?lgarnas Tr?dg?rd
06-30-2008, 04:40 PM
I'm about 10 hours in. Quick rundown.
(-) FFTA2 is ridiculously watered down from FFT. There's practically no story. They boast of "50 classes to choose from" but they're ridiculously limited and can only be applied to certain character races. Further more, some of the classes are just race specific copy and paste jobs. Even more so, many "advanced" classes are just slightly tweaked versions of others. Like Archer > Hunter.
(-)Units themselves are artificially limited because you can only learn skills by having certain weapons equipped. That means the game can control your growth by limiting what weapons you can get and because you also have to forge the stupid things by using "loot". There's even the possibility of handicapping your own party because you need one more skill that requires equipping a weaker weapon or piece of armor.
(-)Laws may have been toned down, but they still ****ing suck. I lost a major battle last night because the laws decided to completely nullify my magic users. How am I supposed to grow my characters when the game randomly decides that I can't use them? Sure, I can break the law, but then I'd miss out on some random drops that I need to make new weapons to make my characters grow.
(-)Considering the above, the game is more of a collect-a-thon than a strategy game. Random collect-a-thons
(-)This game lacks 3D. Not in the "ohhh I need teh shiney" type of complaint, but more of "It sure would be nice if I could ****ing rotate this battle field to see what I'm doin" type of ordeal.
(-)The game draws back most of the strategy that was in FFT. [b]No casting times. No Faith/Brave stats either to dictate spell strength or AI behavior. You can't see an enemy white mage charging to heal a group of enemy units and position your own unit to take advantage.
(-)Poison and the like still seem completely worthless.
With that said, here's the good.
(+)It's still a decent strategy game at the core. It's just not the best and doesn't hold up to it's roots.
(+)The 2D graphics augmented by 3D effects are great. The death animation for characters with Doom cast on them is ****ing awesome.
(+)The music is superb.
(+)I'm glad that they fixed enemy scales. I hated how everything was the same size as my units in FFTA on the GBA.
In the end it's just not very deep. It doesn't allow the level of customization that FFT did. The story is almost non-existent. The dialog is worse. Yeah, I'd rather have badly translated brief dialog than really good repetitive dialog.
Again, I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's still a regression from Tactics Ogre/Final Fantasy Tactics. There's no question that it's the superior game compared to FFT/TO outside of "I simply prefer it". I'll give that to you if that's how it boils down. But mechanically? It's not up to task.
(-) FFTA2 is ridiculously watered down from FFT. There's practically no story. They boast of "50 classes to choose from" but they're ridiculously limited and can only be applied to certain character races. Further more, some of the classes are just race specific copy and paste jobs. Even more so, many "advanced" classes are just slightly tweaked versions of others. Like Archer > Hunter.
(-)Units themselves are artificially limited because you can only learn skills by having certain weapons equipped. That means the game can control your growth by limiting what weapons you can get and because you also have to forge the stupid things by using "loot". There's even the possibility of handicapping your own party because you need one more skill that requires equipping a weaker weapon or piece of armor.
(-)Laws may have been toned down, but they still ****ing suck. I lost a major battle last night because the laws decided to completely nullify my magic users. How am I supposed to grow my characters when the game randomly decides that I can't use them? Sure, I can break the law, but then I'd miss out on some random drops that I need to make new weapons to make my characters grow.
(-)Considering the above, the game is more of a collect-a-thon than a strategy game. Random collect-a-thons
(-)This game lacks 3D. Not in the "ohhh I need teh shiney" type of complaint, but more of "It sure would be nice if I could ****ing rotate this battle field to see what I'm doin" type of ordeal.
(-)The game draws back most of the strategy that was in FFT. [b]No casting times. No Faith/Brave stats either to dictate spell strength or AI behavior. You can't see an enemy white mage charging to heal a group of enemy units and position your own unit to take advantage.
(-)Poison and the like still seem completely worthless.
With that said, here's the good.
(+)It's still a decent strategy game at the core. It's just not the best and doesn't hold up to it's roots.
(+)The 2D graphics augmented by 3D effects are great. The death animation for characters with Doom cast on them is ****ing awesome.
(+)The music is superb.
(+)I'm glad that they fixed enemy scales. I hated how everything was the same size as my units in FFTA on the GBA.
In the end it's just not very deep. It doesn't allow the level of customization that FFT did. The story is almost non-existent. The dialog is worse. Yeah, I'd rather have badly translated brief dialog than really good repetitive dialog.
Again, I'm not saying it's a bad game. It's still a regression from Tactics Ogre/Final Fantasy Tactics. There's no question that it's the superior game compared to FFT/TO outside of "I simply prefer it". I'll give that to you if that's how it boils down. But mechanically? It's not up to task.