when people says "this looks like a PS2 game" they forget that PS2 games looked like this

The visual effects on display are also the work of Jiro Mifune, who was previously involved with Vagrant Story.

The same team worked on both games. Sakaguchi was so moved with Vagrant Story that he decided to entrust them with Final Fantasy. https://twitter.com/Dreamboum/status/1343344648144752640

The recent FFXII remaster managed to highlight the technical prowess of the game even more. Amazing how much a 2006 game still holds up to scrutiny thanks to great art direction by the Ivalice team.

Not only that but there were some flourishes you could never be able to see in a million years with old TVs that can only be seen now with the remaster.

For example, this scene of Judge Ghis showing his internal anger by clenching his right cheek. https://twitter.com/palevioletblue/status/1289394918465536003

It's also crazy considering that Oblivion released on the Xbox 360 before FFXII did and the game looked like this. Just goes to show how powerful art direction and good grasp on the hardware can go a very long way at making a game look timelessly impressive.

This is what Final Fantasy XII could offer on the PS2 in terms of facial animation, texture work and art design in comparison.

Oh! And it would be criminal for me to not mention the stellar voice acting of Final Fantasy XII! They even went as far as hiring theater actors to hone in on the Shakespearean feel of this game.

The best thing about FFXII looking so good is that a lot of the lead devs only had deep experience with 2D pixel art when they started at Squaresoft!

In fact, they attribute what they've accomplished in both Vagrant Story and FFXII to their "older skills and techniques"

The sheer amount of craft put into optimizing the hardware capabilities of the PS2 stemmed from their previous experience working in 2D sprite games.

They knew what would look the best with the available constraints, especially in terms of texture work.

In fact, the 3D models of Final Fantasy XII had less polygons than the Final Fantasy X models because of the world being so much bigger and detailed!

However, they still managed to make the high-poly models extremely convincing.

Of course, 5 years separate these two games, and FFX did a great job despite being an early PS2 game, but you can see how FFXII improved so much in terms of facial animation and camerawork. The handiwork of Takeshi Sadohara and Jun Akiyama respectively.

I actually need some sleep and I was saving up all these things for a dedicated FFXII thread that I'll definitely get to at some point, but I hope you enjoyed the technical marvel that the game has on display! I'll definitely get back to it. I only talk about this game anyway

You can already check @luvileen's excellent thread on some great aspects of FFXII!

This game was so much ahead of its time it even inspired the Dragon Age series! A western RPG! https://twitter.com/luvileen/status/1343633345800937472