Gamespots Greg Kasavin virker svært så positiv til det nye systemet:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Final Fantasy XII does away with the awkward, yet ancient, role-playing conventions of random battles and jarring transitions between exploration and combat. Instead, in Final Fantasy XII, you'll never get taken out of the core gameplay experience, except when the game shows you a cinematic cutscene or when you access your status menus.
That means combat occurs seamlessly within the game's fully 3D environments--no screen-shattering, no your-guys-on-one-side-bad-guys-on-the-other-side battle screen, no signature Final Fantasy victory music as you collect your gil and cure potions after you win. None of that. And you know what? We got the distinct impression that this is the best thing to happen to the series in a while. By extension, it may well be representative of a refreshing, new direction for the console role-playing genre to head toward.
Admittedly, that last statement may be a bit over the top. The truth is, Square's Vagrant Story actually played similarly, only it featured a weird location-based, rhythm-based combat system, whereas Final Fantasy XII is more by the book and lets you command up to three characters at a time instead of just one (and you see all three characters running around in the environment). Basically, the action occurs in real time, but you can always pause to issue new orders. The simplest order is to make all your characters attack a given foe, in which case they'll stand there and dish out the pain as often as they're able to attack, which is fundamentally similar to combat in previous Final Fantasies.
However, you can get pretty tactical with this system and use the physical location to your advantage. You can have your ranged attackers hang back and fire away while your melee fighters suffer the pain on the front lines, for example. The signature spells of Final Fantasy all seem to be here, though we didn't get to try out any summoning spells or anything too spectacular. Still, we felt good about the combat, which comes across as more dynamic and somehow more plausible than in previous games.
It wouldn't be a Final Fantasy without some strange gameplay "system," and this next chapter will be no exception. This time you can assign "gambits" to your characters, which work like tactical orders. The basic gambit determines whether or not members of your party will follow the main character's lead, but other gambits may allow characters to deploy different strategies in battle by default. Such systems tend to be pretty deep, and frankly, we didn't get to explore this aspect of the game in too much detail during our relatively brief time spent with the game.
