http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/reviews/1807/ ... _Rift.html
The newest installment in the Ivalice Alliance series of games, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is a step above everything that is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It's still not the original, but with breathtaking landscapes to battle on, a refined quest/territory system, and a multitude of new quests, A2 brings the Tactics franchise back to it's former glory.
You start off on the last day of school. Your teacher decides that you need to learn to focus, and volunteers you to help the school Librarian clean up the library after class. Upon arriving, you stumble across a book that is only half written, inviting you in its last sentence to pick up a pen and finish the book. As you begin to write, you are thrown into the fantasy world of Ivalice. Recruited by necessity by the clan leader Cid, you quickly learn the ropes of the Ivalice world and set out to find adventure, and a way home.
There is no accounting for story, I guess. Because despite the lack thereof, I can easily sit down and play this game for hours on end. The quests are short, but sweet and the connections between them offer a sort of side-story that is a welcome distraction from the poor main story.
Unfortunately, they didn't revamp the skill learning system of Tactics Advance (shamelessly stolen from Final Fantasy 9) of equipping weapons and armor, and using them for extensive periods of time, to learn new abilities. The faults with this system are obvious to anyone who has played FF9 or Tactics Advance, where it promotes using sub-par gear. Preferring the everyday run of the mill weapons bought from a shop to the rare, powerful artifacts you find through quests and missions, simply because they teach a skill you don't already know.
The Job system is back in full force. Following Advance, with the 'Race Specific' jobs, and various ways of unlocking them. Requiring a certain amount of abilities from other jobs to unlock the new ones, as well as quests rewarding the player with new, previously hidden jobs.
The 'shop' system is something of hit or miss. You start out only being able to purchase a small amount of items from the shop. To unlock more, you need to trade 'Loot' in to a Bazaar. (Loot is obtained through killing monsters, looting treasure chests on battle fields, completing quests, and you can Steal it from monsters with the Thief class.) This actually works similarly in principle to the Bazaar system in Final Fantasy 12, but, not really. As opposed to just everything you sell to the shop being allocated to new item discoveries, you are presented with a list of different recipes and classifications ranging from A-E. Each recipe has at least one combination, and up to five. You turn in usually three items, each item having varying quality, trying to match three items of the quality of the combination you want to make. Such as Platinum Ore being quality C, Maple Wood being quality C, and Whisperweed being quality C, but if you don't have three of the required items to make the recipe, you can't unlock the item. This sounds pretty good, especially since there is no guess work involved. If you had to guess the contents of each recipe, I would have thrown my DS out the window by now. The inherent flaw, however, is that sometimes the items you get from the combination (usually marked with ???s) are much worse then items that are already available to you. This is less frequent the more meticulous you are about clearing up every available quest before moving on to the next area, but if you were playing the game just to beat it, you would be at the mercy of random loot drops to hope the items you get are reasonably useful and come in a reasonably linear manner. Maybe the first 10 items I unlocked were Summoner/Arcanist wands and Dragoon spears, neither of which classes I had even unlocked, let alone had any characters capable of becoming.
One of the other interesting differences in A2 is the way that clans vie for territory. As opposed to being on the battlefield, land control is 'Auctioned' every so many days (usually in surplus of 300) and you spend Clan Points (currency received for completing quests) to purchase it. It's an interesting mini-game, but I don't think I will be buying much land after the first auction. So far, the benefits of having more land are pretty moot. When travelling through areas you control, you are more likely to receive random loot, from the citizens, or come across angry gangs who either want your territory, or previously controlled it and are reluctant to leave. All this does is add stepping stones when moving from one quest to another, but at least its a fight.
The other big change are the way that Laws work, thank god.
The laws still exist, a Judge will show up at the start of the fight and say something stupid like "No using Fire effects." or "Don't deal damage in surplus of 50." or "Don't miss.", but the consequence and reward are much better balanced. In that, there IS a reward, and the consequence isn't game breaking. After a law is passed, and you place your units on the field (given the option to re-equip them and change their jobs,) you are given a choice of a Privilege, which is a bonus that you get as long as you don't break a law. This can be an increase in Power, Speed, Agility, etc. or additional Clan Points for completing the mission. Unless the Clan Points option is locked out, I figure it is -always- the best choice.
If you break a law, you lose your privilege. In addition, six little 'jail cells' appear on the top screen. Any dead characters will show up in the cells. Don't worry, they aren't gone. All this means is that you can't revive any characters for the duration of the battle. They still gain XP, they will still be there for the next fight unharmed, but you can't use a Phoenix Down or a Revive or anything to bring them back... which is a moot point, I think. Since whenever any character of mine has died even without breaking a law, they are removed from the field and I haven't had the option to use a Phoenix Down on them, since there was nothing left to target. That being said, I haven't tried Raise yet since I don't feel it necessary to teach it to my characters because as far as I know, I can't revive them anyways. Either this was a serious oversight, or there is something I am missing. Probably the latter.
All in all, it's a pretty amazing game. The art and graphics are nothing new, possibly even rehashed from Tactics Advance/FF12: Revenant Wings, but the terrain for combat fields and spell effects are down right gorgeous. The music is as it should be for a SquareEnix game, excellent, and the game play thus far is captivating enough to keep me going. Although I sincerely doubt it has 'amazing' replay value, short of the higher difficulty settings.
