took a break and then drastic kinda hyucked itself and I can't be bothered to fix it right now.

So this is just gonna be a short review with the consideration that its an unfinished playthrough I might come back to (and in fairness, I was very close to finishing the main story with above 200 quests already done).

Either way, this was a game I really enjoyed more than I expected myself to. It's just got really solid tactics gameplay with a good variety of classes and skill while not feeling overbearing or too complicated. The number of established characters (e.g Luso, Cid, Adelle namely) for your clan is
limited, but this is to be expected from these sorts of tactics game.

And quite honestly, I actually had a lot of fun imagining the personalites, backstories and customized appearances e.t.c. for the generic party members. This is how I generally am with these sorts of games including the tactics ogre series, it just kind of feels jarring at times cuz I don't share these same kind of feelings for say, Dragon Quest 3 and 9 or something, which also has generic customizable party members for hire. Regardless, having a good variety of distinct class options for most playable species is pretty cool. My major complaint really is the lack of more classes for two species, and species as a whole being either male or female instead of letting you choose their gender. In fairness though, I imagine they probably just didn't have the time or were limited in some way to implement this.

The main storyline is actually fairly short, which I think is about a total of 20 missions iirc. This sounds rather underwhelming, but its cuz the meat of the game is actually in all the clan side quests you can do, a total of 300 listed ones with a few extra as well. You're more or less encouraged to do as many as you can because that is where the main enjoyment of the game is gonna come from.

This seems to have affected the writing as well, as far as I can tell. Compared to Advance 1 and what little I know of the og tactics, the story of A2 is definitely very stripped down in comparison. But I can't say I'm disappointed with that? It feels like a deliberate choice to make the main storyline generally more lax and low stakes to further emphasize the "clan doing all sorts of jobs" aspect with the sidequests, not making the player feel like they're cornered into doing the main storyline as quick as possible. I think the writing quality of the main storyline is made up for anyways this way, as clan quests often present interesting stories with many of them being connected through each other through a continuous storyline. I'm finding it hard to express why I liked it so much, but I guess I just liked the freedom of it and the writing never truly bored me in any way.

I do also want to say the main storyline and notable characters still have their interesting and heartfelt moments here and there. They aren't gonna win any awards for it but I genuinely got pretty connected to the close knit group of Cid, Adelle and Luso and their struggles and how they overcome them with the help of each other, as well as other characters like Huey, Vaan and Penelo being generally likeable and its also just neat of them to bring in ff12 characters, really makes the ivalice games feel more connected. The main storyline villain is pretty slay, ofc, nail polish emote, periodt.

Overall though yeah I do quite like this structure. Would it have worked as well if the game wasn't a handheld? I'm not sure, as I ended up playing it on a phone lol, but for a handheld at least its structure works perfectly for anyone to hop into the game at any point and do whatever they wanna do. Definitely would recommend this game.

Grimoire of the Rift feels like a better version of the original Tactics game for GBA: it plays much more tactically with great maps designed around vertical movement and chokepoints, compared to half the Advance battles being fought over plains. Jobs are even more and even better than before, it has a Judge system that doesn't actively try to punish the player for the sake of it but instead it offers a risk\reward calculation. There are two solid issues that make me reluctant to recommend the game though:

- Luso is a spoiled brat and I don't really like his arc, compared to basically all the other characters in the game. He feels incomplete, a canvas for the young kid who's playing the game, thus the story and the plot points feel less poignant because there's a 13 years old kid at the steering wheel, who has no pressure, no anxiety, no real rhyme or reason to be there if not for "the fun of it". I get it, Luso, you haven't got a younger brother who gets in and out of hospitals every other day, you don't have issues with the Church either, but a bit more agency wouldn't have hurt.

- the game can suddenly hit you with difficulty spikes, crawling to a halt the experience. It is very jarring and it happens multiple times. It's a pity that the best combat, the best storylines and the best job synergies are hidden at what is essentially the end of the game, because it's promising, fun and engaging to just play the game from the middle point to its ending. You'll feel much better when you're done playing than when you're starting out, yet in order to get started you'd have to have a good first couple hours of gameplay ... what a pity really.

