Grade: C-
Pros
Great Story, Music, & FMVs
Cons
Tedious Gameplay
Introduction
This is my second time playing Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT). The first time I played it was back in the late 90s, sometime after I finished Final Fantasy VII. I remember enjoying the game, so when I heard it was being released for the PSP, I anticipated it.
This review is somewhat incomplete. I didn?t finish the game. I stopped playing soon after the start of the last chapter, about 60% complete. However, I?ve played for over 40 hours. It is a long game indeed; you?ll be sure to get your money?s worth. However, I stopped playing because the fighting became tedious and got in the way of the more entertaining details of the game.
I did finish the game as a kid though. This may reveal the reason as to why I stopped playing the game. As a kid, I didn?t have the responsibilities I do today and had all the time I wanted to play this game. This caused my tolerance for this game to be much higher than it is today. As a college student, I don?t have all the time in the world to spend on a tedious game. Therefore, while the game may be a masterpiece to someone with more time, I don?t have the time to waste on such practices.
This PSP version, carrying the new subtitle, ?The War of the Lions,? is a simple port from the original PSOne with some added content. New content includes: FMVs, characters, jobs, missions, multiplayer. I haven?t tried the multiplayer and I don?t have the older version of the game to know which characters, jobs, and missions are new.
Booklet
The booklet is 53, full color pages up to the warranty. It is full of useful information that you will need to read if you?re new to the game. However, it actually refers you to the in-game help for more information about advance techniques. The in-game help is contains much of the information in the book as well as a lot of extras and tutorials. You may be looking at these for a while before playing well.
Story
This is a good amount of story that tells you about the world of Ivalice and the characters therein. It is told via: Full-Motion Video (FMV), lengthy dialogue between characters, and rumors at the tavern.
This port has the addition of FMVs to add more detail and emotion to the story. They have a sketchy, pastel-ish, Anime style, fitting the artistic theme of the package. Although, a mostly satisfying experience, some of them had occasional stuttering issues.
I initially found it difficult to follow the story. The writing tries to be Old English. Whether it succeeds or not ? I don?t know. I just know that it makes it more difficult to understand. They have words like ?mayhap,? which seems to translate to ?maybe.? Just like the language, the names try to be old and peculiar. This led to confusion because I couldn?t keep track of who is who since they all had equally strange names.
Brush away the hardships and you still get and enthralling story of political greed and power feeding, unmercifully, on the lives of lower class men.
Gameplay
This game is a strategy RPG, meaning: you use strategy to win, while gaining points to level up. All you do in this game is move from one point to another, literally, on a world map, read some dialog and fight. But, unless you can win the fight, you may be doing more moving and fighting than actual dialog. This wouldn?t be such a bad thing if the fighting was interesting, but it isn?t. It is slow and tedious.
A fight can last from about 10 minutes to over 30 minutes, depending on the difficulty they throw at you. The difficulty doesn?t seem to evolve at a natural pace. You may fight one fight that?s easy, but another may be near impossible. Impossible fights may bring to the table one-hit kills to your party. I had this one battle that killed my entire party with one magic spell. I?ve fought two assassins that killed two out of my four party members with one hit. You go to revive them with your White Magician. The spell misses. Then she dies. One member left. I finish these battles barely alive.
Sometimes it can get really annoying to go anywhere on the world map. Going from one point to the next may get you into many fights. It could be over an hour before you get the next point. And all you wanted was a cheeseburger.
The worst is when you?re having a tough time beating a fight and you have to continuously tap the ?X? button for minutes, skipping any story, before you get to the fight. Having to do this after multiple losses is very annoying.
A battle can last too long. I even developed a habit of pressing the X button in hopes that the game would move faster, but it doesn?t. It isn?t caused by any one thing, but many small things, each take their few seconds to accomplish. Executing a move is almost always accompanied with slow-down. The reason is because most the time, the game loads the animation from the disc. There is also lots of information being shown when enemies act that also slows down the game. There is no need for it to be shown. Many spells put on to big, elaborate show to accomplish a small feat. It becomes frustrating when the show results in a miss. When you want to do a move that takes a certain amount of turns before executing, you might want to check the turn list to see if your target moves before you strike. Unfortunately, the list only shows names. To find out your target?s name, you have to cancel all your menus which may take a few seconds, then move the cursor, box by box, all the way to where he stands, select him, then cancel and return. Doing this many times during a single battle gets really tedious.
The camera is limited to a small amount of options in where you can move it and when you can move it. Sometimes, it?s hard to see all the action that goes on, which may be important to your strategy. Sometimes because of obstacles, such as rocks or tall trees, it becomes annoying to move characters.
