea of how fickle gambits can be, I'm well over 40 hours into the game, and I still can't tell my characters, "If you're ally is poisoned, use an Antidote on him," with gambits.

The genius of turn-based RPGs is that slowing the action down allows one player to realistically simulate a strategy that might reasonably be adopted by three or four playable characters. It's not necessarily a non-starter to try to implement a realtime game experience if you supplement it with character AI (Baldur's Gate did a good job on this front); but if you do, the AI needs to be robust. FFXII's gambits fail miserably. You cannot implement a winning strategy against any substantial boss in FFXII using gambits alone. You always have to burst in with specific instructions, in which case the action freezes while you navigate the command menus, and you're left wondering what was gained by switching from turn-based in the first place.

The last thing I don't like about gambits is that they distance the player from the action. It used to be that you would deck your characters out in weapons, armor, etc., and then head out to smite some evil. Once you were in battle you were essentially at the mercy of your equipment if it was suboptimal, but you could limit the fallout by making wise commands. Gambits take your battle commands and make them more like weapons and armor and relics in that respect, since you're sort of stuck with the ones you have equipped. Admittedly you can disable gambits or override them with specific commands, but those are just small exceptions; most of your time in FFXII is spent watching your characters instead of playing them.

For all its faults, and I know I've been really hard on it, it really is a game that's worth playing, and maybe even worth loving. Somebody with less traditional tastes than I have might even be able to prefer it over the rest of the series.

Oh, and we haven't signed up for HD satellite service yet, because the HD-DVR receiver costs more than we want to spend right now.