izigame.me

An excellent remake of the SNES/PSX original, which was already remade once for the PSP. It's like a 9.5 out of 10 for me, hard to say what they could do better.
Pros:
- Combat system which greatly resembles its spiritual successor from the same developers, Final Fantasy Tactics. It rewards mastery, but unlike FFT gives a very gentle learning curve through the ability to turn back time. Did you just move a character into a spot that got them ambushed? No problem, just go back to their turn and do something else.
- Huge cast of unique recruitable characters.
- Very interesting story, at least IMO - lots of opportunities for character and setting development, and plenty of surprises. Some allies can be found in unusual places, and others have ulterior motives. You can try to influence events for the better, but what effect will you actually have?
- Branching storyline based on your choices - but you won't miss anything, because after you finish you can go back and make all of the choices you didn't before. This includes getting recruitable characters on other branches!
- Extensive post-game, in which you further change the past to master the present. Developed further in this release.
- Deep class, skill, and gear-based character customization.
- Full voice acting, new to this release.
- Crafting system developed further from PSP release, and supplemented with a new system for merging powerful relics to power them up.
Neutral:
- Some difficult story battles are immediately after other story battles without any chance to do optional content in between. This is clearly stated and it's hard to get REALLY stuck when you can replay turns, but if you have bad party composition for the fight then you may have to go back past a battle you already beat. It does raise the sense of tension, though.
- Postgame goes for extremely long stretches of gameplay between story hits, and the enemies are allowed to scale up in level far beyond you. This encourages repeated farming of dungeons with permanent stat buffs. Good if you aren't tired of the battles yet, but if you just want to get all of the story then it's a real grind.
- Mechanically, unique characters mostly boil down to two questions. The first is if they have a unique class, and if so how good is that class. Unique classes are mostly better than generic classes, otherwise what would be the point? The second question is how fast they are - every unique character has a Weight stat which directly affects the rate at which they get turns, and of course in a turn-based game that's incredibly powerful. It just so happens that the fastest characters mostly also have unique classes. So, if you are trying to build a powerful party, it will probably end up resembling other people's powerful parties to some degree. There are unconventional ways to build a party of generics which are also effective, but they're a lot less obvious than just stacking all of the fast face characters - and don't get me wrong, I am glad that the obvious solution of stacking all of the fast face characters is very effective.
Bad:
- The grindy nature of the postgame means that at a certain point, even folks who love the game are probably going to say "Let me use auto-battle and make a sandwich while my party slaughters this map." However, many of the maps you would want to do this on have bottomless pits or cliffs. Anyone knocked over the edge who can't fly back up is gone forever. The game won't call out "hey, you just lost a character forever and should probably turn back time", so it's quite possible to just not notice until a while later that you don't have a cleric or whatever anymore. There are ways to mitigate this, and it's really the only thing keeping you from just having your characters grind themselves to ever greater heights of power, but, you know, I had to find something to put here. It's a really damn good game, you should get it if you like FFT and probably get it if you like Fire Emblem.