This game looked like it might bring legitimacy to the FFT name for me, but I find myself hating it for pretty much all the same reasons. And these reasons aren’t complicated or numerous, they’re just mind-fuckingly bad:
If the game tells you your moves have <80% chance to work, they’ll actually work about 30% of the time.
If the game tells you the enemy’s moves have >10% chance to work, they’ll work 100% of the time.
I’m only 5 hours into the game and I’m already finding this artificial challenge shit infuriating. In fact, I just stopped mid-battle to make this post. Holy fucking shit is this battle system terrible.
Hades out.
Edit: On the PLUS side, it DID do away with the rampantly bullshitty turns-to-cast-spells system, in which your characters took a completely arbitrary and random number of turns to actually fire off things like spells and arrows and shit.
FFTA is much lighter in tone and easier in gameplay than FFT. If, as I recall, you were annoyed with not being challenged enough with FFT, FFTA is certainly not going to make it better.
You recall wrong. The challenge was there, it just had nothing to do with skill or intelligence, only luck. FFT was a game of crossing your fingers and hoping the game’s incredibly erratic chance-numbers happened to pan out in your favour. I was hoping FFTA wouldn’t be like that, but if the game is going to outright lie to you, there’s not much I can do to convince myself it’s good.
If I can use a move with 80% accuracy 10 times in a row and watch it miss 8 times, how am I supposed to make decisions about what tactics to use? The problem isn’t a lack of challenge, it’s an overabundance of erratic randomness. I feel like a Stormtrooper firing his clumsy, random blaster when what I really want is an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Without predictability, there’s no real game to be played here. There’s just finger-crossing.
I swear to God, your description of FFT makes me wonder if you were even playing the same game. The Speed stat varies so little in between start and end of the game that everyone who ever played that game learns how to eyeball CTR to perfection within an hour of using a Black Mage. Let alone Summoners, where you can honestly just cast in some general direction and be sure it’ll hit someone.
I dunno, I honestly did not have that experience with FFTA. FFTA2, yes, I’ve heard a lot of complaints about that, but not with the original. I didn’t feel like the percentages were off by that much, certainly not noticeably.
CTR bothered me, but not nearly as much as attack percentages. It wasn’t my main gripe with FFT, it was a tertiary gripe.
I dunno Cid, maybe I just had a very unlucky stretch, but there’s definitely something up with these numbers. I just played a few battles and they’ve been treating me a bit better.
A BIT. Even when standing behind enemies, my accuracy in this game feels Blood Sword-like.
What I really didn’t like about FFA is the fact that Marshe is a maniac bent on destroying the world. Oh, sure, it isn’t HIS world, but it’s filled with inhabitants that he regularly interacts with
Nevermind the fact that the TA games are the only FF games more breakable than FF VIII.
The only counterbalance set against your team are the laws which in TA1 were total bullshit (and while they do manage to remove the bullshit from the laws in TA2 it only serves to make the game even more broken than TA1).
I wouldn’t even use the term “broken” in conjunction with FFTA/FFTA2. The game is just generally easy.
Except for some of the last missions in FFTA2, some of those are ridiculous.
I’m referring to stuff like the Mighty Morpher class and other ridiculous builds (such as a dual-casting summoner, or a juggler, or a dual-wielding paladin with a mastered fighter skill set, or so on). Not to mention abilities like Strikeback, or Evade Magic, or Toss Smile, or so on.
And I think there’s even a way to acquire the weapon that teaches the Steal: Weapon ability early on in TA1.
Basically, just because they’re about as challenging as a Sesame Street game, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any exploits to make them even more ridiculously unchallenging.
I miss the days where the FF games actually had some kind of challenge like FFs VII or VIII had. ;_;
Getting the Cinqueda early does take a good amount of tedious work though. It’s like saying FFT is “broken” because you leveled in Mandala Plains until you got a summoner right at the beginning. Not that FFT isn’t incredibly abusable, but… well, you know what I mean.
I gave so little a shit about everything related to FFTA’s plot that I just fulfilled the minimum requirements for the story and got it over with. The skill system and the race-restriction on Jobs took a lot of the fun out of the game for me, and removing charged actions was a huge downgrade. The big bonus from CTR was that you needed to predict enemy movements with the assurance that so long as you were good at it, the spell would strike. That was goddamn strategy. With spells being instantaneous and subject to accuracy, not only is that extra challenge gone, but it introduces the little issue that spellcasters usually have a really shitty time getting behind an enemy thanks to their crap movement range.
I ended spamming Doublecast-Whatever and Air Render and just won. I have trouble imagining how FFTA2 could be even worse.
Why doesn’t anybody ever give Link any shit about that regarding the Wind Fish? I mean, here at least you get ambiguity with stuff like “what happened to the real people” or “maybe the world will continue on its own”. Link just waltzed in and fucking killed everyone for real.
I remember stealing most of my enemy stuff past a certain point, I sort of enjoyed that.
FFTA I actually liked and finished. It was tedious at times, but it was ok. FFTA2…fuck that one, fuck it in the eye with his own ripped off arm.
(I hate FFTA2 on account that CAN’T FIGHTS DROP STUFF FOR CLASSES I HAVE? PLEASE? SERIOUSLY IT’S BEEN 12 HOURS GIMME A SPELL BETTER THAN FUCKING RANK 1 STUFF! CURE AIN’T CUTTING IT ANYMORE!)
