As a Final Fantasy fan losing interest in the series due to its endless spinoffs and returns to FFVII's lore base, I played XII out of a sort of obligation. Design-wise, it features one of the best and one of the worst ideas I've seen in an RPG for a long time.

Let's start with the worst. I will be frank, I did not like the license board. It isn't analogous to the real world in any fashion, it's complicated, and it's broken. That's not to say that I hated it, I just don't think it represented a good concept.

First of all, it doesn't translate into any sort of logic. Is there a worldwide committee that punishes people for wearing the wrong helmets and issues such "licenses"? Does it represent an increasing level of skill, and later weapons and armor are more difficult to use? I suppose you can use that logic, but it's tenuous at best.

Secondly, it's complicated. You can see the entire board as blank squares until you've unlocked what's next to them, it's huge, and unless you have an FAQ, there's no indication which way you should start moving if you have a certain piece of equipment you can't use. It's broken because if you know where everything is (due to having looked it up online), you can just make a beeline for the best gear and HP upgrades. It's about as fun as chess. Some people find chess fun. I find it tedious, but you can't argue the design of chess, which is brilliant.

But where FFXII shines is the gambit system, and to be honest, I think they've ruined AI for the rest of the industry because their implementation was nearly flawless.

Let's examine a big problem with RPGs today - reviewers seem to have something against turn based combat. So the solution is to start making real-time combat RPGs. But RPGs, by their nature, tend to have large parties of characters, and in a real-time situation, that means the bulk of your party will be controlled by AI.

XII's brilliance is that they not only expose this logic to the player, they make it part of the game. You can tie almost any action to almost any stimulus, and you can prioritize these rules. Furthermore, even the act of building these stimulus/response lists is part of the game - you have to find items that unlock the ability to respond to "getting blinded" or whathaveyou.

If your character is acting stupidly (a frequent complaint of ally AI), Square has put the blame solely on you. You take responsibility for your characters in an unprecedented way, you control their every action based on the actions you would take in a turn based game anyway.

So where does RPG AI go from here? It's a good question, and not one I have an answer to - sure, the gambit system can be improved - the ability to have multiple AI "profiles" would be nice. But largely, what Square did was make ally AI open source with collectible "conditionals". It prevents the problem of AI being so good it saps challenge and "leads" the player.

Any attempt by a future RPG to have customizable AI will draw inevitable comparisons with the gambit system. It's another example of forward thinking from Square - now if only they'd apply some forward thinking to other franchises.