Just in case you were wondering what the hell happened to Final Fantasy XII Gamespot just received a boxed retail copy of the game fresh from Japan and, as a result,
has a decent preview up of the game here. Final Fantasy XII's setting is a big enough departure from the series, but even bigger changes have happened on the backend, with the combat and character-progression systems seeing almost complete overhauls since the last single-player entry, Final Fantasy X.
Again,
here's the preview link.