My main gripes in the FFTA games are the fact that they’re generally too easy. Hell, the AI in FFTA is near braindead, whereas FFTA2 does fix some of the problems, but still pretty bad.
Although both can be broken pretty easily. I tore through FFTA2 with my super Bangaa, Doublecast Summoner, and a Paravir. There wasn’t a whole lot that those three couldn’t kill.
As for FFT, I will admit that game was brutal to you if you make mistakes. Strategy really helped in that game.
As far as the RNG screwing me over with percentages, I probably had more issues in A2 than FFTA. It pisses me off like none other. It’s kinda like in Pokemon when they jacked with the accuracy of attacks in the 3rd/4th Gen to where even 100% accuracy moves still have like 1% to miss (and I’ve had that happen a few times too). I mean, WTF?!
My biggest problem with the FFTA series is with the abilities.
No I do not need twenty different ways to perform a spin-attack. Quick? Why would I need an ability that costs MP when I can just spam Smile Tosses for free? Why the hell would I let a character waste their time as a Time Mage when I can afflict Quick, Stop, and Don’t Act all for free? Why does everybody need some kind of variation of the Air Render ability? Why do I have Sonic Boom when Aura Blast does the exact same thing but slightly better? Why waste my time as a worthless Black Mage when Illusionists hit just as hard but to everything that looks at me funny? Why the hell did they give Protect and Shell their own class instead of leaving it with a White Mage? Why do I have a class that can use spells like Flare when I have a second class that can use Giga Flare and an Ultima attack? What is the point of Items aside from feeding Cure-Alls to your captured monsters grow a godly Morpher? Why do Bangaa have more classes than just White Monk? What is the loving point of Archers when you have Hunters and Snipers to choose instead? And so on…
And then of course there’s having to grow characters via equipment almost like FFIX but with parsimonious AP rewards, and almost every ability dependent entirely on the hundreds of weapons. There’s like a grand total of 6 abilities to be found on both headware and shields yet there’s like 25 different weapon types each consisting of at least 10 different weapons apiece. And since you can’t grind AP in battles you have to fight the same retarded battles over and over again just to learn one ability. What’s the point of having 10 jobs per race when half of them are the same loving thing and any one of them takes for loving forever to master. And that’s assuming you can find all of the weapons in a timely manner too.
[SPOILER]The absolutely worst part of it though is the fact that SE has taken this approach for almost all of their games these days.
In fact I dare anyone to name a SE game that doesn’t have you going through the exact same mission 300 times to get everything (and remakes don’t count either).[/SPOILER]
Originally Posted by Seraphim Ephyon
[i]
[QUOTE]Quote:
Originally Posted by Genericangstyposter View Post What I really didn’t like about FFA is Spoiler: the fact that Marshe is a maniac bent on destroying the world. Oh, sure, it isn’t HIS world, but it’s filled with inhabitants that he regularly interacts with
Why doesn’t anybody ever give Link any shit about that regarding the Wind Fish? I mean, here at least you get ambiguity with stuff like “what happened to the real people” or “maybe the world will continue on its own”. Link just waltzed in and fucking killed everyone for real.[/i][/QUOTE]
Namely because there was more to concern yourself with on Link’s journey towards Awakening than just everyone’s going to die if you leave like FFTA1 did.
But yeah Link’s Awakening totally trumps FFTA in every measure save for shear size (relevant size however is still Link’s).
I’ve found that every race has mostly the same classes mostly capable of doing the same things… The different names are just to add variety and culture to the game, which I like.
I haven’t come close to losing a battle yet, passing the game isn’t a worry. I just don’t like when games tell me they’re going to work a certain way and then don’t even respond to their own systems.
I thought TA2 fixed a lot of TA’s problems, but it was still really really easy. I did tend to find a few classes that worked really well and stuck with them through the whole game, though I did do some experimentation too. TA2 has a ridiculously insane amount of classes.
One thing TA2 did was to have everyone start each battle with zero MP, so you couldn’t just learn the best abilities and obliterate enemies. That was also a pretty good idea, though there are still abilities (like Halve MP or cast spells from HP) that get around it.
TA2’s biggest downside is the stupid random bazaar thing. I hated it in FF12 and I can’t believe they brought it back. >_<
I actually started playing FFTA once, put it aside after I got frustrated with trying to get some Jobs abilities (in FFT I got all) and when I wanted to go back to it… I couldn’t find the game. Damn tiny Gameboy cassettes.
A2 was much better than A1 if only because law-breaking wasn’t a Game Over. I lost count of how many times I got Marche sent to prison because I forgot a law in the heat of battle.
Skill system was still messed up though, if not more because of the Bazaar feature. I had a Ninja who was stuck with one ability for about 40 missions because the game never gave me the weapon or gave me the materials to make a weapon that would give him more skills.
As far as the randomness goes; I actually had more trouble with this in FFT than any of the others. In FFT I missed on more than one occassion with 90-95% accuracy, and have been hit with spells that had 20%-25% (mainly from Mystics).
However, once back in the day in a Super Robot Wars game, I was hit with a 04% chance attack, so I may just have terrible luck about me.
“more than one occasion” is fine. If a skill has 95% accuracy, that means that on average, 1 out of every 20 times you try it, you will miss. Similarly, if you are attacked with a spell with 20% accuracy, it means that 1 out of every 5 times it’ll hit you. That’s not messed up accuracy.
FFTA2 has been accused of consistently and often missing with 95% accuracy skills and/or hitting consistently with low accuracy skills, by many people. That points to a flawed random number generator or algorithm.
