![]() While it is bolstered by great combat and structure, the weak storytelling ends up with me finding the other Final Fantasy Tactics games to be more interesting. It’s quite fanservice-y in places, with characters showing up from other games to shout “hey look it’s me!” to the audience, and for me to go “huh cool” whenever one shows up, but not much beyond that. It feels somewhat like a “greatest hits” in videogame form. Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata return from the other Ivalice games to provide some great music (even if it is mostly made up of covers of tracks from prior games).Īnd that last point kinda summarises what this game is. Vibrant visuals at a smooth framerate pop really well. Some of the weapons could also be gained through an auction house, which ended up being a surprisingly fun minigame to play by itself. It also meant that instead of fighting a bunch of random encounters in order to gain strength, I was spending more time engaging with missions with more varied gimmicks that in some cases weren’t even combat driven. It meant that in order for me to build a character in a way I wanted, I had to be on the lookout for missions that would give me what I needed. Items found during, or as rewards for combat encounters can be given to the Bazaar in order to make new weapons that are then put up for sale. All character abilities are learned from equipment (which encourages equipping many things), and most of them are gained in shops by engaging with a system called the Bazaar (which is mostly borrowed from Final Fantasy XII). ![]() There’s also changes to how equipment is gained that encouraged me to explore the game more. I only needed to think about the actual fight, as it was unnecessary for me to make everyone do unusual routines in order to ensure everyone stayed the same level. Having less awareness of those numbers while fighting actually made the game feel like even less of a grind. FFTA2 moves experience point gain until the end of a battle, and guarantees them for every character who takes part. If a character didn’t do anything then they wouldn’t get any growth. For every move a small experience point number would show up above a character’s head, and if they got enough they would level up during the fight. Previous games would reward experience points for every action taken. There are many small updates that improve the flow of how it plays, but the biggest one was a change in how levelling up worked. However, in almost every other aspect there are a lot of improvements. Moments which show a little personality or motivation of the main characters do take place every so often, but they turn out to be dead ends as they’re hardly ever followed up on. Not many things happen and it’s disappointing. I’m over-simplifying the story a little but honestly not by much. ![]() The setup is the most like a playground these games have ever gotten, just simply do enough things until it’s time to go home. The book arrives with him, and to return home he has to fill out the pages by adventuring through the world. In this game, Luso Clemens, a child from a world similar to our own gets transported into the fantasy world of Ivalice via an old book he found at his school’s library. There’s less time devoted to storytelling, and what’s there is largely a redo of what the prior game was doing with much less thematic weight behind it. Where Final Fantasy Tactics Advance tied much of its mechanics into the narrative, this game is more devoted to refining systems for a much smoother play experience. While FFTA2 continues the vibrant look of its predecessor, I could tell very quickly that it had different priorities. Playing this one has cemented the idea that I should spend more time playing Tactical RPGs, as all three of these games have been a good time (though I may have to start looking to other developers as Square Enix themselves haven’t made many in the last decade). Later I reached Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which built off of the original’s mechanics in ways that helped it tell a fascinating story.Īfter all of that (and many other Final Fantasies in-between) I recently finished off Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift ( FFTA2), the last installment of this trilogy of sorts. But I pushed through and found Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions an excellent game to play (while I come across as harsh on the story in that article, I’ve come around to liking it more since). ![]() Initially I was a little afraid to get started with them after having tried and failed on multiple occasions to get into the original. Getting into the Final Fantasy Tactics sub-series of games was one of the more pleasant surprises I had in the last couple of years. ![]()
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