Square-Enix
Review by Lauren
When I beat my other recent Square-Enix tactical RPG, Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume, I found myself at a loss for words when it came to summarizing the experience. There was entirely too much to say, and a lot of it was negative. I looked forward to jumping into Final Fantasy Tactics A2 immediately afterward, excited for the opportunity to have some freedom in a tactical RPG again. I couldn't wait for the joy of building up my units, strategically planning my battles, and just being able to have fun. Not only did I not get what I was expecting, but I actually enjoyed this one even less than VP. I know that there are many who will disagree with me, but I'm still going to give an honest summary of my experience with this game. Despite my initial hopes, it obviously was not a good one.
I enjoyed this game for the first few hours, mostly because I was getting excited to build up my party and unlock quests, as I usually do in tactical RPGs. As a great amount of disappointments revealed themselves, however, I started to dislike this game. I disliked it for the next 70 hours. There is only one reason I continued - because I've decided to not write reviews for games I have not beaten. Yet I felt so strongly about my experience with FFTA2 that I wanted to write about it enough to force myself through the whole main game and bonus content. I still attempted to enjoy my time in this version of Ivalice, but sadly, it only got worse as I progressed. I will apologize in advance for this potentially seeming more like a rant than a review, but some elements seriously need to be addressed that I don't see mentioned elsewhere.
Let's start with the hard part - the gameplay. It's fairly different from FFTA1, but fans of the original will certainly feel at home in the beginning. Laws are back, but in a different way. This time, if you follow the law, you get rewarded, instead of getting severely punished for breaking it. Breaking the law won't end the battle or instantly put the offender in jail, but you will lose a special battle privilege, your ability to revive fallen allies, and your law-based reward at the end. This was a welcome (and almost necessary) addition. Unfortunately, however, enemies don't have to abide by the laws.
But the biggest change with the laws is the fact that they are predetermined - no more walking around the map until you match up a decent law with an enemy encounter. The developers have instead selected specific laws for each and every battle, story and sidequest alike. I was genuinely excited to hear this news, but after a few hours into the game, I found that they took the mean route with it, making me wish it were back to the original law system. If executed correctly, it would have been great, but apparently that was too much to hope. Laws seem to be selected with the intent to annoy the player. No, it does not create a genuine challenge, but instead it simply makes you take more and more of your time to complete the already slow battles lawfully. It becomes so painfully tedious that all my potential enjoyment was sucked out of the majority of battles in the game.
In addition, this law system actually took away another otherwise enjoyable part of the tactical RPG - building up a party that suits the player. If you want to follow the law (and you likely will for several reasons), you'll have to constantly switch characters, jobs, and/or sub-jobs in order to have a functional party without having a chance of breaking the law. This goes for plot missions, sidequests, and even "random encounters," as they all have laws. Battles with undead monsters pretty much require you to bring in certain classes in order to win. If you don't bring the right classes/sub-classes in any situation, you'll run the risk of breaking the law with a counterattack or something of the sort, or simply having a deadweight member or two. Because of this, I found myself completely unattached and apathetic about the members that I spent so long building up - they'd have to be an archer for one fight, then a mage, etc., etc., and not what I was hoping to make them for at least the majority of battles in the game. Never before have I experienced such a lack of satisfaction in a tactical RPG, despite the enormous timesink.
Remember the oddly inaccurate damage estimates and percentages in the original FFTA? Well, they're back and worse than ever. Damage estimates can sometimes be up to 20 HP off, and that's a huge margin considering some laws require you to do less than X amount of damage. No matter how well you plan, you can still get screwed by a deceivingly poor estimate. The percentages are wildly off here as well. 90%+ attacks miss surprisingly often, and there's simply no excuse for this, especially when certain battles require you to not miss. Get ready to reset a lot in battles like those, because even 99% simply can't be trusted. Either I need to buy a lottery ticket, or Square seriously needs to take a course in Probability/Statistics. (Though of course, they did pull off accurate estimates in the past with the original FFT, so there's really no excuse for carrying over this flaw from FFTA.)
After the law of each battle is presented, the player is prompted to choose a "clan privilege." These range from increased movement to constant Regen to the ability to see traps. If you break the law, this privilege is lost. You can add to your list of privileges by completing special quests called clan trials. These special challenges can be accepted at taverns. Most tend to be somewhat luck-based, such as examining the correct barrel out of several choices, or entering a battle where missing is forbidden (and yes, magic and abilities can miss just as easily as attacks). Your clan's stats - aptitude, adaptability, teamwork, and negotiation, are increased (and sometimes the opposite stats are decreased) when you successfully complete one of these trials. It's very easy to max out these stats early on in the game, and they mostly just affect your ability to accept new quests. Beating trials will also earn your clan a new title, which can lower shop prices and such.
