Review: Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift
If you have no idea what a grimoire is, don't worry, neither do I, and I've played the game.
{ Sun 24th August 2008 }
I've long been a fan of RPGs and am partial to a spot of tactics and strategy in my games, so, as you might assume, Strategy RPGs have always held an element of appeal to me. And any talk of SRPGs will inevitably lead to mention of titles such as Fire Emblem, Tactics Ogre, Disgaea or, most likely, the much lauded Final Fantasy Tactics. However, unfortunately for me, the oft praised Final Fantasy Tactics on PlayStation never made it to the UK back in the day, having finally found it's way here last year in form of a PSP re-release (which currently resides in my list of games to play).
The psuedo-sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, on the GBA did, however, make it to our shores and I duly snapped it up hoping to get a taste of what I'd heard so many good things about. Talking to friends from the US though, I was informed that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a watered down experience compared to the original Tactics, which was disappointing. As it turned out though I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing through it and found it to be a highly entertaining game.
When the sequel — the rather lengthily titled Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift (or FFTA2 for brevity and the sake of my fingers) — was announced for the DS, I was actually quite excited, despite derisive remarks from those that consider Tactics Advance to be a dumbed down game and bemoaned that it wasn't a sequel to the original Tactics.
All part of the plan
For those who haven't played a Strategy RPG before, the premise is simple: a number of units are deployed onto a, typically grid-based, battlefield with the task of meeting some goal such as defeating the enemy, surviving a number of turns, etc. in turn-based combat. Unlike traditional RPGs where world exploration and story is generally the focus, SRPGs instead focus on the battles primarily with any story elements told via scenes between fights or pre- and post-battle speeches.
SRPGs also tend to employ a job, or class, system for the available units. Jobs or classes open up specific abilities, and may allow you to mix them to create customised units, adding to the strategic possibilities. Typically these job classes will be structured in a branching fashion, with later ones having dependencies on earlier classes/abilities needed to unlock them. And in some cases the jobs and classes are also locked to particular sexes or races of creature. This leads to a lot of potential options for how you approach the battlefield, and with a diverse set of units you can potentially deploy radically different troops.
FFTA2 follows this establish structure almost to the letter, offering a number races (a couple new to this game apparently) with their own unique job classes, although a few of these are little more than a copy-paste-rename efforts. Where FFTA2 wanders furthest from the beaten path is with a mechanic introduced in the original Tactics Advance: the Judges.
Don't you judge me
In the world of FFTA2 some clans, such as yours, are protected by a magical Judge who prevents your clan members from meeting their untimely demise on the battlefield if you cock up on the strategy front (so no Fire Emblem style permanent deaths here). Unfortunately the judges have clearly been partaking a little too much in the old magic juice as they've developed an odd trait: in return for their protection your clan must fight according to an arbitrary law they impose at the start of the match.
But it's not just protection you get, the Judges also grant you a choice of perk for the battle that will remain in effect as long as you uphold their law. These can prove to be quite useful with perks (the better ones needing to be unlocked in various 'clan trials'), such as one increase your movement range, increase your speed or power, reduce the MP cost of spells, or ones that will grant you more ability points (required to learn abilities) for each battle. As an extra added bonus (the Judge chaps sure are generous, huh), completing a battle whilst upholding the law also grants you a couple of items.
As for the laws themselves, they can range from simple weapon or item restrictions, to restrictions on certain elemental attacks, through to slightly odder ones (such as not allowed to cause more, or less, than a certain amount of damage), and some plain daft ones. One of the silliest laws is one that disallows missing with an attack. Since very few attacks are ever 100% guaranteed you can end up being caught out when a practical certainty (i.e. a 95%+ success rate hit) falls foul of the outside chance.
Fortunately the punishment for breaking the laws is rather tame, leading to the loss of your battle perk, no post-battle bonus items and the inability to revive fallen team mates. However, despite not being able to revive them mid-battle, any downed units aren't killed off and remain available afterwards. As such it can actually prove to be strategically sensible to purposefully break a law which would have otherwise made life unnecessarily difficult.
To some people the Judges are a deal breaker, and they can certainly have their moments of irritation, but since there's so little risk to breaking the laws they become an easily ignorable aspect of the game. For those put off by the Judges in the previous Tactics Advance title, you'll find them far more palatable here, if just as unnecessary.
Tell me a story
Another area that put some people off the previous title was the story, what little there was of it, and how 'kiddy' it felt. Unfortunately, you're unlikely to find much change with the sequel as it's still fairly thin on the ground and follows a similar path.
It's the classic tale of boy being held back at school to help tidy the library, boy decides to write name in a mysterious book he finds, boy is transported to another world, boy finds out the way to get home is to lark about for a while and explore this crazy new world (naturally). It's all rather silly, and the kind of thing that if you stop to think about it too much you'll not just find plot holes, but gaping chasms of idiocy (like where does this kid suddenly develop masterful sword skills from, and why the hell is he put in charge of the clan almost immediately?), but when all is said and done it serves as enough motivation to keep things moving along.
