Final Fantasy XII: how to change party leader in The Zodiac Age

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age features one of the best and most open-ended battle systems in the whole FF series - but with that freedom comes difficult choices - even down to which character your party leader is.

Between worrying about things like the best jobs, best job combinations, espers, license board choices, the best weapons and even your basic party composition, things are already quite complicated - but something that is impacted by and equally impacts all of the above is your choice of party leader. This is important, of course, because you have direct control over the party leader in battle.

Because the game doesn't explain this brilliantly, a lot of people have been asking about it as The Zodiac Age hits new platforms like Switch and Xbox. As such, here we are to help...

How to change party leader in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

One thing FF12 isn't entirely clear about is how you change party leader, especially on certain platforms, like PC - so we just figured we'd clear it up here on this page.

First of all, you can juggle your party members and their roles in the main menu, using the party subscreen. This allows you to actually change your party members, of course, but as part of this you can also change the party leader, moving the little party leader flag onto whoever you want to have direct control of. 

The sub-menu isn't the most useful, however, especially if you want to do it on the fly. That's an important thing to do, too, since you might want to swap character if your party leader dies to revive or see out the end of a fight.

The solution to this is actually quite simple, though FF12 doesn't do the best job of telling you this: you can change party leader between the characters in your current party by simply pressing up or down on the D-Pad. This goes for any console version of the game, plus the PC version when using a compatible controller. 

On PC, with default key bindings, you can also flick the party leader up and down between current party members with the I and K keys on the keyboard.