Abilities are learned in the same way as FF9, through weapons and armour. For example, equip a sword on your Soldier that has the ability "First Aid" on it, and you'll gain that ability for as long as you have the weapon equipped. After a certain amount of Ability Points are gained, however, the character will permanently learn First Aid and can equip that ability set even after changing equipment or jobs.
Generally, this system works well. Unfortunately, however, previously basic abilities are withheld from the player for a remarkably long time. Some of my personal favourites, such as Dual Wield for Ninjas, Smile Toss for Jugglers, and Rockseal/Last Breath for Assassins are locked away in items that cannot be found or created until much later battles or within the auction house "mini-game."
Weapons and armour are created in an interesting way - the Bazaar system. For those who have played FF12, it will be somewhat familiar. Loot collected from monsters can be sold in a shop, which then allows the vendor to create new items for you to purchase. While this sounds great in concept, it becomes quite cumbersome as the game progresses. When you try to create an item from random loot, you get nothing more than a vague hint and a tiny icon of what that item will be. But once you make it, the loot you used to create this recipe will disappear. Therefore, let's say you try to make something in the "Sundry Sabers" category, only to find that the weapon contains a single ability for a character that you can only recruit after beating the game, and you used up your valuable items in the process of discovering this information. You'll either be glued to FAQs, or you'll be resetting constantly so as not to waste your items (and therefore opportunites to create something you can actually use).
Items can also be gained within the aforementioned auction house mini-game. It's an occasionally available timed event in which the player must attempt to use as few of their auction tokens as possible to just barely beat the rivals' bids. If you aren't conservative enough, you can't win all the auctions in an area and therefore gain control of it, for the reward of being able to bid on rare items. It can be very tough to do this until you memorize your opponents' tells and react quickly to them, so it also ends up being a matter of reset-reset-reset. Or just don't do it and instead gain those crucial items from later quests and the bazaar. Win or lose, in order to participate in another auction session, you have to wait an entire game-year to do it again. That's a lot of wandering or sleeping.
The box advertises 56 jobs, over 300 quests, and hundreds of hours of gameplay. Though they are all technically true statements, the actual truth of them in practice is not such a positive thing. 56 jobs, and they all begin to repeat in no time. Sure, mages get Cure and Protect spells, but look at this new job called Flintlock! It has unique abilities like "Cure Cannon" and "Protect Cannon." Hm. Well, Fusiliers can cause Blind and Silence! But so can Ninjas. And Green Mages. And Elementalists. The repetition makes many jobs pointless to master. Sure, each has some unique abilities, but it's unlikely you'll get to use two similar jobs simultaneously for tougher battles anyway considering how often plot characters are pushed on you.
Three hundred quests indeed. It sounds good, but it can become incredibly boring over time. It doesn't take long to figure out the formula of essentially every sidequest in the game: kill all the bad guys (which may involve saving a suicidal NPC), or examine the sparkly spots. Like them or not, you'll pretty much have to do the majority of the mundane quests, else you'll find yourself too weak to face an early boss and perhaps the last couple of story missions.
I cannot stress enough how slow this game is. Each battle drags on and on, with enemies taking an extremely long time to act. There is no way to turn off battle animations, or to speed the gameplay up. Eventually I found myself setting the DS down and doing something else when enemies had more than one turn in a row, because otherwise I'd be waiting a very long time to act. This slow gameplay only worsened my detachment from the game and characters. It may not seem as slow to a newcomer to tactical RPGs, but seasoned players might find it excruciating. Even easy battles usually take about 20 minutes to complete, which is obviously not pick-up-and-play friendly. Quicksave is thankfully included, but that's a staple for DS RPGs at this point.
The slow gameplay and many quests combine to form what seems to be a long RPG. Yes, it's long. You could spend many hours of your life on this game. But don't let that fool you - it's for the wrong reason. FFTA2 didn't have to take this long to complete. The gameplay time could have been cut down greatly, but instead it drags on and on and on. The story itself is remarkably short, so aside from that, you'll just be doing trivial quests until you burn out or run out.
