When the hype over last year’s Final Fantasy 12 died down and the tens of hundreds of us who were looking forward to it settled down to a forty-hour chunk of RPG questing, it’s fair to say that I was as excited as a small kid who’d found themselves locked in Toys ‘R Us overnight. I love a good Final Fantasy, and having had to wait an absolute age since I had played through X and X-2 I was rather looking forward to immersing myself in another of Squaresoft’s pieces of work. Then it went and mostly let me down.

The reasons for my dislike of 12 are numerous, whether it was the wafer-thin story, the unexplored characters or the pointlessness of the summons. Still, the opportunity to add a little more flesh to the bone is always welcome in my book, and with Square Enix following on their tale with a curious real-time strategy game for the DS in the form of Revenant Wings the big question was always going to be whether the change of platform and genre would work out.

The answer, somewhat thankfully, is mostly yes. Final Fantasy titles have strayed into the strategy department before, of course, what with the plethora of Tactics games littering various consoles, so this isn’t necessarily so much of a departure from the norm as you’d expect, and visually Revenant Wings bears a striking resemblance to that type of game with an isometric view on cutesy, pixelated visuals. However, this time there’s no turn swapping antics to be had and instead you control Vaan, Penelo and company around a series of maps slashing and hacking your way through to your objective.

Employing the touch screen as your main method of control (although you can use buttons to select individual troops if you prefer), moving your little army around the screen is as simple as either tapping a single unit or dragging a square around many and then tapping somewhere on screen to send them to that location. As you’d imagine there are plenty of enemies dotted around for you to smash and bash through, and engaging them is as simple as tapping them and selecting the little dagger icon that pops up. On the face of it it’s a rather simple system, but there are tweaks which you need to start employing as the game ramps up the difficulty a few hours in.

The combat, for example, is set up in a way where certain units are strong against a certain type of enemy but weak against another, making it vitally important that your entire squad is divided up into certain blocks of the same type so you can successfully engage enemies with as little hassle as possible. A little later on in proceedings you gain the ability to summon not only certain types of monsters to fight by your side, but also big summon beasties such as Ifrit so your party leaders can use them.

Hence it is a big ol’ tactical onion just waiting to be peeled, and free of the stop-start nature of turn-based combat it’s actually really quite moreish. By making it so easy to jump straight into the thing and then adding new tools and commands at a decent pace you’re always on your toes, and the difficulty level curves up at a good rate too. All in all it’s a pretty successful tilt at an RTS game, but there are a couple of issues that crop up relatively frequently.

The first is more of a technical issue than anything, with the game often stuttering and shuddering whenever there’s a concentrated patch of action happening on the battlefield. It’s not something that’ll annoy you so much that you end up propelling your DS at the nearest wall, but it’s still an issue that does crop up. Another potential thorn in the game’s side is that bigger battles can get rather messy, with the smaller nature of the DS screen meaning that picking out individual units becomes pretty much impossible, meaning that you rely on the buttons to divide your squad up. Again, this isn’t so much of a game breaking issue but an occasional annoyance.

As you’d have guessed with a modern Final Fantasy title, Revenant Wings makes up for the above somewhat with some rather swish production. The cut scenes which litter proceedings are probably the most impressive thing you’ll see on the console, whilst typically epic musical backing tunes float on by. It’s also very reminiscent of its predecessor in terms of enemy and location design, with the world of Ivalice being ported pretty decently across.

Talking of that, the bods behind the game were presumably thinking that everyone who has picked this game up has played 12, because the game kicks off without introducing you to any of the characters. The story that unfolds is itself interesting enough to keep you plugging away as Vaan and crew discover a lost sky continent and happen across a race of people being wiped out by sky pirates. It actually ends up being more interesting than the floaty non-existent nonsense that 12 carried, so there’s a bonus point to chalk up.

Those bonus points do keep chalking up too, although the game’s rather let down by only having the single player campaign to work through and no multiplayer offering. Still, as an engaging little strategy title it fits the bill really very well indeed, and in my personal opinion is much more fun than any Final Fantasy Tactics game has managed to be to date. If you’re a Final Fantasy newbie or a veteran looking for another game to fill the gap between now and Final Fantasy 13, this comes highly recommended.