You know, if you've read the articles here in the Mag, you might have run across the one where SK and I talk about horrible game ideas (top 10, actually). And the law system in Final Fantasy Tactic Advanced took number 1.

If you haven't read it yet, here's point of relivance:



Well, when I heard that the DS was getting a sequel... I immediately told squenix to go f*ck themselves. Of course they didn't hear me, but whatever. We'll a few people online I speak with said they've played it and made some changes. At first I was all, "Hell no. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

But after a good deal of discussion, I was assured that the laws don't take near as much focus in the game. In fact, if you break the laws, the judge just leaves. And the only thing you suffer is not being able to revive characters if their HP hits 0 (as well as not getting an after battle bonus, but who cares). Well... it took the plunge and gave the tactics series another shot. I LOVED Final Fantasy tactics, and I love the story behind Ivalice. There's not one reason for me not to enjoy this turned into a series.

Oh how I was wrong...

I got the the point where you can take Clan title trails... or whatever it is that gives you better clan stats. You got to chose the difficulty, and your reward for harder difficulty was better stats. I was going for negotiation... decrease in shop prices? Yes please!

Anyway, the rules were simple... Kill so many enemies in so many turns without targeting any far away enemies (IE they had to be directly a space beside you if they took damage).

Cool... no problem. I didn't go with the hardest one (which was like kill 5 enemies in 3 turns), because I just didn't really care for the frustration of it. Little did I know I was getting frustration wether I liked it or not.

One of the enemies charmed my black mage. His turn was immediately next (so I couldn't bop him in the head or something to get him to stop) And the first thing he did was target an ally with a magic spell.

"I" broke the law and lost. f*ck that... *reset*

I tried again... but THIS time, I critical hit an enemy... which sent him a space back. AND THAT WAS BREAKING THE LAW TOO! f*ck you game... *reset*

And if you notice... it doesn't matter which difficulty on this challenge I am on, I'm losing over things that I can not control.

Third time... I killed all but the last one. No way I can lose now. Last one was aginst the wall. So even if I somehow got a rare crit, it wouldn't go anywhere... but I was wrong, the bastard got one last turn... moved out in the middle of the place. AND SURE ENOUGH, I killed him with a crit and he flew over a space. *Power off*

Done.

So now, shame on me for expecting anything to change. Oh well...

... The justice system in Ivalice is an extremely sluggish piece of antiquated machinery.

I totally tried to get into FFTA and couldn't. Mostly because of that annoying gimmick.



Fixed that for you =P

Oh criminy I just bought this... at least it was from a friend.

Heh... some friend.

just ignore the battle for now. fail it, there is no real penalty for doing so, you will just need to take it again later on. go back and try something easier. start at the first level of those challenges and work you way up, there is a different skill for each level or so. patience is a virtue in this game.

I ran out of that way back in the first one. It's just absolutely beyond me why someone would restrict you from doing basic funtions in a game in the first place. You shouldn't pentalize players for stuff that you are SUPPOSE to do.

And specially the things you can't even control. Like no critical hits... no missing... ect. It's just dumb and not worth the patience required to complete it.

I for one rather enjoyed FFTA. Played over a hundred hours. The law system is kind of easy to manipulate to your will, which can both be a good thing and a bad one. Can put less stress on you, but on the other hand defeating the purpose of the system. It is suppose to be there for you to think up different strategies. However, they never should have allowed more than two laws at a time. Jesus! That could get frustrating. I think they would eventually get to 6 laws at a time, maybe 5. So while don't have the same opinion on the game, I do understand where you are coming from. As for FFTA2, after playing the first one I was rather interested... until I heard about the stupid laws of no missing or criticals, like you said, from my cousin. Then I was totally turned off. Not to mention, I heard that the story was completely retarded.

The story isn't much different from the first actually. Some kid in school f*cks with a book that he shouldn't have and gets sucked into Ivalice. And he's just running around trying to get back home. I didn't get too far into it than that, so I can't judge the story.