The law system struck me as something deliberately designed to be annoying or simply time-consuming. This should not be the focus of any game, as people generally play games to have fun, or to have a genuinely satisfying challenge. Many laws do nothing but stretch out the time required to complete a battle exponentially. Some basic ones, for example: no actions by Viera (Viera may only perform basic actions), no magic, or no archery. While it's not challenging to avoid these actions, it's a pain that's just going to waste your time. Unless, of course, you just give up and break the law, which will undoubtedly happen from time to time. For example, a certain battle's law is: "Forbidden: Having debuffs cast on you." And you're up against a party of Tricksters, who then proceed to do essentially nothing but cast several types of debuffs on all of your characters. Come on.
Or "Forbidden: Being Robbed" for a battle with Thieves and other jobs capable of stealing your items and money. And they do, at seemingly every opportunity. Not only do they tend to steal staggeringly large amounts of gil or precious items, but the fact that that can break the law and therefore take away further potential items is simply a slap in the face. Just about every game has a thief-type enemy who will occasionally use Steal, but Thieves (Steal Gil), Vikings (Pickpocket), and Snipers (Wallet Shot) in this game spammed it every time I encountered one. It's painful to see so much progress lost in a game that progresses as slowly as this.
I wouldn't mind if these laws required real strategy, but the above examples are left up to luck (unless you're very far in the game and somehow have ribbons for everyone, but the average gamer will not). There's really no point in a luck-based gameplay system like this. It's neither fun nor strategic. If I wanted luck-based gameplay, I'd buy a pair of dice instead of a new video game in a genre that's proven to be capable of so much more than this.
For as much as I ramble and complain about the gameplay, the plot probably deserves even more criticism. I cannot emphasize enough how weak the story was in this game. It just may be the worst I've seen in an RPG. It was short and disjointed, featuring barely a handful of shallow, underdeveloped characters. There are only 23 story missions in the game, with lots of optional filler quests in between. Some of those quests have tiny subplots of their own, but nothing remarkable. It seems that the writers decided to play the cameo card every so often in order to distract from the poor story. The fourth-to-last battle in the game was seriously just an unrelated tangent with two cameo characters, which had nothing to do with the actual story. Meanwhile, the "serious" story itself was incredibly shallow and seemingly an afterthought. Just drop the word "grimoire" and "magicite" here and there, and apparently that makes a Final Fantasy story now? The rationale they kept giving for this little boy continuing to remain in the storybook world of Ivalice was something along the lines of, "This world sure is cool! I'm not worried about getting home! I might as well do more quests! Hey player, do more quests! Forever."
The graphics in FFTA2 are a step up from its predecessor, boasting colourful backgrounds and character sprites. Even so, they're nothing remarkable for the DS considering other recent releases. The artwork is certainly a unique style - very reminiscent of a children's storybook - which is something players will likely either love or hate. The animations look wonderful, but most players will eventually stop noticing them due to their inconvenient length. My only real graphical complaint is that the sprites become very pixellated on the zoomed-in top screen during battle.
The music is decent, but I found it to be forgettable. It was the same situation with FFTA, if that's any indication, while the original FFT's music still gets in my head at times. Much like the sound effects, the music is just "there." And as much as I disliked the story, the dialogue itself was decent for most of the game, emulating the speech of characters like Balthier and Fran in FF12. They do go a little over the top with it at times, though.
The game does, at least, look nice and clean. A quest map is available in your clan menu, which neatly lays out every quest you've beaten and what else is available. It's one of the few features of this game that I'd like to see implemented in other games. SE also made very effective use of the top screen, and I was happy to see it. During battle, the turn order, as well as the law and privilege, are displayed clearly. You can also cycle further through the currently visible turn order to see the next several turns. And while in the menu screen, more information (such as what classes can equip the item you're viewing) is displayed above. The dual screen is definitely used in a smart way in this one. Too bad the stylus controls weren't done as well, but thankfully the classic button scheme is always an option.
I'm going to summarize with several examples off the top of my head as to why the gameplay itself is simply not well-designed. For starters, Confusion is an especially cruelly programmed ability, as it can (and often will) make your characters use items. And of course, in a completely mundane battle, the first one my main character went for was my Eureka Crystal, a very rare item best saved for difficult boss fights. This happened yet again in another battle. Reset, reset, reset. By the way, Confused Ninjas can and will throw weapons, even your most rare/valuable ones. Reset again.
