LogFAQs > #899733905

Unfortunately Square totally fucked the battle system. In the original, it was a simple character-attacks-enemy, character gains exp, character levels up and becomes stronger, and you may choose to change his/her class whenever you want. In this game, characters don't level up, their classes do. So if you have a LV5 knight you want to make an archer, they go back to LV1 (unless you have been leveling an archer already). This doesn't sound absolutely terrible, but in Chapter 4, you'll have plenty of new classes and many store characters will join you with their own special class. That means these characters, which may have appeared strong or served as storyline bosses, all start off at LV1 and can't take on random battles at all. Even the main character gets his own special class in Chapter 4 and has to start over. This is extremely annoying and frustrating and creates a lot of unneeded grinding. What an odd gameplay decision. Speaking of odd gameplay decisions, there's a new crafting system which is bare bones and crappy. Oh, and battles can be really slow because monsters seemingly have impenetrable defense sometimes.

They also changed the translation to some kind of weird, Olde English-y purple prose like in FFT: War of the Lions but much, much worse. Dialogue can be incomprehensible and even takes away the urgency or emotional impact of a scene at times. The translator also loads up names with "X"'s and "Y"'s used too frequently, and sometimes makes up words altogether. The City of Rhime is now called the Arkhaiopolis of Rhyme, despite Arkhaiopolis not being a word (it's archaeopolis). Zodo Marsh became Xeod Moors, and Fort Damsa became, uh, Ndmamsa Fortress. Narm.

So yeah, if you don't mind the extra time spent on classes, you could find yourself spending a lifetime on this game. The size alone makes it worth more than $40. I eventually got bored of it, but I'm glad I can recognize this game as quite a feat, especially for Squenix. If I was younger and had much more time on my hands I'd have eaten this up. If you're the type of player who has no problem spending hundreds of hours trying to Platinum/100% games or simply obtaining everything you possibly can, Tactics Ogre LUCT would be the perfect game for you. Those final few extra battles in CODA (what the game calls some of its top secret optional content) are incredibly rewarding, and you can't go on YouTube to watch them either because AFAIK no one's uploaded them...