86.9 hours played
Written 14 days ago
Yes, but ONLY IF some things are fixed. If you don't like what you see below, don't buy this game. Watch a story video on YouTube and save your money.
1. The Steam / PC version has massive random cutouts of the Xbox controller. For no reason, at any time, it will stop taking your input. This game must put the controller as the HIGHEST PRIORITY, as a mistake in input could cost you one of your soldier's lives, and lose the game for you.
2. A confirmation dialog MUST come up before you can attack your own soldiers. See #1. The only time you should be attacking your soldiers is when they're charmed and you have no cleric to cast Ease on them.
3. Ease should cure ALL OF THE NEGATIVE CONDITIONS AT ONCE. It currently ONLY cures one condition, it doesn't ask you which one, and it usually chooses the least lethal condition to cure (like weakness to lightning, over the condition that causes stumbling [attacks automatically miss] or charm).
4. The party can carry 1000 of each item, but each character can only carry >> 4 << in combat. This makes the time between combats an inventory nightmare.
5. Likewise, you can only carry 4 spells. And 4 skills.
6. Even as far as Chapter 3, you cannot buy MP refill items, nor craft MP refill items unless you find Magic Leaf items on the battlefield. This makes conserving MP refill items mandatory for boss battles. Again, not fun.
I like Final Fantasy Tactics. Story-wise, this game follows the story arc of FFT almost beat for beat, and I like that. But it seems that Square took the *** worst *** parts of FFT, and added more bad things, and came up with this game. FFT was smooth, and inventory management was virtually non-existent - you bought everything you need in the party inventory, you equip your people, and in combat, inventory is shared. This game is radically different.
As I said above, you only get 4 inventory slots per character, and you can have 100 characters (but only 12 per battle at most). A shared inventory would have done away with that mess and made the game fun.
You can only select between 10 human characters when hiring a new characters - if you want non-humans, you have to convince them to join you, which generally has a base 30% chance of success, even if you drop them to near 0 HP (don't use pincer attack anywhere near a character you're trying to convince - you'll kill them every time...and you don't know just how hard it is to convince a rare flying cleric). Worse, when you hire a character, you have to change their class immediately to get the class that's not one of the original 10 (Witch / Warlock, Dragoon, etc). It's not intuitive, and it's not fun.
There are no quality of life improvements, such as going into the shop and have the shopkeeper equip your new character with the best gear possible, based on the class and weapon skill you chose (there are a lot of them, and even in chapter 3, you haven't unlocked all of them, like spellbooks for Witches, which makes no sense at all).
Then there's the maximum level cap...FFS, this concept is good for developers, but the worst thing for players. Especially when the gameplay is not balanced properly even after you hit the level cap with all your characters. In order to get out of Chapter One, you need to max all of your characters to the current level cap, and then try not to die while taking out the leader in a really hard battle, who takes little damage from your underpowered characters.
If you really, REALLY want to play a FFT clone, play Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. It's fairly well-balanced, and doesn't have too many bugs. It scratches the FFT itch very well. If you MUST play this game, get on GameFAQs and read the FAQ as you play. This game is merciless if you don't pay attention, or if you choose the wrong skills, go in without enough items, or the input cuts out, you end up killing one of your character by using a weapon skill instead of a healing item, and your whole mission implodes because you're down a fighter you absolutely needed to win. Also, before starting a battle, SCOUT THE BATTLE, so you know what to expect. Fighting 4 beasts without a dragoon with the beast killer skills (2 of them, one for you and one for everyone around you) is asking for death, no matter how good your fighters are - remember the level cap.
There is a crafting glitch that allows you to make infinite money in Chapter 3 crafting blowguns. But honestly, even after you've crafted everything you need, the other problems keep kicking you in the head. After some battles in Chapter 3, a new section of the random battle POI opens up...but the last section of it sees you fighting your 12 characters against *** 18 enemies ***. Even with my best lineup, I almost lost because they have charmers on their side, and the Ease problem forces you to attack your own characters to get rid of the charm effect, which is fewer hits on your opponents.
It's a headache. I'll probably finish the game, because I want to see how it ends. I doubt if I'll ever play it again afterwards, not without fundamental changes like I listed above. As always, YMMV, but if you buy it, it's on you. Don't say you weren't warned.
