Caltrops - Nintendogs





	[quote name="Last"]It's at least as good as any previous FF:Tactics game and probably a little bit better. Positive! The game is pretty much what you expect it will be, although in this one you can unlock more jobs sooner than in previous titles. You should play it on hard mode since normal mode is way too easy and hard mode is enough of a challenge to keep you thinking but not so unfair as to make you snap your hinges off. On hard mode the AI will target clusters of your guys with AoE attacks (smart) and will also attack your damaged guys first (also smart) and it seems like they stay away from your guys that have automatic counter-attack abilities (you get the idea). The AI is not perfect, though, and will still do stupid stuff once in a while like having their wizard fight in melee rather than using a big powerful spell. Oh well, a perfect AI opponent would get boring/frustrating anyway so it's probably better for them to have left in some mistakes. The way the loot system works is that every single creature has a drop and also there are treasure chests sprinkled liberally on the boards and also you get a handful of items for finishing a quest (more if you follow the laws, see below). The drops can be items, weapons, or ingredients. You take the ingredients to a nearby shop and depending on what you have the shopkeeper will unlock new weapons that you can buy. So far I've been unlocking way more weapons than I can afford and that's great. Each battle has an optional law that restricts you in some way. The laws are stuff like "Don't use fire weapons this battle" or "No ranged attacks" or even harder stuff like "Only your lowest level character can do damage" or "Never miss". They are optional in that you can choose to obey the law, which will provide your guild with a stat bonus during the fight and will earn you extra lucrative bonus loot after the battle, or you can break the law which frees you to fight however you want but you don't get any extra stat bonus and also you can't use phoenix down during a fight but that's a useless tactic on Hard mode anyway so no loss. Your team is called a guild, and there are side missions you can do that boost up your guild rank in four categories (teamwork, adaptability, negotiation, and something else) and will also give you more bonuses for when you obey the laws during fights. In order to take on bigger quests you must first have a high enough ranking in the four categories. This might sound like a pain in the ass but really it's not at all difficult to keep your guild rank way up above any quest requirements. The guild rankings don't seem to have an effect during battle, but if you have a very high negotiation then you get cheaper prices at shops. The downsides so far are that it is a Final Fantasy game so the setting is completely queer (floppy bunnies with fairy-wings and brave little squires and menacing dragons and cuddly moogles) and the dialogue is banal shitty shit. I copied a section of Square's terrible dialogue here but then erased it because everyone already knows how terrible Square is in the first place. The other downside is that you can't rename any guild members that you recruit, and they all have anagram names that make them impossible to tell apart. Let's see, is your white mage Cyreol? Or Arudel? Or Yeorel? Or Layerea? or Dyrunel? Or Rulyced? Or Anuncyl? What's worse is that I seem to remember that you could rename guys in the earlier tactics games, so their failure to let you do it here is a step backwards. The upsides are that you can skip through the dialogue pretty fast, the quest descriptions are clear and straightforward, it only takes a minute to go from selecting New Game to actually playing the game, and they give you a luxurious NINE characters with which to name the main hero character instead of the traditional eight.[/quote]