#not to mention youre already halfway to being completely invincible to magic attacks

[rollanan]

two of my favorite mana batteries swap robes

[retphienix]

Now this game. This game.

What you're seeing is just a quick roundup of what I had for the final fight. No-one was properly equipped because this game is terrible and requires equipping garbage in order to learn skills and I didn't bother to equip my 'good' stuff for the final showdown. Partially because I forgot. Also, Montblanc was nearly completely useless the entire game.

After this terrible experience I can say I fully understand why little kid me hated this game near immediately, and I'm thankful he didn't attempt to push through because all of this pains me. I also understand why apparently the cart I have has a hacked main save, even the previous owner couldn't handle seriously playing this piece of crap.

Here is where I'll throw the readmore as I'm just going to let my frustrations out a bit. I may tackle some of the good things I can come up with but those impatient just know my takeaway from this title is: It's not the worst game on its own merits, but to me it might as well be. It's the sequel to FFT but every single change they made was for the worse to the point of it being downright insulting.

It's the worst because of what it did to FFT. It's "just a bad game" if you ignore what it did to FFT.

I only showcase the 6 people I actually used for one. Something amusing about the systems in place working against themselves is that learning abilities is painfully slow and poorly implemented, which means levels additional characters can add many many hours of grind onto the title. Or you can just "not" do that, so I didn't. The skill system is among the biggest problems with this title, and I say that with full knowledge of "invincible because we said so with no thematic reasoning" bosses and writing so poor it actually brings me pain.

You learn skills by equipping an item that teaches the skill, then participate in enough fights for the skill to finally be learned. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And realize that you can usually only equip 1 item that teaches you a skill at a time per character since it's primarily taught through weapons. And repeat.

This is undoubtedly the most annoying and tedious part of the game. It undermined the job system by instead making it about what weapon you equipped to learn about, rather than what job you leveled as to become proficient at. Not to mention the skills are braindead as can be and for the most part attempt to make every class the same.

In FFT every class was unique. In FFTA every class carries nearly identical skills, with a couple small differences.

Want to be a melee job? Well you have an aimed attack, an inaccurate heavy attack, probably a ranged attack, and probably a self heal. Want to be a ranged job? Well you have an aimed attack and normal attacks that also proc status. Want to be a magic job? Well you have 3-5 spells that all do the same thing but with different elements.

Do you want to know what ACTUALLY makes these jobs special? Downwards of 3 skills per class.

FFT had Chemists being the only class using items. Knights being the only class that destroys equipment. Thiefs being the only class that steal equipment (or hearts!). White mage being the heal magic. Black for damage magic. Oracle for status magic. Monk for a balance between DPS (Knight) and healing (WM or Chemist). Archers had the unique charge system that abused the CT system (a system that doesn't matter at all in this game). Geomancers merging Knights and Black Mage in a UNIQUE way that demands you pay attention to what terrain you're on. Ninja's inately dual wield. A class dedicated to inviting enemies to join you which worked on any non-story enemy in the game, compared to FFTA being able to 'bank' monsters. I could go on for way too long here, especially when you consider the unique job classes of the special characters like Engineers or Holy Swordsman.

What's this game do? Every class does the same things except one can steal things (thief), two rip off geomancer by dumbing it down to painful levels (Ninja and Elementalist), we have somewhere around 4 classes that use bows (Archer/Sniper/Assassin/Hunter) and they use them the same way, hit them with an aimed shot or hit them with a status shot. Gunner exists and is literally just an archer with the same "status" shots. Fighter and Monk are the same class basically. Red Mage exists for no reason at all especially when you realize they have to RELEARN all the spells they already learned BUT THIS TIME AS A RED MAGE. ALREADY KNOW CURE? WELL SCREW YOU LEARN IT AGAIN. And Assassin can learn an instant KO or two to give them the illusion of flavor.

More or less every class has the same skills, just different visual effects. And sometimes they skimp on that with things like the aimed attacks. The lack of flavor to any class is painful and makes them all feel uselessly similar. The ninja doesn't even innately dual wield, what kind of decision was that? I saw one class that interested me and it turned out to be useless. The Illusionist, which is entirely improperly named due to what they do, is a raid wide spelluser. Except they learn very few spells. And they all do terrible damage. It's a bad math skill from FFT. Not to mention there is a severe lack of skills in comparison to FFT which means every class has fewer tools to work with than before, so they NEEDED those tools to be unique and instead they copy paste in order to maintain some weird and restrictive form of balance.