A lot of spells is annoying to use because sometimes they have chance attached to them. And it seems that many times, it?s not your strategy that was wrong, but by chance, your desperate move to revive your most powerful fighter missed. I don?t know how someone misses a dead person. ?Oops, unexpected twitch. Sorry.? This causes you to play the entire battle over. And you know what sucks even more, not only did you miss, but you don?t even get any experience points and you lose your MP on top of that. That is very crippling, especially if you wasted the last of your MP on that spell.
The game has a very interesting way of telling you that you have to level up. In one part of the game I was hitting people by 170hp. Then after one hour, the story characters were now at higher levels and I was only able to hit them by less than half of that. Why does it have to spring this on me, when I just did a bunch of leveling up not too long ago and I was starting to feel comfortable with the difficulty. I?m tired of leveling up. I want to continue more of the story.
It was initially fun to master a job. You get to try out new moves and become more powerful. But later on it starts to take too long, even with a special ability that allows you to double the Job Points (JP) you earn. It could take hours with the slow pace of battle. It?s too big of a break in the story. The fighting is more fun when it is to continue the story. But the difficulty of that will keep you behind leveling up.
Some of the jobs seem useless too. Why do you need 20 jobs when you?ll only be using five people in a fight at a time? Sure each person can use abilities from two jobs at a time, but the total is still only 10. Instead of creating so many classes, maybe the development team should have created more meaningful classes. Trying to master them all would take a very long time.
Graphics
The graphics are all in the battles. The battlefield graphics are 3D consistent with the PSOne. The characters on the battlefield are sprites. The sprites are animated very nicely. They rotate and move in an almost 3D appearance. Generally, the animation isn?t amazingly fluid, but is surprisingly detailed. Then there are the special effects such as magic or summons. These effects, except for the summons themselves, are created using 3D graphics, some of which are impressive, but mostly, they are too elaborate and make the game more tedious than it needs to be.
Sound
The musical score to the game is one of the greatest I?ve heard. It never gets old. Most of the sounds in the game are perfect except for some environmental sound effects. During a battle: rain, howling winds, and waterfalls all sound ridiculously lousy to be paired with such a magnificent score.
Conclusion
I played over 40 hours of the game and I didn?t finish it. I wasn?t even able to master half the jobs with my main character and that?s with the ability to double JP earned. It sounds like the game could last me for a while longer, but I feel that most of the time will be spent leveling up and fighting near impossible fights. Although, tailored with a great story, the gameplay isn?t good enough for me to see it through, which is a shame for a game with so much potential.
Pros
Great Story, Music, & FMVs
Cons
Tedious Gameplay
Introduction
This is my second time playing Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT). The first time I played it was back in the late 90s, sometime after I finished Final Fantasy VII. I remember enjoying the game, so when I heard it was being released for the PSP, I anticipated it.
This review is somewhat incomplete. I didn?t finish the game. I stopped playing soon after the start of the last chapter, about 60% complete. However, I?ve played for over 40 hours. It is a long game indeed; you?ll be sure to get your money?s worth. However, I stopped playing because the fighting became tedious and got in the way of the more entertaining details of the game.
I did finish the game as a kid though. This may reveal the reason as to why I stopped playing the game. As a kid, I didn?t have the responsibilities I do today and had all the time I wanted to play this game. This caused my tolerance for this game to be much higher than it is today. As a college student, I don?t have all the time in the world to spend on a tedious game. Therefore, while the game may be a masterpiece to someone with more time, I don?t have the time to waste on such practices.
This PSP version, carrying the new subtitle, ?The War of the Lions,? is a simple port from the original PSOne with some added content. New content includes: FMVs, characters, jobs, missions, multiplayer. I haven?t tried the multiplayer and I don?t have the older version of the game to know which characters, jobs, and missions are new.
Booklet
The booklet is 53, full color pages up to the warranty. It is full of useful information that you will need to read if you?re new to the game. However, it actually refers you to the in-game help for more information about advance techniques. The in-game help is contains much of the information in the book as well as a lot of extras and tutorials. You may be looking at these for a while before playing well.
Story
This is a good amount of story that tells you about the world of Ivalice and the characters therein. It is told via: Full-Motion Video (FMV), lengthy dialogue between characters, and rumors at the tavern.
This port has the addition of FMVs to add more detail and emotion to the story. They have a sketchy, pastel-ish, Anime style, fitting the artistic theme of the package. Although, a mostly satisfying experience, some of them had occasional stuttering issues.
I initially found it difficult to follow the story. The writing tries to be Old English. Whether it succeeds or not ? I don?t know. I just know that it makes it more difficult to understand. They have words like ?mayhap,? which seems to translate to ?maybe.? Just like the language, the names try to be old and peculiar. This led to confusion because I couldn?t keep track of who is who since they all had equally strange names.
Brush away the hardships and you still get and enthralling story of political greed and power feeding, unmercifully, on the lives of lower class men.
