Ok I didn't expect XF's final act to be that short.
This was a decent game.
It relies entirely on the very robust class system, one of the best incarnations I've seen. All the classes are varied, balanced and fun to use, and meshing them together was a joy. This completely saves the rest of the game.
Including the CTB bar was a really great idea, since the FFT approach of hiding it in menus is so much worse.
So yeah everything else about it is kinda meh. It looks like the devs realized that strategy games get boring fast, and so they threw way too many gimmick battles and stages. Cute at first, grating fast, and destroying the replay value. There was a lot of wasted time in general, especially with the "Save Levin's dumb dad" or "Save civilians" battles that had absolutely no margin of error.
The game kind of misses the chance of having interesting political intrigue like other strategy RPGs, and instead tells a dumb WA story. At least WA knows villains are better, so it shows a cutscene of the villains after seemingly every single battle in the game. That villain cast was overall good (Charlton, Rupert, Edna) but otherwise I don't have good things to say.
Unlike FFT and TO, the game gives a ton of unique PCs at the very beginning, so you can't play around with generics if you play normally (I had to make a concious effort to avoid this)
Item synthetizing is pretty bad too. I ignored it until endgame, where I had too much money and stores only sold +3 weapons. I took about an half an hour to upgrade everybody to +6. Can't say this was exciting..
The dog really really sucks. Honestly sub Suiko3 dog at endgame. The worst RPG dog.
Anyway it was still pretty good, especially for a Wild Arms game.
