System Played: Nintendo DS
Year Released: 2007
Year Reviewed: 2018
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift is a pretty straight sequel to the GBA’s Tactics Advance, retaining the visuals, gameplay and lack of much story, but somehow even more so...
Being honest, the Tactics genre is one I’m not even sure I enjoy. The pace is painfully slow, the difficulty is rarely well balanced, and one round can take hours. I got the game secondhand, and the save file on there from the previous owner, Karl, had him clocked in at 129 hours… Shit! That’s 100 hours more than I want to give this or any game!
Luso is a school kid given detention and tasked to clean the library. There, he finds a book which transports him to Ivalice, like in the last game. It’s not as much of a shock to the system as you might imagine apparently. He promptly joins up with a clan, and gets on about the business of familiar Tactics-game turn-based grid battling.
It’s all incredibly light hearted and even further away from what made the story in the original Final Fantasy Tactics so compelling. There just plain isn’t a story in A2.
Gameplay-wise, you’re on familiar ground if you’ve played anything similar. Grimoire of the Rift doesn’t do anything to change the basics of how the game is set out, or how the battles work.
You move across points on a map. Go to towns, where you take on missions and buy gear. Then go to the right point on the map and usually fight some enemies. Slowly. You manage a clan of characters, each with a job assigned which determines the kind of abilities they have in battle.
Tactics Advance introduced the mechanic of Judges who preside over battles, stipulating restrictions on certain actions, I guess in an attempt to make the gameplay more challenging or engaging…? In fact all this ever did was annoy me, so I wasn't enthused to see them back for A2.
Breaking the law here isn’t the end of the match, but you do lose the ability to revive allies, and any bonus items at the end, assuming you do go on to win.
I found that breaking the law rarely made the difference between winning or losing a round, but still felt like unnecessary bullshit, with laws like not being able to knock enemies back a tile, or no evading ...even though these things happen at random with no input form you anyway.
Another shitter is that laws (and their consequences) just plain don’t apply to enemies, just your clan. In a battle with the stipulation that you can’t use magic or target more than one character at a time? You can bet your opponent still will. How is that fair?
Other BS examples, of which there are many, include ‘don’t do more than 50 damage’, ‘don’t attack anyone a lower level than you’ (well how are you going to fucking win then?!), ‘take exactly 3 steps every turn’... oh, just fuck off and let me play the game why don’t you?!
At the start of each battle, you get to select a ‘Clan Privilege’, basically a perk which should help you out a bit during the fight (a bit more Strength, Auto regen, there are a few).
Clan Trials are like special challenge rounds you do to win new Privileges. Trying to explain how they work would be confusing. The game does a poor job too, and the implementation of these in general isn’t good. You can try any you want, even though you’ve no chance early on of winning most, and it isn’t obvious which Privilege you’ll earn from doing any… the less said about these, the better.
Loot (that is, non-equippable junk) is won in battle, which you trade in at shops for access to better weapons and equipment. Sort of like typical crafting, each piece of equipment is made up of 3 bits. Stick them together and then the item becomes available to buy. It starts to feel like a bit of a laborious and unnecessary process after a while.
Like in the first game (and FFIX), equipment items are imbued with abilities specific to different jobs. Equipping them allows you to use that ability, and over time you learn it outright. Then you switch it out for something else to learn the next one.
New jobs become available for completing specific missions. You then have to learn so many abilities from other jobs to enable a character to do that job.
If you can get excited about menus and statistics, Grimoire of the Rift might be for you.
You might find it to be a slow but somewhat rewarding grind. Or you might not. The ideal candidate to enjoy the game is someone with 200 hours to spare time, and nothing better to do with it. Maybe you just broke a leg in several places? You’ll be ideally suited.
Mission variety isn’t the games strong suite either.
The majority of objectives just come down to battling a group of enemies, with faux-variety in the form of some where you have to search tiles around the map for a number of items, or protect an NPC, ...but at the same time, you’re still just battling a group of enemies anyway.
Why can’t the objective be to collect the items OR defeat all the enemies? Because you end up having to fight them all either way, and then have to spend another 10 minutes laboriously moving your characters individually, turn-by-turn, across an empty map, collecting shit. It’s a waste of time! You’ve won already!
Others pointless missions are the many fetch quests where all you do is go to some location and watch a cutscene of you handing an item over to someone. Then there are missions where you need to guess the right job type of a character to send on a dispatch mission from some overly cryptic (unintelligible) clue, or just fail. This is pointless padding in a game which already doesn’t respect your time.
There are 400 missions in all, but even Karl couldn’t stick it for that long, and I sure as shit didn’t intend to!
By 30 hours, I’d generally had enough of the slow-paced repetition.
Up to this point, A2 had certainly been one of the easier ‘Tactics’ games I’d played, rarely seeing a Game Over screen. Enemy AI is pretty dumb most of the time, casting Silence spells on your characters which don’t have any spells and the like. So playing doesn’t require much effort, and certainly no “tactics” on your behalf other than just give all your characters the Air Render ability so that they can do ranged attacks, and just win all the time (albeit slowly).
So I decided I was just going to focus on the main story missions and get it over with, and by hour 40 I’d made it to the penultimate fight. But apparently I hadn’t suffered enough.
Against an enemy who can incapacitate your entire team, whilst buffing hers, in a single move, and can also refill her entire life in one go… Air Render all of sudden couldn’t cut it anymore. So it looked like another dozen hours of slow grind would be needed, when really, I’d had enough already. It’s not like I was expecting any kind of satisfying conclusion. There isn’t a story!
I had 53 hours on the clock in the end when I finally did beat the last mission (ignoring all the side quests), 126 quests completed, and a bad taste in my mouth for it.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift can be satisfying at times but feels like a real slog for too much of it. I suppose I did enjoy some of it, but the time commitment was incredibly frustrating. And there’s no story to speak of. And the laws are annoying. But other than that… yeah
6/10
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