This game left me with a desire to kill myself.
So where do i begin? I guess where any tactical RPG's foundation should be, the story. Only if you want to call this game's story a story, you really have to be generous. You're a school boy in present time i guess, or at least some time similar and far outside of Ivalice in terms of time. You get reprimanded on the last day of school for being late and are forced to clean up the library after school. OH NOOOO! Of course it turns out to be not just your ordinary run-of-the-mill library cleanup job. Instead you get sucked into an ancient looking book that leads to the now mythical world of Ivalice. That's basically the most of story you're going to see in the game. After that its extremely short scenes of horrible dialogue that is rushed along to get to the next battle. When I say rushed along I mean it. It takes Luso (the main character) somewhere around 30 to 40 seconds to completely accept the fact that he's in a new world with new races, monsters, and history, depending on how fast you hit the button. A lot of the other story scenes throughout the game consist of flashbacks of former story scenes without the dialogue and in black and white. really, the story is a joke, and and RPG without a story is close to the same thing.
The main character is a mindless drone constantly doing whatever is necessary to complete a quest. I mean WHATEVER is necessary. I can't tell you how many quests are him coming upon people or creatures in their homes, doing nothing wrong and he just slaughters them because it was posted as a quest in the pub. He even shows that he understands what he is doing is wrong, but it gives you no choice to back away or sort things out, you just murder innocent lives for pay-off. I'm not even exaggerating. All the other main characters of the game are horrible cliche's we see in every single RPG time and time again, only simplified, so they become even worse than a cliche. And as for Cid, I don't even know what he's supposed to be, some sort of goblin man that I think one of the creators' kids must have drawn. if you've seen him you know what I'm talking about.
Now onto the gameplay. Well, the gameplay isn't all bad. In fact I'll admit that it's highly addicting. Learning new skills through weapons and equipment is something that isn't overdone in RPGs today, so I guess it's a little refreshing, even if it is quite a bit unrewarding. Especially since you find yourself equipping older weapons and armor later in the game to learn skills you didn't have the requirements for earlier. I don't even know why any of the equipment has stats actually, since the stats are pointless if you want to learn abilities. For example you could have an extremely strong sword, but after you learn it's ability you might as well get rid of it since keeping it would only hinder your growing in the game. Also as you progress you learn new classes for your characters, seems cool doesn't it? It's not. Every new class seems to be worse than the last. In fact, the best classes are most of the ones you start with. I can't tell you how many of the later classes I mastered and never used because every ability was just terrible.
While this game has decent gameplay qualities, there are many aspects which just make me feel like they implemented them just to cover up a lazy job. The percent system is completely flawed, it's a joke really. I can't tell you how many times I missed with a 99% chance of hitting, sometimes 2 or 3 times in a row. 99% is more like 85%, 90% is like 60% and 85% and under you might as well not even try, because its a guaranteed miss. I'm not just saying this either, it was proven to me time and time again. Of course the percent system seems to work the opposite for enemies. I've seen them score 40% chance hits on my team time and time again without a miss.
Now the enemies are completely retarded. I mean it, it seems like they have absolutely no intelligence what so ever. Even guests on your side are quite stupid. For example, they will approach someone on the opposite team who has 1hp left and choose to lower their attack or magic instead of finishing them off. Most of the time I feel like the AI is just trying to prolong the battle, not win in any way.
This brings me to the last and worst part of all... the law system. This is what made the first FFTA unplayable for me, and in this one while not initially so, ended up causing the same affect. The law system is a joke to me, it takes away from the skill and fun of the game. The laws seem to always negate what make a strategy game a strategy game. For example, monsters that are weak against elements usually make you think and find the element they are weak against to defeat them, but here the law system makes those elements prohibited. Whatever the best way to win the battle is is always against the law. The worst part is that the laws only apply to you. So your enemies can do whatever they want, every single battle. It basically takes away from the potential of the game, and is honestly what I see as a cover up for a terrible AI. the only way to make this game difficult was to implement this feature and it's still pretty easy, just unbearably aggravating, even on hard mode. Now most of the time you can break the law, but once you do so you suffer side affects, the most important being the fact that you can't revive your allies. So even if you don't care about the 3 bonus items that are always horrible that you receive after winning a battle without breaking the law, you have to deal with not being able to revive your allies.
This isn't some review I decided to write after playing a couple of battles. I logged 75+ hours on this game and after, well, realizing finishing it held no benefit for me at all I decided to write this. I mean, with 75+ hours into this game, i think I only did 6 or maybe 7 story battles, the other 150+ were side quests that are so redundant you will end up wanting to kill yourself. This game hold no skill requirement, no aesthetics in story, and well, little to what turns into no fun.