But then it doesn't matter because really the game is all about the missions, or 'quests', of which there are 300 — though only a handful comprise the central story thread. Most of quests actually fall into their own side-story threads that you'll follow as you complete each one in the chain, and which serve to flesh out some the game world a little, or can even lead to things like bonus characters joining your party.
There's actually more quest to do than just the straight 300 quests though, with a number of quests returning multiple times over the course of a game, and occasional random battles with area clans or monster fights. On top of that there's a bastard hard tower to take on, though you'll need a fairly beefed up team to do so. I accidentally wandered into it at about level 35 or so, made it past various floors of level 50+ monsters (just about) only to be confronted with a top floor featuring a load of level 99 fuckers. Needless to say my party got a little raped in that fight. Hard it may be, but it serves as one of the many things you can get up to in the game.
How long?
In fact, the sheer weight of quests on offer is what makes this game a real time sink. I gave up doing all the side-quests at about 260 in — though in reality due to repeats and random battles I'd probably taken part in a fair few more than that — and by the time I'd finished the last couple of story quests I had racked up a mighty 80+ hours of game play time. Whilst some may see this as a good thing, for me the game did start to overstay its welcome. Whilst there is a slight variation in the mission types on offer, more often than not it's a simple case of kill everything else that isn't your team, and it had got to the point where my team was so powerful that the fights were barely a challenge. I could even afford to put out my second or third string units and win comfortably; though this might be testament to my efforts of trying to keep all my clan members up to standard as much as anything else.
Speaking of trying to keep the team balanced, this can be a right hassle, especially for any units that join anywhere from about a third of the game in. New recruits are always completely blank slates with no existing abilities learnt, which leaves them a little useless on the battlefield compared to the team members you've been building up to that point. The game helps out a little by applying ability points across the entire clan, so even if not taking part in battles your units will learn skills over time. However, units don't gain experience unless they take part in a quest, so you're left with the choice of sacrificing the use of your good units, ones with actual skills, for lame newbies who are probably poorly equipped (because skills have to be learnt from particular weapons armour or accessories).
The game does offer one potential solution to this problem, with the ability to dispatch units and teams to undertake quests autonomously, but this it manages to cock up royally by making dispatch missions near impossible to complete successfully unless you send out your best guys, the ones you want to use in battle (and even then there's a good chance they'll fail). I tried dispatching reasonably experienced troops on a quest that purely required you visit a certain location, and somehow they failed. How? The quest was literally walk to location X, Y and Z, then success. I want to know under what useless ruling they decided that could be failed, by anyone. It's not like I picked a team of leg-less, blind idiots with no sense of direction to attempt it. I found the only way I could dispatch units to get them experience was to send them off on repeat quests that they were vastly over-experienced for, and for which they didn't gain much in the way of experience points anyway.
This was a double blow, because I'd hoped to use an alternate team to take care of some of the quests I had no interest in tackling, cut through the missions a bit quicker as well as helping to keep my team balanced at the same time. Sadly the game decided to stomp on that plan.
Needs more items
One other area of the game likely to provoke the ire of players is the way it handles weapons, armour and accessories. Some can be picked up or won from battles (or stolen, if you get incredibly lucky with the odds), but most have to be bought from the shop. However, before you go wandering into the shop and laying down your hard-earned Gil for the SuperUltraMassiveSpank-o-Sword you need to unlock it in the 'Bazaar' (a rather apt name in a way). Weapons, armour and accessories are unlocked by making them from the requisite component items, which are collected every time you kill an enemy, as reward for completing a quest, or gifted at the end of battle by the Judge. Early on all these unlocks provide items in the shop that can be bought multiple times over, but once you start unlocking the really good stuff you find you're unlocking one-off purchase (and they cost a pretty penny too).
I actually ended up doing alright out of this system, but since locked job classes often demand you learn a number of skills from one or more other class, it can be annoying when a unit is left to stagnate on the skills front because you don't have the means to unlock another job class (I only suffered this briefly with my Thief unit who I wanted to turn into a Ninja, but lacked a fifth Thief skill to learn).
Time to return home
It may seem like I'm being quite hard on this game, but really it's just disappointment at those little niggles that start to mound up and stop a good game being great. Yes, the story is positively stupid, and in grand scheme of tactical RPGs it may not offer the depth of other titles, but it's a fantastic looking game (great sprite work, topped with rather funky special effects) with a brilliant score (I generally don't play DS titles with sound, but this one I actually sat with headphones on listening to) and is, for the most part, rather good fun. There really is a decent amount to praise in the title, and the fact I happily ploughed 80-odd hours into should back that up, but I can't shake the fact that by the end I was left feeling a bit fed up with it.
So yes, it's a decent game that suffers with a handful of small issues whose ability to annoy will vary depending on your personal preferences. Certainly if you're new to Strategy RPGs this wouldn't be a bad starting point, especially since it's not quite as complex, and features a less punishing difficultly curve, than other titles in the genre. If you are already a fan of SRPGs, well I imagine you don't need me or my words to help make up your mind, you probably knew already if this was going to be getting your money or not, but thanks for reading.
