Sorry I haven't been posting as much, had a frantic weekend, but I have been playing a lot. I'm currently in Chapter 5 I think. We just escaped from the empire and have been accused of assassinating the matriarch of Concordia. Of which I have a strong suspicion that a certain dumbass in my party may have actually done.

Pros:
  • The plot has been very good so far. Kind of a nice balance of taking the interesting mythology of the FNC project but giving it more of a FFTactics/FFVIII vibe which really works for things here. Its been really surprising how so many elements I've wanted the series to explore are all neatly here. This game is dark, political, morally grey in a lot of places, yet has enough wacky elements to never get too serious for its own good. The setting is just so better thought out than XIII and XV. This game honestly should have been FFXIII.
  • My favorite characters to play as are Jack, Queen, Duece, Ace, and King. Though if I'm going to be fair, I like using everyone for different reasons except maybe Trey and Cinque since their play styles are little too off for my taste.
  • Finally got to play around with the summons, and they are pretty impressive. I actually like them a little more than I did in the demo oddly enough.
  • Milities was pretty awesome in Chapter 3 and 4. I loved the shout out to FFVI with exploring the region on a MA unit, and I love the FFVII shout out with the awesome Scorpion Tank boss fight in Chapter 4. I remember this mission in the demo, but it was even more awesome with some actual context.
  • Money is no longer an issue cause my dumbass self finally figured out I should just resort to RPG 101 tactics and actually sell some of these vendor trash items I'm hoarding for no good reason. While I wish we had some better defensive options, I'm not really hurting for cash outside of the SPP stuff for their private armory.
  • You know, the mission and dungeon variety has been really good so far in this game. I'm digging the fact that all the main story missions have interesting objectives or gimmicks to keep them from growing stale. I still love how the Scorpion Tank fight borrows elements from the X-AT0M0S fight from VIII that gives a really cool cinematic feel to the party's escape from the capital and hide the fact that the dungeon layout for this stage is actually incredibly linear, but you don't notice because "holy trout! I'm being chased by a robot spider scorpion tank that's barraging my party with missiles every time it shows up!" so the overall game design has been fairly good.


Cons:
  • I think it's really silly that you can only have one side mission registered at a time, especially annoying with the ones that involve leaving Akademia and eat up a huge chunk of your time. I get this won't be as much of an issue in NG+, but its a little annoying right now since I prefer to be efficient in these types of matters.
  • The way the Phoenix Down item works in this game is stupid. Like I don't understand how I'm allowed to use potions and ethers from the menu whenever I feel like it, but phoenix downs can only be used in battle and has to be specially equipped to my party for it too work. It just seems like they went out of their way to make this item as inconvenient to use as possible.
  • While I like the summons in this game so far, I'm not sure if I'm just mistaken on how to do this or if I'm right, and they are limited to story missions only; but I really wish I could spend more time leveling these creatures more/
  • The one gripe I have with the plot is that it suffers from the same problem The Last Story has. Its a really intriguing world with an overall great cast that gets pulled down by having the two most generic and boring characters have too much story focus. While I enjoy their playstyles, I pretty much hate Machina, who is an idiot, and Rem is just bland and boring with goddamn soap opera cough no less. During one of their many "Rem are you okay?" "Oh Machina, I'm fine, its just my asthma" scenes, of which there is already too many for my taste, I actually screamed at the screen that the two of them just need to get a room and smurf already, cause their awful sexual tension was ruining an otherwise perfect game for me. I actually was jumping to joy when Machina tried to call Class Zero out on their actions and they pretty much just clapped back to his frustration. The guy is a tool.