dsheinem wrote:So a big part of the appeal of FFMQ was the short length.
Are there other spinoffs people enjoy that can be beaten in 10-15 hours or less?
I adored Mystic Quest AKA Final Fantasy Adventure on Game Boy. It's about 8 hours or so.
dsheinem wrote:So a big part of the appeal of FFMQ was the short length.
Are there other spinoffs people enjoy that can be beaten in 10-15 hours or less?
nullPointer wrote:I think I've inadvertently stumbled upon some mechanical aspects of FFT: War of the Lions that I find less than enjoyable. So let's talk about the grind. There are two primary aspects of grinding in this game; grinding for experience, and grinding for job points which allow you to 'purchase' abilities specific to your current job. In many ways I'd say that grinding for experience occurs organically throughout the game, it's grinding for job points that can be tedious often to the point that it becomes necessary to 'game the system' to really gain any traction. And part of this is due to the implementation of random battles. In scripted story battles all enemy EXP/HP levels are static. So in this type of battle it's possible to win through sheer OP dominance. In the random battles however (i.e. the ones you encounter during attempts at grinding), enemy EXP/HP levels are scaled to (and are usually just slightly higher than) the character with the highest EXP/HP level in the current party. And this is where the trouble starts, because you can't just go into battle with a couple of OP tanks in an attempt to help the lower level characters advance. The enemies will be so powerful they'll one-shot the lower level characters no problem. It almost necessitates that you level up your party simultaneously across the board, and God help you if a much lower level character joins your party at some point because they'll have an uphill battle all the way.
So due to these shenanigans sometimes the most effective way to level up your characters is to have them fight each other. As in, you go into battle, leave one enemy alive, and then just have your characters start beating on each other or using pointless status effects ad nauseum. And to be sure FFT: War of the Lions isn't the first time I've seen this exact grinding strategy put to use, heck it's not even the first time I've seen it in a Final Fantasy game, but it always just strikes me as so mind-numbingly stupid. If the most effective way of leveling up characters is to completely break any sort of story immersion, maybe the system needs tweaking ... just a bit.
ESauced wrote:I started Tactics: War of the Lions on PSP. As I’ve mentioned before, I never really play games like this. And, I stared writing out my impressions, but they’re all just so negative and I don’t want to just rag on it. Long story short, I just don’t have the patience for this game. Maybe if I kept at it then it’d grow on me but after an hour and a half I don’t think I can go any longer.
On the plus side it was a good cure for the insomnia I’ve had the past few days (posting this so late only because my son woke me back up).
pierrot wrote:Tactics Ogre was like this too, but at every map, you could go into a sort of two player mode where you set your company up to train against each other, with no enemies, and no fear of losing units from their death. I spent copious amounts of time leveling up my units in those maps, after making a character a VIP in the story missions. Alternatively, once I got petrify, I could just petrify all the enemies, and start having my units beat the stuffing out of each other, but that's a lot more dangerous if one of them crit, or something.
Tactics Ogre had an awesome story, and production values, but I found the gameplay to be a real drag most of the time. Sounds like FFT is pretty similar. (Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, FFT, and FFT:A all share the same director, if anyone was curious about the relevance.)