Gameplay
This game is a strategy RPG, meaning: you use strategy to win, while gaining points to level up. All you do in this game is move from one point to another, literally, on a world map, read some dialog and fight. But, unless you can win the fight, you may be doing more moving and fighting than actual dialog. This wouldn?t be such a bad thing if the fighting was interesting, but it isn?t. It is slow and tedious.
A fight can last from about 10 minutes to over 30 minutes, depending on the difficulty they throw at you. The difficulty doesn?t seem to evolve at a natural pace. You may fight one fight that?s easy, but another may be near impossible. Impossible fights may bring to the table one-hit kills to your party. I had this one battle that killed my entire party with one magic spell. I?ve fought two assassins that killed two out of my four party members with one hit. You go to revive them with your White Magician. The spell misses. Then she dies. One member left. I finish these battles barely alive.
Sometimes it can get really annoying to go anywhere on the world map. Going from one point to the next may get you into many fights. It could be over an hour before you get the next point. And all you wanted was a cheeseburger.
The worst is when you?re having a tough time beating a fight and you have to continuously tap the ?X? button for minutes, skipping any story, before you get to the fight. Having to do this after multiple losses is very annoying.
A battle can last too long. I even developed a habit of pressing the X button in hopes that the game would move faster, but it doesn?t. It isn?t caused by any one thing, but many small things, each take their few seconds to accomplish. Executing a move is almost always accompanied with slow-down. The reason is because most the time, the game loads the animation from the disc. There is also lots of information being shown when enemies act that also slows down the game. There is no need for it to be shown. Many spells put on to big, elaborate show to accomplish a small feat. It becomes frustrating when the show results in a miss. When you want to do a move that takes a certain amount of turns before executing, you might want to check the turn list to see if your target moves before you strike. Unfortunately, the list only shows names. To find out your target?s name, you have to cancel all your menus which may take a few seconds, then move the cursor, box by box, all the way to where he stands, select him, then cancel and return. Doing this many times during a single battle gets really tedious.
The camera is limited to a small amount of options in where you can move it and when you can move it. Sometimes, it?s hard to see all the action that goes on, which may be important to your strategy. Sometimes because of obstacles, such as rocks or tall trees, it becomes annoying to move characters.
A lot of spells is annoying to use because sometimes they have chance attached to them. And it seems that many times, it?s not your strategy that was wrong, but by chance, your desperate move to revive your most powerful fighter missed. I don?t know how someone misses a dead person. ?Oops, unexpected twitch. Sorry.? This causes you to play the entire battle over. And you know what sucks even more, not only did you miss, but you don?t even get any experience points and you lose your MP on top of that. That is very crippling, especially if you wasted the last of your MP on that spell.
The game has a very interesting way of telling you that you have to level up. In one part of the game I was hitting people by 170hp. Then after one hour, the story characters were now at higher levels and I was only able to hit them by less than half of that. Why does it have to spring this on me, when I just did a bunch of leveling up not too long ago and I was starting to feel comfortable with the difficulty. I?m tired of leveling up. I want to continue more of the story.
It was initially fun to master a job. You get to try out new moves and become more powerful. But later on it starts to take too long, even with a special ability that allows you to double the Job Points (JP) you earn. It could take hours with the slow pace of battle. It?s too big of a break in the story. The fighting is more fun when it is to continue the story. But the difficulty of that will keep you behind leveling up.
Some of the jobs seem useless too. Why do you need 20 jobs when you?ll only be using five people in a fight at a time? Sure each person can use abilities from two jobs at a time, but the total is still only 10. Instead of creating so many classes, maybe the development team should have created more meaningful classes. Trying to master them all would take a very long time.
Graphics
The graphics are all in the battles. The battlefield graphics are 3D consistent with the PSOne. The characters on the battlefield are sprites. The sprites are animated very nicely. They rotate and move in an almost 3D appearance. Generally, the animation isn?t amazingly fluid, but is surprisingly detailed. Then there are the special effects such as magic or summons. These effects, except for the summons themselves, are created using 3D graphics, some of which are impressive, but mostly, they are too elaborate and make the game more tedious than it needs to be.
Sound
The musical score to the game is one of the greatest I?ve heard. It never gets old. Most of the sounds in the game are perfect except for some environmental sound effects. During a battle: rain, howling winds, and waterfalls all sound ridiculously lousy to be paired with such a magnificent score.
Conclusion
I played over 40 hours of the game and I didn?t finish it. I wasn?t even able to master half the jobs with my main character and that?s with the ability to double JP earned. It sounds like the game could last me for a while longer, but I feel that most of the time will be spent leveling up and fighting near impossible fights. Although, tailored with a great story, the gameplay isn?t good enough for me to see it through, which is a shame for a game with so much potential.
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