It's a great game with solid tactical decisions, planning and fun factor, yet it doesn't really respect your time and oftentimes you'll find yourself skipping through dialogue because it's not the best. If you plan to start the game, don't forget to play through the House Bowen and the Frimelda questlines, since to me they are its peak in content, storyline and Final Fantasy factor.

A2 does something no other FFT and honestly no other game really does- or even attempts to do. The game tries to personalize the player as the group, and not as any individual character.

The game allows any clan member to be the representative in major longrunning questlines and turf wars. Luso is treated as A main character, not THE main character. The other clan members take part in his quest just as well as he takes part in theirs. Its a subtle theme that gets pushed with every other named party member as well. Its not really something any company would market with and its not really anything anyone looks for in a game, but regardless it makes A2 have a unique flavor that no other game has, nor does any other game try to match.

If it wasn't for how easy it is to make broken builds with illusionists, this would be my favourite tactics game ever.
The way to level up the characters, the childish tone of everything, the cute sound effect of the mogues, the limitations on races of jobs, the lore worldbuild about those races and jobs being as they are.
The previous entry was too focused on the main characters and lacked this much exploration, this one is so relaxed and easygoing compared to the advance one.
The soundtrack lives rent free in my mind. Thanks Ayako Saso.

Este juego me marcó mucho de niño hasta puntos que ni yo mismo sabía cuándo lo he rejugado. Una década y pico después hice un juego de rol y tiene cosas de FFTA2 y mejoras que creo sinceramente necesita. No me malinterpreteis, me ha gustado mucho jugarlo, pero ya de adulto le veo las carencias. Para empezar el sistema de trabajos está muy bien, pero una vez has desbloqueado los mejores no hay ningún motivo para tener los peores más allá de cumplir algunas misiones de enviar e un miembro del gremio. Y para eso simplemente tienes un recambio con todos los trabajos y ya está. Bueno, eso si consigues craftear el equipo con un sistema lento, pesado, y que tiene buenas ideas, pero no llega a nada realmente. Si ya tengo que puedo ponerme dos armas, para que coño voy a usar otra habilidad, esto duplica mi daño por dos, literalmente, y usando cualquier otro trabajo.

Con respecto a la historia tiene buenos puntos e historias secundarias que recordaba tras tantos años, pero también, dentro de las 300 misiones, hay una enorme cantidad de relleno sin sal.

Luego el combate si es entretenido, retante si el rival tiene el mismo nivel que tú, y cuándo usan una habilidad o un trabajo que ni sabes que es vas con extra cuidado, porque es algo tan emocionante como peligroso. El problema sería la regla de cada combate. Muchas veces está bien pensada y te inclina a no usar habilidad que ataquen a todos, no dañar a X personajes, hacerlo rápido, etc. Pero otras con como "No puedes dejar que te roben". Y a ver, no es algo que dependa de mi, si no de la suerte de que intenten robarme y lo consigna o no, yo ahí no puedo hacer casi nada para evitarlo.

¿ Y porqué le pongo tanta nota? Porque en algunos momentos brilla de verdad, porque tiene tramas secundarias muy interesantes si consigues seguirlas, porque el combate tiene muchísimo potencial y los personajes a más habilidades aprenden más versátiles son y, probablemente, porque es un juego de mi infancia, que me ha marcado mucho más de lo que creía, y quiero que otra gente lo pruebe y lo disfrute.

text by tim rogers

★★☆☆

“NOT REMOTELY AS 'ADVANCED' AS IT NEEDS TO BE.”

In all the official writings, the title of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 is written as Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Anyone who’s played the previous game in this now-two-game “series” knows that the “A” stands for “Advance”, because the first game was called Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. That game was produced by videogame legend Yasumi Matsuno. It was also for Gameboy Advance. The sequel is neither produced by Yasumi Matsuno, nor is it for Gameboy Advance. Though games are generally better on the Nintendo DS than they were on the Gameboy Advance, and generally worse when they’re not produced by Yasumi Matsuno, weirdly, neither of these things make the game in question exponentially better or worse.

