I bought this game so long ago, I've completely forgotten when it was that I had started playing. I think it was just over a month before PAX08 (end of August 2008). But anyway, 177 hours, 40 minutes and 1 second after starting it, I finally completed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift. Another way of looking at is that I spent 7 days, 9 hours, 36 minutes and 1 second playing this game. The previous record was about 130 hours to complete Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and now coming in 3rd place is Final Fantasy XII which took me about 122 hours. So why did this game take me so long to complete? What are my thoughts about the game after having invested so much of my time into it. And why was this the second most frustrating game that I've completed (The top award goes to Goldeneye 007 just because of the level "Aztec" on 007 Agent Mode: The Kid can back me up on this).
Beware, Thar Be Spoilers Ahead. Ye've Been Bloody Damn Warned.
Not initially knowing the differences between Normal and Hard Mode, I thought I would try out Hard Mode and if it was too difficult to start out with, I would switch over to the Normal Mode. Upon selecting Hard Mode, I was greeted with the following statement from the game, "Hard mod is designed for players seeking a greater challenge. Enemies deal more damage and battles are more difficult on Hard mode. The story and quests are identical to Normal mode." Personally, I didn't think the game was overly difficult. Not any harder that the first Final Fantasy Tactics and I can only imagine how much easier the game is on Normal Mode. In short, I was looking for a challenge.
Unlike the first Final Fantasy Tactics Advance game on the GBA, the character Luso in FFTA2 is actually transported to the world of Ivalice vs. being transported to a dream realm created in the likeness of Ivalice. The general main story of the game then revolves around Luso's attempt to fill the pages of the Grand Grimoire with his adventures in order for him to return to his own world. As is the case with FFTA, there're a shit load of side missions (280 to be exact) along with the 20 required missions to complete the game. This is where my first beef with the game comes in.
The Main Story? It sucks. Hypothetically speaking, you could complete the game only having passed these 20 missions, raising levels by fighting wandering monsters (although that would take a very long time......) and have almost no coherency for what's going on in the storyline of the game. For example: There're a whole series of side quests dealing with a group called Carm Mercantile who later turn out to be front for a lager organization called Khamja, an assassins guild within the Jylland region of the world of Ivalice. Early on in the game, Carm Mercantile appear to be an organization that are out to help endangered creatures and protecting them from poachers. Only later is the connection revealed, again, in a side quest.
Then there's another whole side quest dealing with an invading guild called Duelhorn. This storyline starts out with rumors of a foreign guild looking into other clans in the region followed by the guild trying to take over clans and trying to stake a claim in this region. Eventually the Khamja organization starts to take notice of Duelhorn and there turns out to be some contention between the two organizations. There are 11 missions to this part of the story, which I found to be much more intriguing than the main story.
Yet another very involving and awesome side story revolves around this Paladin who is being haunted/chased by a relentless zombie. Again, I felt that this story was better constructed than the main story line.
Then!, one of the main characters in your clan, Adelle starts off as being a kind of annoying girl who tags along / steals from you. Later, it turns out she's apparently part of a near immortal race that only go by "Gifted Ones." The game even hints that she's significantly older and that her race don't age past a certain point. Adelle then has a bunch of missions directed towards her and her self discovery of who she is and how to wield her power, which saved my ass in the final battle. (The "Elpe" ability which sacrifices yourself to raise and fully heal your entire party). It was a pretty intriguing story that again, was not required to complete the game.
One last side mission, that was only a single event came across, to me anyway, as fairly mature compared to the rest of the games themes. There was a notice posted at a pub, which is where you find out about missions and accept them, that read: "I love someone whom I can never have. The very thought haunts me each moment I draw breath. It is more than I can bear. And so I wish to quit this mortal life. There is a substance known as zombie powder which may grant me the relief I so desperately seek. Please, find this and bring it to me. End my suffering. ~Gleifin. Now I'm starting to wonder if this Gleifin person was the Paladin character previously mentioned. I'm not sure if this quest had multiple endings or if you just failed if you didn't give the zombie powder to Gleifin. The tone though, compared to other quest posts like "It's nearly my mother's birthday, and I want to give her some flowers as a gift, kupo. I need someone to gather some pretty pink flowers for the bouquet. Genne, Devoted Son." It's just a complete 180.
Alright, enough with the pros/cons of the storyline. The next thing that really bothered me was the accuracy rating during battles. Yes, I know that the game warned me that battles would be more difficult on the "Hard Mode," of which I did fully expect. What bothered me was the frequency I would miss with an 80% accuracy rating or higher. I do not have any statistics to back me up and yes I did try for a while to chart each of my battles along with the accuracy rating for each attack that was put forth by both sides but in the end, it became too difficult; especially with the casting of "Accuracy Up/Down" and that the accuracy would be different depending on what side of the body the character was attacking. Conklederp can attest to the number of times I was quietly playing while she was doing homework and I suddenly let out with a "Ah, that's bull fucking shit!!/ Seriously !? Fuck! / Motherfucker!!!" or some variation thereof. It was all because I had selected an enemy to attack, had maybe 75% to hit and missed. Okay, that's understandable. Next character goes to attack this stealthy bastard, this time, 90% because I was attacking from the back. Miss! I don't remember which mission I was on, but it was located in The Galerria Deep and I had to take out a thief who your character had helped out earlier in the game. This time, only 1/3 of the attacks actually hit him even though I had over 70% with nearly every attack. If the character is going to be hard to hit, then it should be reflected in the % To Hit, not in some abstract algorithm within the game that it's not telling you about just because the character is akin to miniboss and because I was playing it on Hard Mode. Another similar story was when I was about to kill a boss character, I had 99% accuracy, it was the kill shot from behind and I missed. The boss's move was next, so naturally they healed themselves, moved away and forced the battle to take another 5 minutes. Blarg!! Shisno!!
