The FFTA2 Thread

I’m one of those guys who’ll always do 100% of all the sidequests available to him at any time unless they’re demonstrably too hard. My reasoning is that I’m going to do all the sidequests at some point ANYWAY, so I might as well do them as early as possible to reap the rewards.

And I actually find the Bazaar system rather cool. It’s not quite as random as it seems since most Bazaar ingredients are obtainable from sidequests rather than enemy drops (at least so far). It’s certainly leagues ahead of the incredibly awful FF12 version.

I still don’t understand the logic behind rehashing FFIX’s skill learning system. Did anyone actually LIKED that system in IX? Or in FFTA? What the hell is the point of taking a system that everybody complained was too slow and restrictive, and making it SLOWER?

Umm… raises hand

I liked it quite a bit, actually. Not sure I can put my finger on why though. It just seemed to be relatively well-balanced, forcing you to scale back on your equipment if you wanted to learn things, which increased the challenge, although you could just equip the best equipment you had when encountering particularly difficult battles.

Although come to think of it, Valkyrie Profile 2 had a similar system (where particular equipment combinations were required to learn skills) but that worked far worse, because it was terribly balanced. Lining up equipment of particular colors sometimes required an incredible drop in stats, to the point where it was almost impossible to learn anything.

Except IX didn’t give you even remotely enough points per battle to learn everything, so if you wanted a certain set of skills, you could end up doing either what you just described for VP2, or farming skill points like a bitch. This didn’t hurt quite as much there because… well, IX wasn’t particularily difficult and you could just skip to the strongest available skill and that was it, the only point it might have actually dragged was having every required passive skill learnt for Ozma’s fight. Translated to the Tactics setting however, THIS DOES NOT FUCKING WORK, the whole POINT of the thing being tactical is giving me options, the arbitrary roadblocks with equipment degenerate battles into restrictive “CAST X FOR MASSIVE DAMAGE” fests because the game hasn’t seen it fit to grant me more than five skills yet.

I agree with SE that the design at SE is shitty.

However I did like FFIX’s learning system. It worked, whereas this one does not. If the rate at which you acquired items for the bazaar, which is a neat system, correlated with class development in a coherent manner, that would be fun. But it is not.

shrug Maybe I’m too early in, but I am honestly not seeing that much of an insane difficulty here - certainly nowhere near what I experienced with Wild ARMs XF.

I wouldn’t be having problems with the enemies if I had the right tools available to me and that is my primary complaint about it right now. Without access to a status clearing spell, any and all status changers are crippling (Especially things like immobilise, it may as well have one shot KO’d my character for all the use I am going to get out of him) it means that the fights without status effects feel fun and are a challenge, but those with are close to unwinnable.

Maybe I’m doing it wrong, I don’t know.

Sin: I found out that everyone gets the same amount of AP for their skills, regardless of if they were benched or in combat. Makes it easier to level their skills up without having high AP quests available. Just make sure all your benched characters are ALWAYS learning something during each fight. It might be a useless skill, but you never know, since there is no limit to number of skills a character can learn.

I try to do it to my main characters as well, for example my white mage is currently a fencer/white mage to help make her a bit tougher and so her AP gains don’t go to waste. I know she won’t have the same stats as if she was pure white mage, but I always felt a healer that can take care of flankers themselves is worth slightly less powerful heals.

I’m not talking about DIFFICULTY, I’m talking about bad design and stupid set ups.

Oh, I agree about bad design and stupid set-ups, but I find it tends to be expressed in frustration, since it makes doing everything harder (not just fights, but actually “playing” the game is more arbitary).

Welp, guess we have to agree to disagree for now. I’m not seeing frustration so far.

Well I just got the game the other day and started playing it.

Do I need to do that rank 44 quest? Does it go away permanently?

No, it sits around till you’re ready for it.

Alright, one more question. I just accidentally broke a law by doing more than 50 damage (a crit…). Have I lost out on any permanent things? I’m not too concerned, I didn’t care enough to redo the battle.

No. In fact, the law items you get are rarely anything decent. It’s actually kind of fun to try to get through battles without breaking the laws, but if you do, don’t sweat it.

A few of the quests require that you not break the laws, and a few of them have someone break the law almost immedietly after you begin. Other than that, just follow Cid’s advice :slight_smile:

Also, the only missable thing that I am aware of is in Hurdy’s quest to get an instrument. If you do a second battle before you go back to town, you can get a better instrument for Hurdy, but even then, you can get it later in the game.

Unavoidable law breaking is fucking retarded.

No attacking with blunt weapons? Whoops you forgot to take counter off of your bishop

No knockbacks? Whoops you crit. Okay go back and only attack guys that are surrounded, whoops you countered someone and crit.

You’re following all the rules? Welp, time for a little charm (40% chance to hit honest teehee) lol I’m breaking all the rules with your character.

Also I think playing this game on hard just fudges the percenatages since any attack below 80% for me is a guaranteed miss while the enemy will hit with anything above 30%.

I’ve heard weirdness with the hit percentages before… wonder if it’s only on Hard mode.

Also, I was under the impression that counterattacks don’t matter in terms of law breaking.

In any case, if there’s a law I really don’t like, I’m just going to completely ignore it; most of the time I won’t care. F’rinstance, I just saw one that disallowed hitting for more than 20 HP damage; this when all my characters are level 30 (so even trying to find an attack that low is hard), and I have four rounds to beat a 400-HP monster. It’s probably technically possible, but REALLY hard. So I ignored it. And had a lot more fun. 8p