Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsFinal Fantasy Tactics In Spirit, In Execution Could Be Better.
Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2022
UPDATE: I have now played over 8 hours…yeah…this game could have been exactly what we all wanted. However, they went all in on the story line. They flip-flop back and forth between the map unnecessarily. There’s WAAAY too much filler and cutscenes. I want to play the game…it’s like these jokers wanted to write a book or something… The graphics, land, menus, battles, feel are all fantastic. Whoever decided to do this to such a promising platform needs to be smacked, and hard.
I don’t get much time to play games, and when I do I don’t want to wait hours for updates which is why I chose the Switch. I also don’t want to watch a movie…if someone who has the power to change this ever reads this I am begging you… Stop it with the cutscenes and other long drawn out garbage it’s really bad. I stick with my original rating.
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Maybe it’s because I am getting older I don’t know…I’ve only played a few hours so take what I say here with a grain of salt.
Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) was/is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played. It was superb…other than not having a remake or remaster for the Switch there’s nothing I’d change except expanding the story, and jobs. Come on Nintendo/Square…give us the juice! Quit making us wait.
Anyway, this game is the closest I’ve seen to it so I’ll talk about the gameplay, story, and other aspects in comparison to FFT. On a 1 to 10 scale, 1 being nothing like FFT and 10 being exactly like it.
Gameplay: 7/10
Good: The visuals are awesome, especially the landscapes and backgrounds. Camera movement is good, and moving around the map is good. It moves too fast for me. I want to see the attack animations, but that may be a setting I can change. (UPDATE: There is a setting.)
Bad: Characters have weird dark halo around them, it’s annoying, there could have been more visual detail to the characters, seemingly no modifiers like in FFT in which thing like zodiac sign/day/sex/elemental type all impact attack/defense, which was a really important and fun thing to have.
Story: 2/10
Good: None. The story is seemingly your standard medieval regurgitation…young semi-royal boy comes into manhood during a stressful time and his love interest is there to help him…blech…
Bad: Again maybe it’s the old man coming out in me…but it seems these days long drawn out stories with tons of characters and cutscenes are showing up in a lot of games…game developers…STOP IT. I want to play a game…not watch a movie while I get to play between lots of unnecessary dialog. Set the story up and be done…let me play the darn game.
Let’s outline why I think the story/writing is ridiculous. The names of the people/towns are terrible…weird concatenations of seemingly unrelated things. It’s all a bit cringy and well over done. Like, ok…make up a fantasy world, but don’t pull aspects from every bad dialogue in the genre and toss em in. What the heck is Wolffort? Or Aesfrost…come on. At least Ivalice and Hokuten actually sound like real names.
Don’t mix English, Scottish, Irish, and other European dialogues…everyone is from a general area in a fantasy land. They should just speak normally. They don’t all need to speak like they’re a bad actor in a college rendition of some Shakespeare play, all from different backgrounds and dialects and crap.
Tactics doesn’t mean I need to know about all of the inner workings of the political background of the game…it means I get to choose how the fight takes place. If the ultimate bad guy is a space alien dragon demon, or just an evil kings hand…cool…do I need to know about the 3rd cousin of a lord’s political motivation to send his guard to fight? No.
I’ve played video games my entire life…let me turn off tutorials completely instead of skipping each time. I’m sure I can figure out how to play.
Menu navigation is easy and intuitive.
Overall so far…I give this a 6/10.
