Final Fantasy XII IZJS, the holy grail version of Square’s epic rpg that rivals even FFX for extended play long past last note of the theme sung by Angela Aki, “Kiss Me Goodbye” is heard. Many ask at first what IZJS is, and basically it is the final version of the game that was released in Japan as part of the international series and included the “Zodiac Job System”. This system replaced the old Licensing board with an complete turn around on how to play the characters and classes in the game.

The Zodiac table of jobs has 12 of the main jobs more associated with Tactics, like breaker or machinist, than the newer Final Fantasy games. When you first received your character, you assign one type of job for them that they will be for the rest of the game. This builds a custom LP table that will work around just that particular set of enhancements and equipment needed for that class.

• Aries – White Mage
• Taurus – Uhlan
• Gemini – Machinist
• Cancer – Red Mage
• Leo – Knight
• Virgo – Monk
• Libra – Time Mage
• Scorpio – Breaker
• Sagittarius – Archer
• Capricorn – Black Mage
• Aquarius – Mononofu
• Pisces – Shikari

This version of the game incorporates far too many minor and some major changes to list here.  A major change is that while in the original game every spell and ability could be bought at shop or from various merchants, now the most powerful or useful ones are found at treasure chests. This leads to more hours of exploring the vast game world. But to balance this, there is also a new option of speeding the game up by pressing L1 button.  With  all of the changes and the new table format, this version is without a doubt the best.

Only one problem is that this final mix version is only in Japanese. Without the help of a great “gamer engineer” named FFGriever, we might never have played this game in English.  If you know what an “iso” file is, you should be able to follow along on this outline to making a copy of the file. These instruction are merely here to help you better understand the gaming world and of course not to “hack” anything.

For the process of building the file you will need two disk ISO files or what is basically a image of your game disk. One is the North American version of the game and the 2nd is the IZJS copy. You extract you images using the easy wizard driven program called Alcohol 120%. Download just the demo since you only need this once and it is fully functional.

1. Start Alcohol 120%
2. Select the Copy Wizard option
3. Select the drive that will read the disc
4. Deselect the copy current disc on the fly option
5. For data type select which console the game is for PS1/ PS2 then press Next
6. Select your image location and name it then press Next
7. Select the drive that will write the disc and write Speed
8. Look through any other options and change if needed
9. Make sure that the data type selected is the same as selected above
10. Press Start to begin
By Owner at Afterdawn.com

Now comes the harder part since most do not have a physical copy of the Japanese International version. If you do have that then follow the above steps like with NA and make a ISO file. Many seasoned computer maniacs shy away from using Torrents and so begins mini lecture. Let me explain that a torrent is a copy of one file that is on 10 or 100 people’s computers that you can access and download fast. The computers that have the file for you to download from are called “seeds” and they are just regular people like you who are helping to share the file. You need a client program that reads the torrent link file and starts up the download. I recommend for ease of your use and at no cost, uTorrent. Download this program and install allowing it to set up firewall installations. Keep in mind if the program is not on in the system tray then it’s not running and no one can do anything to your computer. Plus, if you do not make any torrent link files of your own then nothing is coming off your computer “yet”.

Where everyone gets crazy about torrents is how they are sure they are going to get virus from something. LET ME SAY IT PLAINLY… you only get a virus from a torrent if you download a bad file just like you can do with your emails every single day. You are not going to get a bad file unless “all” the people you’re connecting to have a bad copy. Now, once you have completed the file transfer is when you can make the choice to not become a “seeder” yourself and just turn the program off. Utorrent will automatically start making the file open to others as long as you have the program up. Right click on the file name and hit stop. This makes Utorrent not share your copy. Since we are working on limited project and if you are not a torrent person then uninstall the program after the download and it’s all gone for good.

That being all said you need to go to this link and click “Download the Torrent” to get your copy of the IZJS iso file.

Now we begin to make the copy of your game.  We run what is called a “patcher” now to take the two files and merge them into one new file that has English menus and dialogue added onto the new version of the game. A patcher is really just that. It reads the program or file and changes just words in there to what we want. You need to download this file and unzip it to a directory a drive that has plenty of space. You should already have to copies of the game on that disk and you will end up with one more copy before it is finished. Below I put the exact directions on how to run the program which can be found in the zip file too. You should always check inside your zip files of projects like this for the most current read me in case there have been changes.

FFXII Int: ZJS English Conversion Patch by ffgriever v0.19

Usage: zjs_repack [-h] [image_eng [image_zjs [image_output]]]

You can just make sure that you have “ff12us.iso” and “ff12zj.iso” in the
same directory as the main executable. Then, just double click the patcher
and wait until it’s done. You can specify the required file names if you
want to (you can specify only the first one, first two or all of them).
The default output file is “ff12engzjs.iso”.

MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH FREE SPACE ON HDD AND THAT YOU HAVE READ/WRITE
PERMISSIONS. MAKE ALSO SURE, THAT THE “TEMP” DIRECTORY IS IN PLACE, AS WELL
AS ADDITIONAL, MODIFIED FILES. IT’S ADVISED TO LOG THE PATCHING PROCESS INTO
A FILE.

(see file for all the changes being worked on)

Now, this is where the pirating tale ends for this time. You now have the ISO file and need to do something with it. In the next blog I will explain how to make yourself a working game and where you can run it. If you are person who knows emulators on the PC, you can do that now, and enjoy FFXII IZJS my friends.

Peace Out~Tebian !