War of the Lions, a game of variety

Day 384

I would have preferred to have had significantly more time with War of the Lions tonight before writing another entry, but an especially late night at work and a flurry of posting at Fool's Gold has prevented this from happening. As a result, I haven't played a lot of it since my long entry about the game yesterday. Still, I'm certain many things will occur to me the more I play it. It's a fantastic game and I have a lot to say about it.

I'm particularly excited about unlocking the new classes available exclusively to War of the Lions. I've heard that Dark Knight in particular is overpowered, but I don't really mind. After playing Gungnir and a series of other difficult games, I'm content to play a well constructed but easily exploited game like Final Fantasy Tactics. I enjoy it because it affords the player the opportunity to become ridiculously powerful much in the same way as Final Fantasy V. Mixing and matching the best elements of various jobs together is supremely satisfying to do. For instance, I have recently trained all of my characters as Time Mages in an effort to give them all the Teleportation movement ability. This allows otherwise immobile classes to scurry around the map quite effectively, although attempting to travel too far will often fail.

One of my characters instead trained long enough to learn the Mana Shield reaction ability, which allows her to tank hits with her MP pool instead of her HP. This allows her to survive any hit so long as she has at least 1 MP left. Combine that with Manafont which allows her to regain MP every time she moves and you end up with a very sturdy unit regardless of her defensive stats. I plan on using her primarily as a Mystic because I really like the pole weapons they use. They deal pretty good damage and operate entirely off Magic Attack, meaning both her melee attacks and spells have the potential to be quite strong.

Eventually I'll be able to annihilate maps with relative ease. The kind of setup I want requires a significant amount of grinding or otherwise I'd complain the game is too easy. A player assuming a reasonable pace through the game should find it fairly challenging. Veteran players will invariably find myriad ways to boost the game's challenge in an effort to add variety. Straight Character Class Challenges are a good example of this. In such a challenge, only characters of a certain class (Knight for instance) can be used for the duration of the playthrough. No secondary command may be equipped, but Reaction, Support, and Movement abilities can be used provided they are from that one class. It's very restrictive to the gameplay, but can force veteran players to innovate new strategies.

Hopefully I'll have a more substantive entry prepared for tomorrow. For now I'd like to sit back and actually play the game! I've been eager to play it all day, but only now have I really settled down and gained the opportunity to do so.