Nov 16, 2007

The Final Fantasy for everyone. That's a promise likely to make hardcore fans fear for this spin-off from the epic PS2 game, but while it's definitely not in the same league of complexity as last year's FFIII remake, it's undeniably a more immediate experience.

So out go the menu-driven, turn-based fights, the random encounters and the giant dungeons. Instead of all that daunting stuff, Revenant Wings has a combat system and open battlefields reminiscent of a realtime strategy game, simplified enough to negate the requirement for fiddly micro-management. At its most basic level you just show your team the enemy, wind them up and watch them go.

Of course there's a little bit more to it than that. You have five team leaders, each of whom can summon allies, called Espers, from the monster generators dotted around most of the levels. The maximum number of Espers depends on the experience of the team leaders, and by assigning units evenly across the team you end up with five squads that can break up a larger enemy army and attack from multiple directions.