Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

Generally I love Final Fantasy Tactics. I've spent countless hours playing them. This is a pathetic miserable excuse for a game bearing FFT, and square enix's name. First little obnoxious trait. There's a judge. You break the rules, you lose some nice abilities. Generally it's pretty easy to not break the rules, unless it's something fantabulous like, no damage over 50, and your average hit is in the mid 70's... Or my personal favorite... No distance targeting... Be sure to take the time to put one of your people behind whatever it is you're attacking, because if you crit it, and it flies, you lose. This is by far the most obnoxious part of this game. When you are working on improving your clan, you fail, you get to go back and spend more currency to try again, and again, and again, and you've got 4 turns to kill them all, and the end of the fourth turn your warrior crits them again, and they go flying, and...
If you enjoy exercises in Futility, and being thoroughly annoyed at stupid things like that... don't let this review stop you. But better bang for your buck, PS1 FFT.
Honestly, I am disgusted that this ever passed beta testing.

If it had been done right, I'd be singing praises. I usually get games that make me think, strategy type stuff. This Brings a lot of really neat features to the table, except I usually enjoy relaxing when I play a game, not getting frustrated at all the little things that were poorly implemented.

Save yourself the frustration, get something else.

Being the huge fan I am of FFT and FFTA, I bought this game knowing that it'd be hard to make a mistake with it. Although my assumption was right, I do admit that I was mildly let down by this game. Here's why:

The storyline in this game, as the other reviews suggest, is seriously lacking. It basically sets up the storyline, puts you into the game, and hardly becomes interesting until the very end, where the most excitement is basically you saying "Oh, cool" to finding out secrets behind the main characters, and their involvement with the antagonist. It's just not that great.

As for the gameplay, it's fun like all the other versions. One nice change in this title is the ability to move and select the action, see the damage it'd do, and then start all over again, to be able to move to another location, and compare the damage dealt. It allows you to give more thought to your battle, and compare different methods of attack.

The job system, I find, is dissapointing in this game. There's more jobs, sure, but none of them were as exciting to me as those in FFT or FFTA. I, for one, enjoy putting a lot of effort into unlocking a powerful class, and then dominating with it. The jobs in this game are all fairly balanced, with a few exceptions which you'll quickly master and become bored of. There's also only 5 special classes for unique characters, none of which are anything "special."

The one great aspect of this game is all the weapons, though. The feature called a Bazaar allows you to use materials from battles to discover new weapons, which you can then buy in the shop. There's hundreds of weapons, so it will keep you busy for some time.

Quests are alright. Usually they're all slightly differing stories, and then the same basic battle routine. There's a lot of them, but nothing too special about any of them.

All-in-all, it's definitely a game to rent. I got around 50 hours out of it, but don't plan to get much more from it. As for buying, it's just not worth it.