The newest installment in the Ivalice Alliance series of games, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is a step above everything that is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It's still not the original, but with breathtaking landscapes to battle on, a refined quest/territory system, and a multitude of new quests, A2 brings the Tactics franchise back to it's former glory.
You start off on the last day of school. Your teacher decides that you need to learn to focus, and volunteers you to help the school Librarian clean up the library after class. Upon arriving, you stumble across a book that is only half written, inviting you in its last sentence to pick up a pen and finish the book. As you begin to write, you are thrown into the fantasy world of Ivalice. Recruited by necessity by the clan leader Cid, you quickly learn the ropes of the Ivalice world and set out to find adventure, and a way home.
There is no accounting for story, I guess. Because despite the lack thereof, I can easily sit down and play this game for hours on end. The quests are short, but sweet and the connections between them offer a sort of side-story that is a welcome distraction from the poor main story.
Unfortunately, they didn't revamp the skill learning system of Tactics Advance (shamelessly stolen from Final Fantasy 9) of equipping weapons and armor, and using them for extensive periods of time, to learn new abilities. The faults with this system are obvious to anyone who has played FF9 or Tactics Advance, where it promotes using sub-par gear. Preferring the everyday run of the mill weapons bought from a shop to the rare, powerful artifacts you find through quests and missions, simply because they teach a skill you don't already know.
The Job system is back in full force. Following Advance, with the 'Race Specific' jobs, and various ways of unlocking them. Requiring a certain amount of abilities from other jobs to unlock the new ones, as well as quests rewarding the player with new, previously hidden jobs.
The 'shop' system is something of hit or miss. You start out only being able to purchase a small amount of items from the shop. To unlock more, you need to trade 'Loot' in to a Bazaar. (Loot is obtained through killing monsters, looting treasure chests on battle fields, completing quests, and you can Steal it from monsters with the Thief class.) This actually works similarly in principle to the Bazaar system in Final Fantasy 12, but, not really. As opposed to just everything you sell to the shop being allocated to new item discoveries, you are presented with a list of different recipes and classifications ranging from A-E. Each recipe has at least one combination, and up to five. You turn in usually three items, each item having varying quality, trying to match three items of the quality of the combination you want to make. Such as Platinum Ore being quality C, Maple Wood being quality C, and Whisperweed being quality C, but if you don't have three of the required items to make the recipe, you can't unlock the item. This sounds pretty good, especially since there is no guess work involved. If you had to guess the contents of each recipe, I would have thrown my DS out the window by now. The inherent flaw, however, is that sometimes the items you get from the combination (usually marked with ???s) are much worse then items that are already available to you. This is less frequent the more meticulous you are about clearing up every available quest before moving on to the next area, but if you were playing the game just to beat it, you would be at the mercy of random loot drops to hope the items you get are reasonably useful and come in a reasonably linear manner. Maybe the first 10 items I unlocked were Summoner/Arcanist wands and Dragoon spears, neither of which classes I had even unlocked, let alone had any characters capable of becoming.
One of the other interesting differences in A2 is the way that clans vie for territory. As opposed to being on the battlefield, land control is 'Auctioned' every so many days (usually in surplus of 300) and you spend Clan Points (currency received for completing quests) to purchase it. It's an interesting mini-game, but I don't think I will be buying much land after the first auction. So far, the benefits of having more land are pretty moot. When travelling through areas you control, you are more likely to receive random loot, from the citizens, or come across angry gangs who either want your territory, or previously controlled it and are reluctant to leave. All this does is add stepping stones when moving from one quest to another, but at least its a fight.
The other big change are the way that Laws work, thank god.
The laws still exist, a Judge will show up at the start of the fight and say something stupid like "No using Fire effects." or "Don't deal damage in surplus of 50." or "Don't miss.", but the consequence and reward are much better balanced. In that, there IS a reward, and the consequence isn't game breaking. After a law is passed, and you place your units on the field (given the option to re-equip them and change their jobs,) you are given a choice of a Privilege, which is a bonus that you get as long as you don't break a law. This can be an increase in Power, Speed, Agility, etc. or additional Clan Points for completing the mission. Unless the Clan Points option is locked out, I figure it is -always- the best choice.
If you break a law, you lose your privilege. In addition, six little 'jail cells' appear on the top screen. Any dead characters will show up in the cells. Don't worry, they aren't gone. All this means is that you can't revive any characters for the duration of the battle. They still gain XP, they will still be there for the next fight unharmed, but you can't use a Phoenix Down or a Revive or anything to bring them back... which is a moot point, I think. Since whenever any character of mine has died even without breaking a law, they are removed from the field and I haven't had the option to use a Phoenix Down on them, since there was nothing left to target. That being said, I haven't tried Raise yet since I don't feel it necessary to teach it to my characters because as far as I know, I can't revive them anyways. Either this was a serious oversight, or there is something I am missing. Probably the latter.
All in all, it's a pretty amazing game. The art and graphics are nothing new, possibly even rehashed from Tactics Advance/FF12: Revenant Wings, but the terrain for combat fields and spell effects are down right gorgeous. The music is as it should be for a SquareEnix game, excellent, and the game play thus far is captivating enough to keep me going. Although I sincerely doubt it has 'amazing' replay value, short of the higher difficulty settings.
