If you haven't been following the game:
- No more random battles (BIG YAY!). You can see enemies on the field, and battles are more action-oriented, although in a way it's still turn-based.
- The enemies interact with sight and noise (so far), and even each other.
- Weather system. The days will oscillate between day and night. During night time, the enemies will change, and undeads will appear more frequently. Also, the weather affects magic. eg. when raining, thunder magic deals more damage.
- You can move characters' positions during battle.
- The battle seems to be more 'automated', meaning that you control one player, while the others auto-attack (but you have to give commands to the others first -using the 'Gambit system'-, so they can auto-attack, auto-heal, etc). However, you can control each character's actions if you want. Don't take this as a fully automated battle in which you can just put the controller down and watch the fireworks.
- All characters can equip any weapons they want, but the more a character uses a weapon, the more specialised he/she is with that weapon.
- The more a character uses white magic, the more specialised that character becomes with white magic, and etc etc.
- the director wants to have an MMORPG feel to it, with huge fields and dungeons and cities (one city so far has around 200 NPCs, and you can talk to at least 60-100 of them, if I'm not mistaken).
- Summon system is similar to FFX's (ie. you can control the summons' actions), but the character summoning is still playable on the field.
- The summons will mainly be from FFT's Zodiac beasts or FFTA's summons eg. Altima, Velius, Hashmalum, etc. Classics such as Bahamut or Shiva are yet to be confirmed.
- Music is no longer done by Nobuo Uematsu, well, most of the OST is not. NU still does the main theme, however. 99% of the OST will be composed by a man named Hitoshi Sakimoto, responsible for FFT (yay!) and Vagrant Story.
- Story's theme is about 'freedom'.
So far, FFXII will rock!
EDIT: Nathan, the overworld map, unfortunately, is no more. But this is compensated by huge, realistic environments, which are definitely much much bigger than FFX's.
To Aliasfan, sorry to break the bubble, but FFXII will be released in Japan on March 2006. That means it's probably going to be released here late 2006 IF we are lucky, knowing how slack Square is to us, PAL gamers.