The most interesting thing about this game, if you’re forced to talk about it, is probably its branding. Square-Enix’s business model has come to feel more like a big tobacco company than a videogame developer, these days. In 2007, the mega-publisher is releasing a staggering fourteen Final Fantasy products, all of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” brand, some of them belonging to the “Final Fantasy VII 10th Anniversary” brand, and some of them belonging to the somewhat conceptually hilarious “Final Fantasy XI 5th Anniversary” brand. The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, in which three titles were announced this year, oddly doesn’t get its own brand. You’d think that, by now, they’d be slightly ashamed of the fact that almost every game they release has a title that begins with the same two words. Why not call them Crystal Chronicles: Final Fantasy? “Crystal Chronicles” is a pleasant, striking combination of words. I guess someone in the company isn’t willing to let anyone mention taking a risk until he finishes having his new mansion built. Or maybe not: the Wii-exclusive download-only Crystal Chronicles game’s title is going to begin with seven whole words preceding the words “Final Fantasy” — The Little King and the Promised Country: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, is what they’re calling it. I guess someone was able to slap together a pitch-perfect PowerPoint presentation detailing that it’s okay to bury the keywords in the middle of the title so long as that title includes two colons. You know, there used to be a time this company was proud of their own name, where customers were trusted enough to buy the games because of the maker’s logo on the box. I wonder what happened.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 belongs to the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, in which three other titles were also released this year: Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War, a remake of the original Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP, Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a pleasant-enough, stupidly simple strategy game for the Nintendo DS, and Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System, which might be the worst subtitle they’ve ever put on a game. I mean, seriously, they’re mentioning one of the most absolutely technical aspects of the game, right there in the title. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also belongs, of course, to the “Final Fantasy Tactics” brand, which I suppose is a sub-brand of the “Ivalice Alliance” brand, unless they decide some day to make a Tactics game with Crystal Chronicles characters in it. That would be amazing. That would be hilarious. Either way, I wouldn’t put it past them. At any rate, slap a “Final Fantasy 20th Anniversary” sticker on the box, and here you have it: a triple-branded game, by Square-Enix, which is kind of like a fourth brand, kind of like a pseudo-brand. How can it not sell at least a quarter million copies?

As what it is — branded, polished, focus-tested — it’s pretty much a perfect little package. The graphics are almost overwhelmingly pleasant, with rich colors and delicious little animations. The music, by Kenji Ito (probably the best (capitalized) Game Music Composer in the world right now), is fascinating: he took Hitoshi Sakimoto’s iconic Final Fantasy Tactics jams and somehow mated them with Italian 1950s pre-proto-pop, little dinging bells and all. The arrangements are literally miraculous. And then there are the sound effects — I swear to god, I’d thought for the longest time that Square’s menu cursor sound effect was perfect, and that they’d be fools to mess with it. Well, FFTA2 messes with it, and the results are gaspingly gorgeous. If you’re anything like me, you will find yourself — figuratively — filled, many times during each battle, with the strong desire to rip the earbuds out of your ears and lick them, expecting honey to be dripping out.

You have a tremendous 56 job classes to choose from this time, some of them total conceptual cop-outs (like “Animal User”, who can use a “Sheep” spell to protect himself with “Wool”, which guards against cold), and others are pretty simply awesome (Fencer, who specializes in thrusting sword attacks that push enemies back). At the end of the day, though, you might wonder why there are three elementary classes (Fencer, Soldier, Warrior) for sword techniques, though hey, they all have different techniques, and it’s pretty cool to learn new techniques.

The back of the box describes this game as “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players!” Maybe they should have said “A pick-up-and-play simulation RPG for all players who know what ‘RPG’ stands for”. Maybe that would have taken up too much precious real estate on the back of the box, though hey, maybe they could have spared it: the back of the box is mostly text, anyway, with only one actual screenshot of the game at play. The other two (tiny) screenshots show a dialogue in one of the many towns’ many bars and the hecking map screen. Yeah, good work, there.

