I used to play this on PS2, but I got burned out because the battles were very slow (MMO-style).
So the 4x speed system really helps a lot. And I totally agree that the main character in this FF feels more like a side character

I beat the last 5 bosses without touching my controller.

Kept waiting for something to happen in the story but it's mostly a macguffin hunt. In any other FF game the end of this would have been the half way point. Only playable because of the x4 speedup.

Only positives in this game are the song "Discarded Power" and of course the leading man Balthier.

Good game, bad Final Fantasy. AFK game wrapped in an FF skin. As far as the setting goes, Ivalice is great in that it's incredibly detailed and feels much more "lived in" than your usual FF setting. Unfortunately though, XII rarely gives you a reason to actually care about it. The cast is boring, their reasons for even being there are vague at best (especially Vaan and Penelo), and honestly despite not skipping any cutscenes or optional dialogues, I forgot what I was even doing from a narrative perspective once cause sometimes you can go multiple locations without a single piece of exposition.

It plays a bit like an offline MMO, some kind of weird hybrid of FF11 and FF14 1.0. Combat is very fire and forget, if your gambits are set up as if you have half a brain in your head you can basically just auto the entire game. The changes made in the Zodiac Age edition (aside from the chests of doom from the original) are mostly negative in my opinion. The original gave you choice over character builds, and everyone being on the same grid meant that the distribution of strength was relatively even and smooth. Now, every character has two grids, each hyper-specific for something, which means you're inherently more powerful than you were on the PS2 version.

The side content is decent. I like the hunts, but there's something fundamentally unfulfilling about combat as a whole. Your hits seem to lack weight, combat as a whole kind of just blurs together. You'll spend hours and hours killing wolves and malboros in wide open fields that chain together. I think the game's most egregious sin comes from the boring cast and boring main story. Final Fantasy titles live and breathe by their cast and here... there's just not much reason to care. Vaan is a bootleg Tidus with less personality and weird eyes. Penelo I can't even think of a descriptor for, she might as well not be there. I'm told it was originally meant to be Basch's story, and yet he barely speaks, or if he does it's a line here or there of little importance. Fran seems pointless aside from one cutscene. The only characters who stand out are Balthier and Ashe. It might as well be Balthier's story cause he's the only guy I actually like. Ashe is cool but gives mary sue vibes cause she's the princess and a thousand years of foreshadowing circle around her. The game does try to give you reasons to care, but it's not like it ever attempts to drive it home. Vaan does have a motivation to be there (ie avenging his brother), he just never speaks of it. It's all "oooh i wanna be a pirate!!" The potential emotional hooks are there, but they seem to lack weight and exist "just because". It doesn't help the OST is very weak, probably because Uematsu wasn't around much for it. Contrast that to moments in other FF games where story drive/ character motivation/ OST etc all combine effortlessly to extract "reasons to care" from the player. Here, all of that seems absent.

Most chests give you very little, whilst a small few give you a 100% chance of something decent like a spell or ability. This makes exploration feel bad because you know most of the time you're wasting your time for 56 gil but maaaybe it's something you'll need. Not sure why they went with this system.

Weather influencing spawns was kind of novel for the time. But I feel like they kinda fugged up the scale of the game. Everything takes forever, so you find yourself running around at 2x or 4x speed constantly, and still sometimes things feel sluggish. I think if you have to do this to make the experience palatable, then the pace of the game in the first place is wrong. You don't get this feeling from FF1-10. But overall, I'd say this game is for people who are either lifelong FF fans, or fans of "turn your brain off and grind levels". It's alright. Not stellar. Ranks low in a list of FF games, but middling-to-decent for titles in wider market. 5.5 or 6/10, recommend but with a ton of caveats. I would give this a sideways thumb if I could. Because it's inferior to FF6-10 in nearly every way, I'm giving it a red.