(It's a good thing though that they took out the judges from actually being models in the battle. You don't know how bad I wanted to hit them...)

She's actually pretty cool.

I also bought RPG Maker(a second backup copy) from her too, and shipping was $8.... and the total was like, $35. So not bad. Helped her to get funds to visit her girlfriend.XD

I've owned FFTA twice now (it got stolen the first time), and on my first ownership of the game, I had logged well over 120 hours into it, and had probably only gotten about 2/3 of the way through the actual "main quest." I was having WAY too much fun micromanaging my characters' abilities and jobs (especially the viera), and just kept at the "random encounters" for the sole purpose of having my characters learn those abilities. Basically, I just kept avoiding the main quest, because I didn't want the game to end. The arbitrary laws did not bother me in the slightest because,

A) You could use cards to negate those laws, and
B) If you looked at the battle beforehand to see what laws it would involve, and did not want to battle with those conditions, you only needed to randomly move around the world map until a few days or whatever passed, and then the laws would be different for the same battle.

Complaining about the judges and laws in FFTA (that's an ADVANCE at the end of the title, not an ADVANCED, for whoever made this topic) is, in my opinion, a tired bandwagon and a long-dead dead horse to beat. There are innumerable ways to negate them, but apparently, a lot of people did not invest enough time in the game to realize it, and realize how incredibly deep the job system is in that game, which, to me, was the MAJOR seling point.

That being said, I of course picked up FFTA-2 the day it came out, but it really did not hold my interest for that long, because as much as I thoroughly loved the first one, it was a lot of, "more of the same."

I'm currently DEEPLY addicted to Etrian Odyssey II, whose job system is just as deep, and whose relentless and brutally difficult grinding is in some way thoroughly enjoyable.

When you, youself talk about negating them... shouldn't they just not be there in the first place?

FFTA2 is a bit different. There are no ways to remove laws, and the laws are static to the fights... meaning, they don't change. And if you like micromanaging your classes that much, you'll get the same thing out of the original Final Fantasy Tactics. the A series is LIKE Tactics, but with a dumbed down storyline and much more limited gameplay. Everything else is pretty much the same.

Well, minus the skills and how they are learned. You see, in Tactics... you got experience from every action a character took. And you can use that to learn what ever skill you wanted. I was stuck with three out of four theif skills required for the ninja job class... and couldn't ever learn it because I couldn't find a f*cking knife that had a theif skill I didn't already have. And that same thing happened to me with many other job classes.

I don't blame you for not wanting to finish the story... there wasn't much to it in the first place. [spoiler]The kid you play as finds his emo friend who doesn't want to leave and kicks his ass and they all go home through the book.[/spoiler] That's pretty much it...

I tried to play FFT, the PSX version, for the first time AFTER I had already played the hell out of FFTA, and it was a letdown for me. I hated the 16 or whatever character limit, and I liked the way in which character-building was done in FFTA better (equip the items and fill the meters as opposed to the standard, "spend the points on job skills"). Was not a big fan of the story of FFTA, per se, but I enjoyed the battling and character-building more, and with strat-rpgs (my fave video game genre), that's necessarily what I'm playing for. The story, if good, is gravy.

I recently picked up the PSP remake of FFT, and I will say, in the short time I played, I enjoyed it a LOT more than the PSX version. Then again, its "Tactics Ogre with a Final Fantasy makeover" gameplay and story were WAY more readily apparent in the remake. And Ogre Battle is my fave game series of all time, and what I tend to judge all other strat-rpgs against (which is an extremely high bar I've set).

And I was the exact opposite. I hated not being able to get certain jobs because shops refused to give me the right equipment to get there. A limiations you can only surpass by when THE GAME wants you to have a class.

In Tactics, you could possibly get any job class at any time if you put the work into it. And that is way more gratifying. You also get to equip your characters because it raises their stats and not because you learn something from it. In TA, you hardly even look at the stat buffs because you are just worried about getting Curaga on your white mage.

Heh, it's kind of funny that we both can like the same genre but still have such different tastes. Though I think my favorite series is Disgaea.