This weird shame is confusing, because A2 is a much better game, as far as games go, than its predecessor. This is funny, because the first one was, you know, actually directed by an actual genius. Geniuses make weird decisions sometimes, I guess: the first game ditched the brilliant (and now simulation-RPG standard) “Active Time” turn-based battle system in favor of a “player side attacks, enemy side attacks” style. This type of battle system, as present in Matsuno’s Tactics Ogre, wasn’t so bad because it gave us a peculiar sensation: go to the bathroom (or cook an omelette) while the enemy side is attacking, and then come back into the living room, where the game screen has changed, either drastically or subtly. Sit down, pick up the controller, and feel something like a forensics expert as you plan your strategy. This didn’t work so well when the game console is something you carry around in your hands. The reinstatement of the AT system, now without a name — now just something that is — works wonders for FFTA2. Each battle is a polished, cute little challenge. The battlefields sometimes feel a little bit flat, which is a real shame: at last, the ability to push an opponent back one square is a lot more executable, and there just aren’t enough heights to knock the enemies down from. I suppose the flat battlefields are on account of the game’s not being presented in actual, rotatable 3D. Why isn’t it in 3D, though? The Dragon Quest IV remake for DS, from what I could tell at Tokyo Game Show, handles 3D exceptionally well, if in a “Porno for Pixelantes” kind of way.

Moreover, why doesn’t this game support touch screen controls at all? It seems like an amazing omission to me. I suppose to controller-only inputs are clean and simple enough — press the L and R buttons during battle to zip between enemy targets when targeting spells, or press them while in free-targeting mode to peruse each troop on the battlefield, in the order that they’re going to attack. Though really, some people like the pointing and clicking. It’s really weird — the window size and fonts seem optimized for touching with a stylus. Though maybe they cut out stylus controls because that way you wouldn’t be able to hear that delicious cursor sound so much. The game includes an option to set the “main screen” as the top or the bottom, though, and I guess couldn’t do that with touch-screen controls.

The most glaring omission in this game — and it glares pretty ferociously — is the multiplayer. The back of the box says that players can “Enjoy wireless play with a friend!” It also says that the friend needs a copy of the game — this must mean . . . yes, that there are multiplayer battles! In a Final Fantasy Tactics game! On the DS, a system my friends actually own and play! I figured that multiplayer battles were a shoe-in, seeing as the battle system has been reverted to the glory of the original FFT‘s AT. I mean, no one would want to play a two-player competitive battle if it was the old “one side attacks, other side attacks” system, yeah? And this is the Nintendo DS, the home of the eight-million-selling Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. And the, uhh, half-million selling Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Square-Enix knows that players love to play together. They’ve already got the most intensive co-op RPG-esque experience on the system; why not go for the monopoly on awesome versus strategy, as well?

Well, a quick tear through the instruction manual will leave you cursing like a sailor: it’s hecking Item Trading. No versus mode for you — you’ll have to buy the PSP Final Fantasy Tactics remake, and then convince your friends to all buy PSPs, jackass. Man, what a rip-off. I guess, ultimately, Square-Enix didn’t want to cannibalize their own sales. Which makes about as much sense as, well, it doesn’t. This is where the in-branding becomes interesting again: “Traditional” FFT and FFT “Advance” are two different sub-sub-brands within one sub-brand (FFT) of another sub-brand (“Ivalice Alliance”) within the “Final Fantasy” brand. If they share too many features — despite the fact that they’re on different consoles — then the publisher will be philosophically defeated. And we wouldn’t want that — otherwise we’d never get that remake of Final Fantasy VII!

Speaking of remakes of Final Fantasy VII: the same in-breeding apparent in every other recent Square-Enix release is oozing out of the corners of Final Fantasy Tactics A2. It should be a given at this point, I guess: remember Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories for the Gameboy Advance, in which Sora, the hero of Kingdom Hearts, a PlayStation 2 game about Disney characters and Final Fantasy characters meeting and having long philosophical discussions and legally constricted brawls with blunt objects, forgets the events of the previous canonical game, and must relive them in portable game form by using an artifact called the “Chain of Memories”. Flash forward to Kingdom Hearts II: Final Mix for PlayStation 2, which includes the entirety of Chain of Memories, now upgraded to look and play like the PlayStation 2 that originally inspired it. Copies of copies of copies of copies — that’s what suffices for blockbuster material these days. Well, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is pretty much just a cover band of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance — it’s so busy trying to be the exact same game that it ends up completely missing the point.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a gentle, slow-moving little game, and as such, it was enjoyable. The tutorial, which should be more famous than it is, involved characters having a snowball fight. When these real-world characters got transported into the Final Fantasy universe, things got more mortal, though the sense of innocence never quite lifted. It added up to a quirky kind of pleasant aura. In the Final Fantasy world, our young hero joins a “clan” of warriors, takes “missions”, and fights “battles” in order to raise his reputation. The game plays out in episodes. Take a mission, fight the battle, save the game, get off the train, et cetera. A story (and one with a weirdly powerful moral message), however, comes creeping slowly in, and that story unfolds as we take more missions, fight more battles, and get off more trains.