With the first FFTA, I talked to a couple people and read a number of complaints online that the Laws in the game were too cumbersome and annoying, especially as the game progressed. By the end of that game there were three laws to consider before each battle. Apparently the Laws system in FFTA2 was an improvement. I aim to disagree. The Laws in FFTA were predictable in that if you knew where you were going to be in a battle, you could look ahead to plan what Laws would be in effect that day so you could work around them without penalty. In FFTA2, the only way to find out about the Law was if you had done that mission/battle before. Often times, the Law would intentionally make the battle more difficult. Such as, you're going into a battle with a bunch of Flans/Jellies and the law is "No Non-Elemental Attacks." So, all your attacks have to have an elemental basis such as casting Fire or having a weapon imbued with Ice. However, the White Pudding creature could only be harmed by non-elemental attacks such as Holy or Dark. So basically you're forced to break the Law if you want to succeed in this battle.
Additionally, some of the Laws were rather ridiculous. The one that really annoyed the piss out of me was "No Knockbacks." So with this restriction, it's against the Law to attack someone and knock them back one square. There are only a couple specific attacks that knockback characters such as "Knockback" and "Blink Counter." If you happen to perform a Critical Attack with an algorithm that I'm not familiar with, you'll knock your enemy back one square. Now how the hell is that supposed to be regulated? The only thing I came up with to comply with the law was to place a character behind the enemy I was going to attack, then with another character, attack my enemy so that just in case I did perform a critical attack, they weren't knocked back. Fucking_annoying. Granted the penalty for breaking a law isn't too strict in that you loose whatever benefit you chose at the beginning of the battle and you loose the ability to resurrect slain allies. Yes, I was one of those anal people who, early on in playing, would reset the game if I ended up breaking a law because I thought that I would miss out on some form of loot that I would need later or would only be offered once in the game.
I'm still kind of on the fence about the whole Auctions thing in this game. I didn't like that clans would basically buy via simultaneous eBay-type bidding the rights to have control over a territory. I liked how in FFTA that you had to fight over territories and that at random times your territories would be threatened and if you didn't address that threat, then it would be taken over. By the middle of the FFTA2, after you've visited all of the areas and "won" them in auctions, you start bidding on rare equipment and items which you could pretty much assure that you will win everything. I did like though that early on, rival clans would be upset if you won too often and would attack you in retaliation.
Now onto other things that I liked. I'm guessing that because Square Enix was using a very similar engine from FFTA that additional races needed to be introduced to keep the game from becoming stale, which I was fine with. The two changes were that Seeq's were brought over from the Final Fantasy XII Ivalice world and Gria's were the brand new race. Seeqs were basically a more tank type of Bangaa, which was fine with me. I ended up only having 1 in my clan as I wasn't able to recruit one until late in the game. I really like the Gria's as they had the ability to fly (and who wouldn't like that?) and had some pretty cool and devastating attacks. That pretty much sums up my feelings on the Gria: they could fly and had cool attacks.
There were some other new jobs for the established Bangaas and Humes I also really liked. My favorite of the two were probably the Master Monk and Cannoneer for the Bangaas. Master Monk was like a more kick ass version of the White Monk job which was already pretty awesome and a required job class for all the Bangaa in my clan. For the Humes it was the Parivir and when combined with the Ninja's Duel Wield ability, they did some major damage.
Hmmmm, I also liked the music for the most part. Nothing too original as it seemed that a lot of it was pulled or in the style from FFTA and FF XII, which didn't bother me. It's more good atmospheric and background music from Hitoshi Sakimoto.
By all appearances, you could conclude that with all of the things that I disliked about this game, that I would have hated it. Why then would I invest 177 hours playing this game? Well, all that I can say is that the side quests, as previously mentioned, were a lot of fun and were emotionally stimulating. As it happens with a lot of Final Fantasy games, I get attached to the characters, especially the grunts who may not be a main character. It was a very enjoyable game for the most part, even though the main storyline wasn't very interesting and pretty weak, but with all of the side quests, they really helped to flesh out the world. It probably would not have taken me this long to complete the game if I was going straight from beginning to end. Instead, I went from beginning, finished 277 missions to the end of the game.
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift a fun game and I'd recommend it, unless you're going to be playing it around your conservative grandparents or in churches.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
It Will Eat Up Your Life
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