A cozy, heartfelt timewaster for long car rides when you were a kid. A slow, plodding timewaster for you to quit less than halfway through now that you're an adult.
I have many vaguely positive memories of FFTA because frankly, it's cute, it's cozy, and its story is trying really hard to be something that it doesn't quite know how to be. What is intended as a parable about fantasy and escapism instead comes across as the regurgitated self-righteousness of a child. Marche wants to go home because his life is fine, and there's nothing wrong with that. There IS, however, something MASSIVELY wrong with unilaterally deciding whether or not a world deserves to exist. FFTA is so caught up in preaching about confronting reality that it forgets to confront any reality that disagrees. It clouds its message with so many looming ethical nightmares that the story's intended hero-child comes across as a self-righteousness brat who is, almost without hesitation, willing to delete a whole universe of conscious beings just to get what he wants: for his brother to shut up and happily sit back down in his wheelchair. Yes, this fantasy is an unhealthy one for princeling who spawned it, but there are more characters in this story, and they are inadequately considered.
I could argue that the gameplay is similarly ill considered. Battles are morbidly, HORRIFICALLY slow, and much of the balance is madness. The difficulty of FFTA will hugely depend on how long it took you to find something overpowered and how eager you were to abuse it. I don't usually gives such issues too much weight in games criticism, and I don't much hold ot against FFTA either, but it does speak to a lack of care. I really probably should not be able to cheese my way through half the game with Charm Shot on my gunner. The miniature-pony-sized elephant in the room here is that I don't like FFT combat in the first place. That's a topic for somewhere else.
100% completion of FFTA has been a long-held goal from my childhood days... but there are a lot of reasons why I've never been able to see it through until now.
I have many vaguely positive memories of FFTA because frankly, it's cute, it's cozy, and its story is trying really hard to be something that it doesn't quite know how to be. What is intended as a parable about fantasy and escapism instead comes across as the regurgitated self-righteousness of a child. Marche wants to go home because his life is fine, and there's nothing wrong with that. There IS, however, something MASSIVELY wrong with unilaterally deciding whether or not a world deserves to exist. FFTA is so caught up in preaching about confronting reality that it forgets to confront any reality that disagrees. It clouds its message with so many looming ethical nightmares that the story's intended hero-child comes across as a self-righteousness brat who is, almost without hesitation, willing to delete a whole universe of conscious beings just to get what he wants: for his brother to shut up and happily sit back down in his wheelchair. Yes, this fantasy is an unhealthy one for princeling who spawned it, but there are more characters in this story, and they are inadequately considered.
I could argue that the gameplay is similarly ill considered. Battles are morbidly, HORRIFICALLY slow, and much of the balance is madness. The difficulty of FFTA will hugely depend on how long it took you to find something overpowered and how eager you were to abuse it. I don't usually gives such issues too much weight in games criticism, and I don't much hold ot against FFTA either, but it does speak to a lack of care. I really probably should not be able to cheese my way through half the game with Charm Shot on my gunner. The miniature-pony-sized elephant in the room here is that I don't like FFT combat in the first place. That's a topic for somewhere else.
100% completion of FFTA has been a long-held goal from my childhood days... but there are a lot of reasons why I've never been able to see it through until now.