Skills actively make this game worse and demand you ignore your equipment because good equipment is useless to you (Oh, you got an ultimate sword? Useless. It doesn't teach any skills. Ignore it until end game when your stats will be so out of wack that you won't need it), and they push you to grind again and again and again in order to feel like any kind of progression has happened.

So let's talk about equipment for a second because this blows my mind. In this game you get ULTIMATE WEAPONS from other FF games, and SUPER END GAME MEGA GEAR from FFT at like the halfway point. And you get a lot of it.

Just about every dispatch mission or mission in general rewards you with things like Save the Queen and Excalibur or the Yoichi Bow. But all of these pieces of equipment have been nerfed significantly and made useless generally by the skill system demanding you keep changing equipment. Why make something as cool as legendary weapons feel like a drop in my inventory bucket? I often got legendary gear and just shrugged it off because they added +1 damage to my party member at the cost of teaching no skills.

Accuracy was also out of wack in this game but I'm not sure how I felt about it. There was the obvious computer bias where enemies would hit every 30% chance strike they went for while I could miss 5 70% strikes in a row, but I mainly mean everyone everywhere had really low chances to strike. Ambushing from behind might net you 80% which felt off.

Gameplay wise the accuracy didn't really effect anything, but it was strange to see everyone save for those with concentrate hitting 65% rolls regularly.

The story was painful. I've ranted enough about it but really it comes down to it's practically written for toddlers as it goes beyond childish and it dwells far too much on selfish unrealistic characters. For a normal game this is embarrassing, for the sequel to FFT it's downright insulting.

The bosses suck. Encounters in general are pretty terrible, but you'd think there would be more variety in what you are challenged with. Statuses almost never came up and I kept attempting to prepare for when they would but the worst I ever saw was a monster that spams a raid wide sleep spell and archers using Aim Arm to dont act my characters. That's not nearly enough diversity especially when they carried over all the different anti-status tools from FFT to this game. The bosses almost all resorted to "haha, don't I have a lot of minions? You should probably hit them instead of me~~~~" which in FFT I would happily hit them because the game's fun. Since this game is NOT fun, I just strike the bosses and find that they have no counter for this strategy.

You can DPS race every boss in this game. Every one. With poorly geared party members. And without grinding to be above the encounter in any way.

The scariest fight I had was Adrammelech because dragon enemies are powerful at that stage of the game and I still just ran straight ahead and hit him with all my party members for a quick kill. I was PAINFULLY weak at that stage too as I was leveling as random poor growth classes and it still worked.

Levels make for a funny subject as well. I mentioned that it's pointless to grind up your alts because skills make it too time consuming to do so meaningfully. They give you a LOT of alts, and the alts actually drag down the encounter levels.

I heard that encounters were based off of your highest level. I can confirm they are not. Perhaps the story missions are, but every encounter in the game is based off your average level, not highest.

This made the first quarter of my gameplay very confusing as every encounter was locked at level 6 while I was at level 15. I couldn't level up at all unless I spammed self-target moves that always give 10 xp because attacking the weak enemies gave 1 xp.

I was growing annoyed at every encounter being useless for me and just a pointless grind for skill points until I realized what was happening and dismissed all my non-leveled members.

Immediately the game became more playable and I'm left wondering why in the world they would do that. Why give me a new low level member every mission and expect me to level all of them equally?

Regardless, it was remedied, just poorly designed.

I wasn't fond of making the map as it prevented Ivalice from feeling like a real place at all. Yes, that's a little thematic what with it being a story book but even for a story book this "place your plot" map was uninteresting and tore me away from thinking this world made any sense at all.

Oh! The CT change in which every skill in the entire game is immediate and requires no timing or strategy at all for “charging” practically killed 90% of the strategy you could have! How hilarious! Gotta love spamming your biggest ultima blast immediately just like when you attack or use a simple fire spell!

I feel like I have nothing good to say and like I could go on for quite a while more. I wanted to say it's alright as a dumbed down 'kid' version of FFT, except it's not. If you enjoyed it, fantastic, but what I see is an unbalanced mess that's unfit for kids and unfun for me. Of course, that's what opinions are. I just really love FFT and hate this game. So that's that.

(Part 2)