Final Fantasy Tactics A2

I'm ambivalent to Strategic Japanese RPGs... I grew up playing games like Civ and the absolutely awesome X-COM (I'll post sometime about it), so I don't dislike turn-based strategy games, they tend to be more cerebral and more "strategic" than real time ones but, they do have their share of problems.

The most aggravating one for me on turn based games it's the flow of the game itself, I know it's a personal thing (most fans of the genre won't ever have a problem) but I get bored easily if the computer takes too long to end it's turns, cast it's spells etc... For example, the most awesome games in this regard are the Super Robot Wars games, why?, because you can swich attack/ defend animations on and off!, so If you are in a long and intense battle and you just don't care about the flashy stuff, and just want to know if that last attack destroyed your top tier unit or not, you can, but you can also see and rejoice on how your last attack destroys the enemy boss in absolutely brutal fashion. SRW games are not the only ones in this regard, Disgaea is also a member of this awesome club.

Not so with other games, which brings me to the grandaddy of the game I'm reviewing today, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX.

I remember playing this one when PSX japanese RPGs where the shit, I had played some FFs but sadly, never finished one of them (I'll try to research into that another day). This also happened to FF Tactics.

However, while the other FF games I stopped playing them mostly because I usually found better things to do with my time (meaning they where entertaining, just not as much as other things), FF Tactics was utterly boring.

Why?, because of the aforementioned "too long computer turns syndrome" I mentioned above. I don't remember the details since it has been almost 10 years since I played, but I remember just turning off the game one day calling it shit, and just leaving it to eat dust until it disappeared from my home, something by the way, I don't even remember how it happened.

When FF Tactics Advance came out, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the GBA to be fair, and quite frankly, what my friends told me about the "judge" system in the games really put me off. So this one I skipped entirely, no big loss I though, since I already didn't like the first one.

And know I have in my hands FF TA2.

I started playing it out of sheer boredom, since I didn't have any other interesting games right now for my DS, but it has quickly draw me in and now I'm happily dedicating it hours of my time regularly.

For starters, it's a cute game, with a colorful cast drawn like a mix between an anime and a children's coloring book.

The story in the game it's quite simple, but it works, out hero funnily named by default "Luso" it's a kid in school (I think it's supposed to be Highschool, being this a Japanese game, but it really looks like a grade school) that finds a estrange and unwritten book on the schools library. He get sucked into the book and thrust into a world of adventure!

While Luso is a paperthin character as development goes, I cannot but sympathize with the little guy, as soon as he arrives in Ivalice, he's eager for adventures and travels, and is in absolutely no hurry to find a way back home, and it's a very refreshing thing to see in a JRPG hero, a genre thats clogged with brooding and indecisive heroes, nostalgic also, as it reminds me of "Justin" the hero of the original Grandia, who is also one of my favorite JRPG heroes.

The game follows a very simple mechanic, you go to a pub, take a quest, complete it. Rinse and repeat.

The battles are fought in turns (duh) and you have a variety of characters that can move through a really cool amount of "jobs" (classes). From this different jobs you get different skills, some passive, some active, some useful, other worthless and some absolutely gamebreaking... the usual stuff. This is, in fact, the most addicting facet of the game, you always want to try one more battle to unlock some class or equipment piece that will let you learn some new (hopefully) cool power, and the variety is such that it takes a lot of time to get boring.

The quests themselves are varied and try to spice things up a bit so they are not "kill all the monsters" time and time again, and somewhat succeed, although not for the right reasons, since I'm always happy to find a "kill all the monsters" mission again. The fact is that the "varied" missions tend to be rather dull, and most of them are actually "kill all the monsters with X handicap", which is horribly redundant because we have the judges for that.

The judges made their first appearance in FFTA1, I didn't play that game, but I do remember my friends cursing and bitching about "the fucking judge" on FFTA1.

The judge establishes "laws" on each quest, these "laws" are just a way of saying "handicapped", the judge will order things like "you must move every turn", which is easy enough, to "don't deal more than X amount of damage" which if you like to powergame as I do, is absolutely horseshit.

However it's bearable, the penalty for not following the "law" it's not being able to resurrect characters and not getting some extra "loot" at the end of the battle. Also, the "laws" are always the same for each battle, so you can come prepared if you somehow screwed up when you reload the game. This is far better than the original judge, if my sources are to be believed, since in FFTA1 the judge handed his "laws" randomly, dropping some stupid laws like "don't attack" and actually arresting your characters if you didn't follow them, with possibly humorous results.

Strategy wise... it's not really that deep, it's mostly a matter of having the right guy for the right job and investing time (and side quests!) in raising the skills and level of your units so they can overpower, over move, over... you get the idea. Which is not entirely bad, it just means that it's strategy it's outside the actual battle and into the "unit screen".

And yes, you gessed it, the computer turns are not overly long, I'm especially happy to see that Summons, the black sheep in FF games that it's absolutely awesome and totally boring at the same time (for the love of god Bahamut, JUST KILL THEM AND BE DONE WITH IT!!!) are rather quick, just like other spells, making the game not exactly quick paced, but fast enough to keep my atention.

All in all, it's a fine and entertaining game, and I recommend it.