FFT-A2 is essentially the same game, without the creeping story. A young boy, while serving detention in the library on the eve of his school summer vacation, is sucked into an old book. Now he joins a clan led by a man named Cid (absolute earliest-ever appearance of Cid in a Final Fantasy game: check), and goes off on an adventure! By “adventure” I mean he takes on missions at identical pubs in identical cities all around the world. He revels boyishly in the logistics of combat. “Wow! Earning new job-specific abilities and then equipping them while in another job class is fun!” There’s a weird kind of Pokemon-esque sheen covering the whole thing, and it might even be more disturbing — though only because it’s a bit harder to place — than the plucky main character in Advance Wars, grinning and saying “Cool! Tanks are super-strong against infantry!” after witnessing a battalion of cartoon tanks wiping out a hundred men on foot. At times, as you start and finish your fiftieth or hundredth battle and still no story pokes its head out of the ground, as the main character continues to expresses profound interest in the book-keeping elements of raising an army, it starts to feel like maybe this isn’t an RPG after all. Maybe it’s a middle-school pre-primer for one of those business-manners-training games that are flooding the market these days, with some critical thinking exercises (strategic battles) thrown in for good measure.

This microthin story facade doesn’t change the fact that the game sparkles when it comes down to dudes fighting dudes. With 56 job classes (for God’s sake!) and a total of twenty-four soldiers in your reserve army, it’s very flexible and very open to experimentation. Taken one mission at a time, played like a board game, it’s a heck of a polished package — and some of the battles are pretty tough. That there’s no versus mode, however, is a crippling flaw that cannot be ignored. You’d think that, you know, when the game is so light on story and loose with regards to structure, that a versus mode would just be a given. Oh well. I will continue to raise my job levels in horrible solitude, with nothing human to fling my made men against. There certainly exist many worse things to do on the train.

🤣🤣🤣🤣

~ ZORLUK ~
🔲70 yaşındaki ninem bile oynayabilir
🔲 Kolay
✅Normal
🔲 Zor
🔲 Dark Souls

~ GRAFİKLER ~

🔲 Paint'le yapılmış gibi
🔲 Kötü
🔲 Fena değil
🔲Oyunun çıkış tarihine göre çok iyi
✅ İyi
🔲 Çok iyi
🔲Ustalık eseri

~ İNDİRİMSİZ FİYAT ~

🔲 Bedava
🔲 Hak ettiğinin altında
✅ Mükemmel fiyat
🔲Daha ucuz olabilirdi
🔲 Aşırı pahalı
🔲 Para israfı

~ SİSTEM GEREKSİNİMLERİ ~

🔲 Hesap makinesiyle bile oynayabilirsin
🔲Ortalama
🔲 Yüksek donanım gücü istiyor
✅NASA bilgisayarı

~ OYNANIŞ SÜRESİ ~

🔲Çok kısa (0-3 saat) (Oyunun kendi haritaları.)
🔲 Kısa (3-15 saat)
✅Ortalama uzunlukta (15-50 saat)
🔲 Uzun (50-90 saat)
🔲 Aşırı uzun (90-200 saat)
🔲Bitmiyor (Atolye haritaları ile sonsuza kadar oynanabilir.)

~ EĞLENCELİ Mİ ?~

🔲 Kuru boya izlemeyi tercih ederim
🔲 Zar zor eğleniyorsun
✅Kendini tekrarlıyor
🔲Aşırı eğlenceli
🔲 Hayatında oynayabileceğin en eğlenceli oyun

~ SATIN ALMAYA DEĞER Mİ? ~

🔲 Hayır
✅ İndirim bekle
🔲 Evet

La historia: 💀
El gameplay: 🔥
Alto monje: 👊
Pistolero: 🔫
Yojimbo: 🔥🧊⚡