This is one that I've wanted to revisit for a long time, and I probably will once the inevitable GOG re-release is out in the next couple of months. I never played the Zodiac version.
Anyway, FFXII is a particularly important FF game for me. I played it when it first came out, and I liked it but didn't love it. That changed. Several years later, I was in law school and it was the last week of winter break, which is when they had all the first-year students come back a week early for career week where you have a buncha lawyers talk at you about how to get a job and what the future looks like for you. I went to the first day of that, was super depressed by how fucking abysmal it all sounded, and then I came back to my apartment and decided at random to throw FFXII in the PS2 and give it another shot. I fucking loved it. For whatever reason, it suddenly just clicked. I blew off the rest of career week and stayed in my apartment playing the game, and couldn't have been happier. At the end of all that, I decided I was going to work in video games. And I did.
So, to say the game was life changing for me isn't an overstatement.
