Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimiore of the Rift (FFTA2) is the third installment in the Final Fantasy Tactics series, and the last game to fall into the Ivalice Alliance world.

Before I played, I thought that this game was going to be better than FFTA, but it is debatable.

Following the story of a boy named Luso, the game starts with him being transported away from summer vacation to the world of Ivalice, where magic flies and swords are swung.

Luso meets up with a revaji (humanoids with longer noses and ears) named Cid, under interesting circumstances. Cid takes Luso into his clan, and they start on their journey together.

The main part of the game is doing quests. Players can choose from a variety of more than three hundred quests, which should keep players busy for a good long while.

There are a wide variety of quests, including defending certain spots, killing enemies, searching for treasure, and more. The number of quests and the choices are not limited.

Another big part of the game is the job system. Pulling from Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (FFTA), FFTA2’s job system is simple, yet complex at the same time.

Each unit (a character that players can control) has access to different jobs, depending on their race, like human or viera (long eared bunny and human crossover). Those jobs might be anything from fighters to paladins to assassins to mages. Each job then has access to abilities that can do a large number of things.

With the large amount of class options, the game gives you a big choice in how you want to play it. Like FFTA, FFTA2 really pulled this part of the game off.

            I did have some complaints, though, like actually having to advance far enough to access a job. This made it so that the game actually challenged you in the beginning, but caused a lot of problems later on.

Again, another big part of the game is pulled from the earlier games, and that is the battle system. Players move units around the screen a set maximum distance, and then can do many actions which include basic things like attacking and waiting.

The battles normally are simple things; kill this certain enemy or take down this team or the ever-famous escort missions appear many times.

In this part of the game, everything is done quite well. The visual effects of some actions are stunning, and the color of everything is so perfectly placed.

One of the new features of this game is the auction system. In FFTA, players needed to fight other clans to gain territory.

Now players go to the auction.

For a small fee, players enter their clan in an auction for control of an area. Players get a number of chips that represent one, two, three, and five points; those points are then used to obtain areas.

 The auction is a semi-real time environment, in which you choose what chip type to play, and then you try to get the most points at the end of the auction for the area.

If you do win, you gain control of the area and possible access to an item or two. If you get good enough, you can gain control of all of the areas in the region, allowing you to next auction play for rare items instead of control of a region.

Another new feature that was added to the game was the bazaar.

Compared to earlier FFT games, the shop was a simple thing. You could go in and buy almost anything if you were far enough along.

With FFTA2, the bazaar makes it a whole new level of stupid. You now have to find loot, which is then traded in for the ability to buy the item. So, you spend two hours getting three specific loots, and then you have to pay 1000 gil (Final Fantasy money) for it.

Now don’t get me wrong, the bazaar is a good idea, but the implementation could’ve been better. If the creators would have made either less loot, or made it so that you would gain two or three loot per kill, then it might have been a reasonable part of the game.

The biggest problem I found with the game is the storyline, or lack thereof. While the game does focus around Luso trying to get home or just survive, the quest missions are haphazardly put together. One minute you’ll be trying to kill a giant chicken, the next you’ll be trying to kill a scorpion thing to get pearls.

There is no clear story, with the main antagonist coming in at the very end of the game and only showing up sparingly after she is shown (yes, a female antagonist).

What I found most appalling, though, was that the game had better side-storylines than the main one. I would’ve rather had one of the multi-quest side quest storylines expanded into the main story of the game, for they actually had more sense in them than most things.

Thankfully, Square Enix took a note from various other games and decided to add in a Hard Mode. While hard mode is obviously harder, it’s not overwhelming.

The worst thing is that you’ll need to work a little harder and have your units one or two levels higher than in Normal Mode. They also decided to allow you to play post-game and complete some more quests that normally wouldn’t be accessible before the end of the game. It kept me playing a couple more hours, and it really was good.

Overall, this was a good game. The main story was negligible, and the battle system and anything else that played into it worked well.

I would recommend this game for anyone who would like to play a challenging game if they can spare 100+ hours on it.

Otherwise, if you want a storyline, steer clear of this game.