I did not grow up with this game, but I've played a couple other games of the genre before. I completed the remaster version on tactician difficulty. I liked the voice acting, the side-quest characters and the ability to rename your units. I tamed a Behemoth King and named him Cookie. Thanks to the poach skill, Cookie is now a bow. Never used it. Bows just aren't very good.
If you like high-fantasy RPGs, then this is right up your alley. If you've played FF 12 or 14 before, you'll definitely recognize the Ivalice connections. And of course, if you've played FF Tactics before, you'll definitely enjoy the nostalgia.
I feel mixed about this game, but the recent update pushed me towards 'thumbs up'. My main issues with this game are gameplay related - early grinding trivializes most story stages, there is no actual end-game challenge/superboss and the overall pacing is just very slow.
A couple more nitpicks:
- Every minor system in the game is over-explained through a textbox, no matter how clear it is. It's good to know that the inventory menu shows your items, I guess. [strike] Too bad the Zodiac compatibility system isn't explained at all [/strike]. They patched this into the game now, GG.
- You can fast-forward most animations during combat, which is great. However, if you get too used to fast-forwarding, you are going to accidently skip character-specific battle-dialogues, which feels bad.
- If you want to find certain enemies in random encounters, you can't just reset what the RNG spawned for you. You need to place one unit, commence the battle and wait for its turn every time you want to reset the stage, which does nothing but waste time.
- The tavern menu specifically likes to annoy you with the menu-specific input delay. Menus don't let you move up and down instantly - so if you want to quickly want to navigate through menus, you'll often confirm into the first available menu because of that input-delay. It's usually fine because the first menu is often the one that matters, but in the tavern that's not the case.
[hr][/hr]
100% achievement completion means clearing a post-game dungeon, grinding specific monster kills for rare items (RIP Cookie) and running around in circles on the world map while waiting for errands to finish. The actual worst part is acquiring every ability, which requires both patience (because you'll need to grind every job to unlock abilities) and guidance (because 2 specific abilities are unlocked differently and are very easy to miss).
Overall, 100%ing this could be worse. I'd recommend saving into multiple slots, though. Checkpoints can save your playthrough in this game - auto-saves are not enough if you want some unique stuff.