In one fight, the law forbade "targeting a distant enemy." I randomly got a critical hit on an enemy, which knocked him back. Violation! Yes, even though you aren't targeting a distant enemy, like it says, it still dings you for being the cause of knocking it back. Some clarification would have been nice here. Similarly, a battle which forbade knockback threw a violation at me for a random critical hit. Sure, I could have gone the whole fight using only abilities instead of physical attacks to avoid this possibility, but the randomness (critical hits are luck-based) with which the law can be broken is still just silly.
When an undead enemy hits zero HP, it turns into a gravestone, which always faces the same forward angle. I once went to use Burial on an enemy like this (which banishes it from the battlefield so it won't revive). Apparently when the enemy died, it was facing away from me, because when I hit the gravestone from what appeared to be directly in front, I got a violation for "back attacks." Seriously. Again, clarification would have been nice in the form of them bothering to animate a few more angles of a gravestone sprite.
Again, my greatest joy in a tactical RPG comes in the form of building up a party of cool and interesting jobs. Do so all you like in this game, but be prepared for story characters to constantly oust your customized characters during almost every plot battle. This becomes especially infuriating if you don't care for some of the weak plot members. The final battles of the game take four of your six party slots up with the plot characters. I hope you didn't waste too much time building up a full party of non-plot characters like me in order to face the final confrontations, or you just might feel bitter at that point.
One quest has you selecting a single character to join a party of moogles, which you must protect. This is especially great when one of your "helpers" is a Tinker, who can very easily Haste all the enemies right off the bat. Sure, it's just a matter of hoping for the best or resetting if that happens, but I literally had to set the DS down and do something else for several minutes because there was such an absurdly long span of time in which I could not even choose an action. We buy games to play them, not watch them happen helplessly. And sure enough, after healing the most damaged NPC to full health with my one whopping turn, I lost the quest before even getting to act again. Hooray for interactivity.
Traps are littered all over most of the in-game maps for seemingly no reason other than to annoy the player and/or force you to use Libra instead of an actually beneficial clan privilege. Enemies very rarely step on them, and sometimes are even immune to them. Some inflict very high damage, while others can actually charm a character on the spot. Again, it's just an unnecessary inclusion that doesn't add any strategy or fun to the experience.
Some battles require you to use a special command in order to proceed, such as "Examine" for sparkling points or barrels. However, sometimes your characters get a special ability as battles progress (much like a limit break meter). Unfortunately, the latter takes precedence over the former. You cannot examine something until you use up your special ability. This can be troublesome in battles such as the time-sensitive "check the right barrel to win" clan trial. Another unnecessary inconvenience that could have been avoided with another menu option, which should definitely be the case with two unrelated commands.
As I mentioned, several decent abilities from past games are kept from the player for a good portion of the game unless you go very far out of your way to get them. But once you get to a certain point, everyone just learns Ultima Masher, Ultima Shot, Ultima Blade, Ultima Charge, and Ultima-whatever to do pretty much the same absurd damage to everything, including bosses. In this sense, I found it to be very imbalanced. The battles were a joke near the end - I literally one-hit-KOed the second-to-last boss of the game as soon as I got in range. The abilities are just plain broken, and at that point, I hadn't even gone out of my way for them.
I could go on for days like this, but the bottom line is that the gameplay in FFTA2 seems almost designed to be annoying and time-consuming. Despite how promising and pretty it looks on the outside, that outer shell hides a surprisingly shallow game. It's quantity over quality - lots of jobs, but lots of repetition within them. Lots of quests with tons of repetition among those, too, alongside a weak plot. Battles generally do not require real strategy, but merely the act of bringing in the "right" classes or just breaking the law and losing potential rewards. It's a simple timesink, and if you don't read into things too much like I have, you might still enjoy it. But with the generally annoying law system and vague item descriptions in the bazaar, FFTA2 all too often becomes Final Fantasy Tactics: Reset. Sorry, I can't give it a 9 or 10 just because it's a well-known company releasing a pretty-looking game that boasts about its big numbers. So many aspects of it were simply not well-designed, subjective opinions of "fun" and "not fun" aside.
In case I've rambled on too long and lost the interest of readers for the body of the review, I understand and would like to finish with one more example:
In a random battle, three turns occurred in which I attempted to attack my opponents, all of whom had no special abilities (such as Evasion Up). Let's assume that all of my attacks hit. There is an 84.6% chance of that happening. Makes sense, right? But in actuality, my characters missed a 90% chance of hitting an enemy, followed by a 95% and then a 99% chance of doing the same. If we do the math... there is a 0.005% chance of that occuring.
And that's about the same probability of my purchasing the next Final Fantasy Tactics Advance title.
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