About a month ago I booted up Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on a whim, and quickly became helplessly addicted to the game. I look now at my completed save file which claims I sank 111 hours of my life into this game -- this is untrue as I played the majority of the game on 2x speed, but I'm still shocked at how quickly those hours passed.
I often go into games seeking story or novelty. I like a game with world-building, or something that tells me a story. Character development, surprises, mystery.
This has none of that. In FFTA2 The characters are flat, the driving storyline amounts to "go explore and have fun, maybe that will get you home", and outside of some interesting or funny quest lines there's not much of note going on in Ivalice.
Everything else, however, hit all the right buttons so hard.
-Graphically the game is sublime. Admittedly I have a very very soft spot for isometric pixel art, but the backgrounds and sprites were just fantastic. Yes, they could have done more with the attack animations and character portraits, but I'm more than satisfied with what I got.
And then there's the gameplay loop, where they snuck in the dopamine hits. You fight battles (fun) which earns you loot, then trade the loot in for new items, then equip the items to give your characters new skills, You do battles to permanently learn those skills and unlock new jobs and slowly build up a party of destructive gods.
I've always loved Final Fantasy games for handing to the player the tools needed to completely break the game. The sphere grid in FFX, materia in FF7, the junction system in FF8 -- these tools that somehow magically made menus fun as you crack open the game universe to make characters way more powerful than needed. This title gives you so much of that, and it was some of the best game breaking I've experienced.
By the time I had ended the game my team was littered with weapons of mass destruction. Battles stopped being a question of how to best tackle the situation, and instead became a question of which nuclear codes I'd use against the unwitting monsters. The dual-weilding Paladin? The double cast summoner that consumes HP instead of MP? My attack-all-enemies-at-once god-mode illusionist and his buddy the Cannoneer that keeps firing MP boosts? I'd frequently stop using the monsters I'd created in order to focus on making more.
The game caters to this as well -- it provides some stupidly unfair battles near the end to break yourself against. Even abusing save states I had trouble with some of them despite my team.
Admittedly, once I had unlocked the bulk of the ultimate moves and preposterous combos, loop stopped being as satisfying. There were no more weapons to unlock and no new heights to reach. I didn't 100% the game for this reason -- I felt I had had enough. I had built my gods and had my fun, so I went and two-shot the final boss and watched the credits, which is the way all good JRPGs should end.
I am relieved to be done, as suddenly I have much more free time in the evenings. I do still occasionally boot the game up and wonder if I shouldn't finish those last couple towers -- but perhaps another day.