Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift

June 27,2008 - Square Enix’s most popular setting in its infamous Final Fantasy games is perhaps the world of Ivalice. Ivalice combines the popular and oftentimes overused medieval look with a mystical feel in its characters that inhabit the land as well as the many forests and meadows used as a battlefield. Now, players can journey back to Ivalice in Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift for the DS, the successor to the overly addictive Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

The game puts you in the role of Luso Clemens, a youth that unfortunately has to stay late in detention during the last day of school. Being the curious boy Luso is, he takes a look at a mysterious book at a nearby desk and examines its contents. To his dismay, only the first page in the book has anything written on it. After reading it out loud, he is then sucked into a world unfamiliar to him—the world of Ivalice. Unfortunately, we find Luso surrounded by enemies, but a clan of mercenaries under the leadership of a creature named Cid comes to his aid and with nothing else to do, Luso joins his clan in hope of finding a way back home.

Whenever something significant happens to Luso after each battle he and his clan triumphs, a summary of what happens is written into his storybook journal. Luso later finds out that when the book is filled, the path back home will continue to become clearer. So to keep things simple, his battles with the clan is what will really get him back home.

As for the battles, they are strictly turn-based and take place on an isometric grid plain. Characters have a wealth of options at their disposal depending on their job or class.  There are over 50 jobs in the game, each one having its own particular strengths and weaknesses. For example, archers are useful at a distance attacking with their bows and arrows, while soldiers excel at melee-style combat. As expected, the terrain you’re on and the position of units affect certain advantages in battle, and with how colorful the area is, it’s easy to analyze what can go on in the field of play. Also, since the game is a DS game, you have the option of using the stylus throughout the game. But since you can’t rotate the battlefield in any certain way and because of the fact that there’s just too much pointing to be done, you’ll find yourself favoring the D-Pad, even with the fact that it’s also annoying to use thanks to the isometric visual style combined with the fact that the camera is fixed the entire time.

FFTA2 remains as simple as the rest of the series, but that goes without analyzing its biggest new feature, which is also the biggest new problem. Every mission or battle you sign up for will come equipped with a certain restriction; ala you can’t use Fire-based moves or something of that nature. While that’s ludicrous, there actually are restrictions so weird that they're preposterous. On one of the optional training missions we did, there was a restriction that didn’t allow you to miss when attacking. Something as uncontrollable as chance should not affect whether or not you've done a mission poorly. Luckily, the only consequences for not abiding by the laws of the missions include the inability to revive a character during battle and you won’t get the extra spoils you usually get when following the rules. The only possible way to fail a mission is to die, so that makes things a lot easier. The developers tried to make the laws a double-edge sword by giving you a certain advantage of your choice, such as slightly increasing the speed and power of your clan, but if you fail to follow the rules—you also lose your advantage, so go figure.

While the entire format of tactics games continues to become stale, FFTA2 still has enough content in it to keep tactics fans satisfied while not being too complicated for newcomers. Newcomers to the FF Tactics series should know that there are no random battles in FFTA2, as aside from getting to where you want to go via the real-time world map, running into battles is to your control because you register for every fight at the pubs in the bigger marquee towns spread throughout Ivalice. Some missions cost more and are obviously harder than others, but with 300 missions in the game and only a small portion of them affecting the actual story, there are all sorts of things to do in the game.

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