Final Fantasy XII is amazing so far. I’m about 6 hours into the game. I literally could not pull myself out of the game after I got home last night. Circuit City had the game for 38 dollars which is a really great deal.
 The opening pre-render is amazing, great use of cameras and really introduces you to the scope and feeling of the game. The character design is very good, similar in nature to FF11 and FFX/X-2, very real characters perfect animations with the hair and facial animations really standing out. The texture artists at square really know their stuff, they add a lot of depth and detail to the environments and characters with the use of very careful usage of textures.
Overall there is a very large political scope to the story which should not be suprising if you know the story behind Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story. The original Producer/Director of the game (he left part way through for health reasons apparently) worked on those landmark games. The architecture has a very eastern european feeling to it, the bazaars come alive with dozens of interactive and non-interactive NPCs filling the streets at every corner.
 The voice acting is amazing, tons of different accents, english, australian and american are all mixed and matched to the character perfectly. The writing is excellent, and I found myself captivated by the in-engine cut scenes.
The battle system is very free form much like FF11 with the ability to stop battle and queue commands. This system is very similar to Knights of the Old Republic but the sense of exploration is much better. There are enemies spread around the levels and you are given bonuses when you hunt a specific monster in ‘chains’. Named monsters quests can be picked up from various NPCs after reading a post in a pub. I spent some time off the main quest to do a few of these. They were all very challenging and healthy diversion for the experienced player. There is a hunting clan that you join as part of this where you get extra rewards, rare monster ‘marks’ and a special merchant.
Character leveling is free-form and you are free to create specialized or generalized character types based on your preferences. Much superior to static job leveling or static class-type leveling. You uncover adjecent skills on a large chess board that allows you to expand multiple areas of skills in multiple dimensions. Ace 
So probably won’t be doing too much homebrew dev. stuff for awhile, I am really excited to see where this game goes and what new gameplay elements are introduced.